KPCC News chief: NPR isn't liberal

Paul Glickman, the news director at Pasadena public radio station KPCC, argues in an Op-Ed piece in the Orange County Register that the evidence shows NPR doesn't have a liberal news slant. The spur to his piece, of course, is the conservative furor over the firing of Juan Williams for voicing a momentary opinion about Muslim airline passengers while arguing with Bill O'Reilly on Fox News Channel that Muslims should not be lumped together as radicals or terrorists. Glickman:

NPR is the premier broadcast news organization in America. While some conservative pundits, columnists, and bloggers deride the network as a leftist propaganda machine, the truth is that professional journalists in all media – digital, print, TV, and radio – hold NPR up as the gold standard....

Many conservatives listen to, and respect, NPR News. On Monday, Joe Scarborough, the host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," said, "I'm a conservative that's always loved NPR. ...They provide services that other media outlets don't provide."

Full disclosure: in addition to my current job as news director at NPR affiliate KPCC, I worked as an NPR foreign editor in the 1990s.

My experience at NPR makes me more qualified to debunk the caricature of the network as a cabal of wild-eyed radicals (or Democratic Party operatives) masquerading as journalists. For nearly a decade, I sat at the daily editorial meeting and watched the sausage being made.

Journalists in all media hold NPR up as "the gold standard?" Yeah, first I've heard of that.