To the editors:
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This letter is in reply to your bashing of National Public Radio [“How Do I Hate NPR?,” June 25]. Among other disturbing things about your article is the curious fact that the identical story appears in the New York Press of May 28, 1993, so I may assume that the Glenn Garvin byline does not represent the work of a local writer, information which should have been made clear. One would hope that this reprint ploy is not an indication that the Reader is now willing to subscribe to the insidious, albeit highly effective right wing propaganda of recent times, namely that the national media, including NPR, is overwhelmingly liberal, elitist, and “politically correct.” With messages like that in the Reader, who needs Rush Limbaugh?
The national FAIR office has sent a reply to the Reader nailing Garvin for his distortions and outright invention of “facts” in his article. This reply also effectively refutes your writer’s ideological meanderings, and I would hope you would print it. The FAIR study of NPR offers a detailed review of a four-month sample of 2,296 stories with 5,507 featured sources overwhelmingly derived from government handouts and politically centrist or conservative think tanks. Compare this with Garvin’s rambling pastiche which demonstrably and “deliberately distorted the content of NPR . . . to score ideological points” (a quote from FAIR’s reply to you). For a copy of the “real goods” on NPR, perceptive Reader readers may contact Chicago Media Watch/FAIR, P.O. Box 10656, Chicago, IL 60610, 312-792-6436.
