Government-Funded NPR Faces Backlash After Trashing Declaration of Independence on July 4

“Defund NPR” was trending on Twitter Monday morning after National Public Radio (NPR) criticized the Declaration of Independence on July 4.

“In this thread of the Declaration of Independence, you can see a document with flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies,” NPR tweeted. “It also laid the foundation for this country’s collective aspirations — the hopes for what America could be.”

In this thread of the Declaration of Independence, you can see a document with flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies.

It also laid the foundation for this country’s collective aspirations — the hopes for what America could be. pic.twitter.com/znLSGKWLaj

— NPR (@NPR) July 4, 2021

NPR tweeted the entire contents of the Declaration of Independence in a thread but not before it slid in an anecdote about how the United States was not free for everyone.

“It says ‘that all men are created equal’ — but women, enslaved people, Indigenous people and many others were not held as equal at the time,” the thread began.

Many Twitter users were not pleased with NPR’s assessment of one of America’s most important founding documents.

“@NPR should have been defunded a long time ago. One idiot I used to hang out with actually thinks it’s an objective source of #news Face with tears of joy #LiberalHypocrisy,” one user wrote.

“Why are American tax payers still paying for NPR when they are clearly anti-American. #defundNPR,” another user wrote.

“Disgraceful media that hates America while receiving funds from America,” another user tweeted.

NPR was not the only publication to criticize the U.S. on the anniversary of its founding.

The New York Times also faced backlash for politicizing the American flag, Breitbart News reported. The publication suggested that “flying the American flag from the back of a pickup truck or over a lawn is increasingly seen as a clue … to a person’s political affiliation.”

The Washington Post published an article with the title “Frederick Douglass had nothing but scorn for July Fourth. The Black abolitionist spoke for the enslaved,” though, as Breitbart News reported, “Douglass declared that the principles of the Declaration of Independence — if not the practice of American law at the time — were redemptive.”

Leftist politicians also took to Twitter to slam America, including Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), House Financial Services Committee chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY).

Breitbart News’s Senior Editor-at-Large Joel B. Pollak called out NPR for being racist in 2016, after which former public editor Elizabeth Jensen recommended the taxpayer-funded radio news service bar future live interviews of conservatives who may have controversial views. 

During a live interview with Morning Edition‘s Steve Inskeep, Inskeep  attempted to paint the publication and its employees as “white nationalist.” 

Pollak responded to the accusations, saying: 

I think that we can talk about individual articles out of the tens of thousands at Breitbart, but, you know, NPR is taxpayer-funded and has an entire section of its programming, a regular feature called “Code Switch,” which, from my perspective, is a racist program. I’m looking here at the latest article, which aired on NPR, calling the election results “nostalgia for a whiter America.” So NPR has racial and racist programming that I am required to, I’m required to pay for as a taxpayer.

After Jensen’s comments, NPR clarified its stance, saying it will continue to conduct live interviews of conservative guests and that the suggestion of the NPR ombudsman that such interviews be pre-taped for “contextualizing” was her own opinion.