Taxpayer-funded NPR made the launch announcement in an internal note to its newsroom. The disinformation reporting team will consist of four journalists, each with some kind of background in investigative or media reporting.
Tim Graham of the Media Research Center (MRC) says if anyone should know about disinformation, it would be NPR.
"The NPR team was very demonstrative that the Hunter Biden laptop was not a real story, or that the information on the laptop was not real, and that they weren't going to waste their time on it," Graham recalls.
He tells AFN that disinformation, which always goes only on way, is all the rage on the left because of President Trump, the 2024 campaign, and "election denialism."
"This is going to be about right-wing disinformation," he predicts about the new team. "It sort of implies, like the rest of NPR does, that there's no such thing as left-wing extremism, there's no such thing as left-wing disinformation."
Conservatives on social media were quick to jump on the news. One person tweeted out that NPR has already put out enough disinformation, so there is no need to dedicate a whole team to producing more.
As for stopping the effort at the taxpayer-funded media outlet, Graham notes that public broadcasting is "one of those things that the Republicans are not in power to cut its funding. But even when the Republicans are in power, they don't tend to cut funding for public broadcasting."
