SACRAMENTO, CA - National Public Radio, the government network supported by your taxes, is adding rank ignorance to its longstanding problem of bias.

On August 13, during a review of Roads by Larry McMurtry, “Weekend Edition” contributor Douglas Brinkley observed that the author doesn’t “disparge” (rhymes with “barge”) the culture of shopping malls. Mr. Brinkley was attempting to say “disparage,” a word whose meaning and pronunciation should be under the command of anyone who graduates from high school.

“Disparge” was a hard one to top, but the reviewer was up to the task. The interstate highway system, he went
on to say, was created to help Americans flee nuclear bombs.

As it happens, the interstate highway system was created to help Americans drive automobiles from one
place to another. That highways are first and foremost a military contrivance is one of the Left’s more
ludicrous canards. But that’s where Mr. Brinkley is coming from. He fancies himself a “presidential historian” but his books are freighted with political correctness, blatant revisionism, and gaffes such as the description of confederate money as a “greenback.” While those seeking a more upscale left-wing hack would do better with Gary Wills, Brinkely holds the ideal profile for an NPR contributor.

A friend of mine, a former NPR producer, recalls the suggestion that the network review Wealth and Poverty
by George Gilder, then a best-seller. A fellow producer snapped that Guilder was a “fascist” whose
pro-capitalist book should not be reviewed. NPR reviewer Maureen Corrigan also described Clare Boothe
Luce as a fascist. While fascism is actually national socialism, a view shared by neither Luce nor Guilder,
American leftists use it to describe anything they don’t like. Hunting, for example, is “fascist.”

This is the network that once hired Tony Avirgan, an open partisan of the Sandinistas and Salvadoran
communist guerrillas, as a correspondent in Central America. It was as though CBS had hired Oliver North as
an impartial reporter. This biased reporting is one reason that NPR was predicting a massive 1992 victory
for the Sandinistas, in the first election they were not able to rig. They massively lost.

Then there was the Nina Totenberg affair, in which the NPR legal affairs correspondent moonlighted as a
Democratic Party deep-cover activist in the Anita Hill affair. Here the network revealed its role as the audio
division of the Democratic Party’s left wing, something that should be kept in mind during an election year.

During the Cold War, Washington insiders used to joke that the first indication that a Soviet boss had died
was the playing of a dirge on NPR. More recently, during the Elian Gonzalez controversy, NPR aired a
segment on Miami’s Cuban community that could easily have been produced by Radio Havana. To disparage (not disparge) a group on the basis of ethnicity is well within NPR standards, as long as that group is
anti-communist, dislikes the regime of Fidel Castro, and rejects the welfare state.

NPR airs some wonderful material, the “Fresh Air” series on American song, “Jazz Profiles,” and, of course, “Car Talk.” But the political commentary and reviews fail to show the same standards. And now abides bias, evasion, and ignorance, but the greatest of these is ignorance.

- K. Lloyd Billingsley