NPR's Subtle Bias

National Public Radio is biased.  There doesn't seem to be much question on that score.  Oh, by the way, it's biased to the left.  It would like to be America's news source of choice, but its obvious slant and that of its left-of-center colleagues the networks, CNN, MS-NBC, and the major metropolitan daily newspapers (and their websites) has sent folks flocking to Fox News and the Drudge Report.

Sometimes the bias is overt.  Sometimes, it's a little harder to see. 

I used to listen to it frequently, but hardly at all anymore.  I happened to be in my car early this morning and with nothing on KTCK SportsRadio 1310 AM The Ticket here in the DFW area, I punched over to 90.1 FM KERA to catch some news and maybe a fun story or two.

What I heard was a report on yesterday's Republican primaries.   Kansas and Wyoming, mainly, and Guam and the Northern Marianas and other South Pacific entities. 

If you get your news from NPR, you would think that Rick Santorum was the big winner yesterday with his 51% Kansas victory.  NRP led with that angle and played it up big.   Near the end of the report, it was mentioned that Romney won Wyoming and those others, but it came across as an incidental news item second thought and was very noticeably brushed off.  And it was followed with a report that Romney is in big trouble in the South because he's a Mormon.

But Rick Santorum was not the big winner yesterday.  Romney won the delegate battle yesterday, increasing his lead.  Not a lot, just a handful of convention votes, since not a lot of delegates were at stake in the aggregate, but he increased his lead with his victories everywhere except Kansas.  And, as one observer did manage to note in the overall negative piece about Romney in the South -- if he's the candidate, he'll sweep it in the general election because of the large distaste the region has developed for President Obama.

Why would NPR pitch its reporting this way, and why do I say that it is biased since we're only talking about feuding Republicans here?

Because Romney is electable, Santorum is not, NPR knows it, and a Romney candidacy has them terrified that Obama will be booted come November.  So it is in NPR's (and all the others') ideological best interest to take the nutty Rick Santorum seriously, and you end up with skewed reporting such as I heard this morning, just before I switched back to bad syndicated sports talk.