At first I thought I was imagining this, or listening too sporadically as I rushed to get my son to school in the morning. But more than once over the past several weeks, my usual morning staple--NPR's Morning Edition during morning drive time--seemed to be taking a noticeable Republican and faux-bipartisan turn. At first I thought the problem was isolated to anchor Steve Inskeep, who would do his morning newscasts with a daily spin on "Day 45 of the Obama Presidency, the Dow dropped another 11 points yesterday, and the economy still isn't fixed; is the Obama Administration in trouble?". Add to this a regular check-in with a Wall Street Journal economics reporter, some regular political hackery from Cokie Roberts, whose only observations sometimes seem to be "things are a mess in Washington", and I was beginning to wonder. Was it always this way and was I just being unfairly partisan? Where they never that good, just refreshing because their actual reporting was good and they were to the left of the Bush administration?
But lately, the trend seemed to be spilling into the actual NPR reporting as well.
A story on Morning Edition just a few minutes ago by Audie Cornish described the fight over DC voting rights, and last week's attachment of a gun rights amendment to the bill that would have given the District a voting member in the House of Representatives. After discussing the NRA's influence over the path of the bill, I felt some hope as the story made the distinction between simply lobbying for gun rights, and using procedural measures to get involved in the underlying business of Congress. The reporter then went on to interview Indiana Democratic Congressman and NRA supporter Baron Hill in saying on the record that the NRA had gone too far. But, incredibly, the reporter next implied that Eleanor Holmes Norton was guilty of doing the same exact thing by trying to get the amendment removed from the bill.
One small difference: she's the Congressman from the District of Columbia! Is the NRA trying to disenfranchise DC voters by forcing them to accept gun rights they don't even want and which are completely unrelated to the issue at hand the same thing as the actual Congressman whose district is disenfranchised pushing for the right to vote?
Anyway, I have the feeling I am not the only weekday morning NPR listener out there. Am I imagining this? If not, how long has this been going on? and why?