NPR ombudsman: Beware First Amendment fundamentalists

Edward Schumacher Matos last day as the listeners representative at NPR gave him one last opportunity to poke his bosses in the eyes, and he did so taking on a couple of sacred cows: the assertion of bias and the reach of the First Amendment.

In his final post last week before vacating the job, Schumacher-Matos warned of fundamentalism, but not the kind involving religion the kind involving journalists and ethics.

And he acknowledged that NPR has a bias. But not the one you might think.

As a public media that receives some 11 percent of its funding indirectly from the government, it cannot be partisan or have a declared bias. With multiple streams of other incomefoundations, corporations and individualsit also is not under the same pressure as the commercial news media to do so.

But lets be honest: NPR has a bias of sorts. It is the bias of its college-educated audienceyou and meto pick and frame stories in ways that represent our interests. This is not a liberal basis, as the far right likes to claim. It is a center-right to center-left bias interested in fact-based analysis and policy on matters such as the environment, health care, gay rights and fiscal issues, as opposed to ideology or belief.

Over my four years I received more complaints from the left than the right, and not because Republicans arent listening. Audience polls show a pretty even Republican-Democrat breakdown, with even more listeners self-identifying as independent. It is that the political debate today and coverage is between the centrists and the far right; the far left feels ignored.

You will decide for yourself whether this is a good bias for NPR to have. I like it. As the news media fractures along narrow, advocacy lines, I think the NPR breadth and framing is valuable for the nation. With its strong storytelling voice, moreover, NPR is a peculiar institution in a way that perhaps only radio and podcasts can be. It is intimate with us, and has become part of our lives.

Schumacher-Matos also criticized fundamentalism among journalists who insist on broad First Amendment protections.

The French news media may have their ethical standards, but they are not American or sacred universal ones, and they shouldnt be French ones either. The United States has never had absolute freedom of the press. And the framers of the Constitution I once held the James Madison Visiting Professor Chair on First Amendment Issues at Columbia University never intended it to. You wouldnt know this, however, from listening to the First Amendment fundamentalists piping up from Washington to Silicon Valley.

Its an odd thing for a journalist to write, attorney Eugene Volokh writes today on his Washington Post blog