NPR execs have concerns about Mara Liasson's regular appearances on Fox. | POLITICO Staff NPR reporter pressured over Fox role

Executives at National Public Radio recently asked the network’s top political correspondent, Mara Liasson, to reconsider her regular appearances on Fox News because of what they perceived as the network’s political bias, two sources familiar with the effort said.

According to a source, Liasson was summoned in early October by NPR’s executive editor for news, Dick Meyer, and the network’s supervising senior Washington editor, Ron Elving. The NPR executives said they had concerns that Fox’s programming had grown more partisan, and they asked Liasson to spend 30 days watching the network.


At a follow-up meeting last month, Liasson reported that she’d seen no significant change in Fox’s programming and planned to continue appearing on the network, the source said.

NPR’s focus on Liasson’s work as a commentator on Fox’s “Special Report” and “Fox News Sunday” came at about the same time as a White House campaign launched in September to delegitimize the network by painting it as an extension of the Republican Party.

One source said the White House’s criticism of Fox was raised during the discussions with Liasson. However, an NPR spokeswoman told POLITICO that the Obama administration’s attempts to discourage other news outlets from treating Fox as a peer had no impact on any internal discussions at NPR.

Liasson defended her work for Fox by saying that she appears on two of the network’s news programs, not on commentary programs with conservative hosts, the source said. She has also told colleagues that she’s under contract to Fox, so it would be difficult for her to sever her ties with the network, which she has appeared on for more than a decade.

Liasson did not return phone calls seeking comment on the meetings. In an e-mail message, she declined to be interviewed for this article.

NPR spokeswoman Dana Rehm declined to discuss Liasson and her work on Fox.

“It isn’t our practice to comment about internal conversations or about personnel matters, and we’re not going to be changing that policy,” she said. “As part of our ongoing work we have internal conversations about talent appearances all the time that are part of our regular editorial evaluation.”

Rehm added, “There’s no relationship between the White House’s criticism of Fox and any discussions about Fox that we’re having.”

A Fox spokesperson declined to comment on specific questions about Liasson. However, the spokesperson, who asked not to be named, said in an email: “With the ratings we have, NPR should be paying us to even be mentioned on our air.”

The White House aide behind the campaign to denounce alleged bias at Fox, then-Communications Director Anita Dunn, said she had no discussions with NPR executives about the issue. However, in an interview with NPR in mid-October, she said, “We see Fox right now as the source and the outlet for Republican Party talking points.” Dunn recently left the White House communications post.

Liasson is one of the most high-profile journalists to appear as a regular guest commentator on Fox News. A bio of Liasson posted on Fox’s website describes her as a “political contributor” and says she joined the network in 1997.

Fox disputes White House charges that it is a conservative media outlet, saying it clearly differentiates between news programs and commentary from hosts such as Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly.

As the White House’s campaign against Fox heated up in October, Liasson’s work on Fox drew fire from Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate.

“By appearing on Fox, reporters validate its propaganda values and help to undermine the role of legitimate news organizations,” Weisberg wrote in an Oct. 17 Newsweek column, “Why Fox News Is Un-American.” “Respectable journalists — I'm talking to you, Mara Liasson — should stop appearing on its programs.”

In the past, NPR has caught flak over its personnel appearing on Fox News and has taken some steps to put distance in the relationship.

In February, NPR asked that journalist Juan Williams, who is a political analyst for the radio network, no longer identify himself as such when appearing on Fox’s “O’Reilly Factor.” The request followed a “Factor” appearance in January in which Williams said of first lady Michelle Obama, “She’s got this Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going.”

NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard wrote that she had received dozens of “angry e-mails” about Williams’s remark. However, she said NPR officials were “in a bind” because he is not a full-time NPR employee and instead works on a contract that gives him broad latitude over his non-NPR work. Williams later said he regretted the remark. In recent months, Williams has filled in on occasion as a guest host of O’Reilly’s show. Liasson has not taken such a role.

One source close to NPR executives said their discomfort with the Fox appearances by NPR personnel has been long-standing and has intensified over time.

“This has been a building thing. There has been a concern in the upper regions of NPR that Fox uses Mara and Juan as cover” to defuse arguments that the TV network is populated with right-wing voices, said the source, who asked not to be named.

One complaint from NPR executives is that this very perception that Liasson and Williams serve as ideological counterweights reinforces feelings among some members of the public that NPR tilts to the left. “NPR has its own issues in trying to convince people that, ‘Look, we’re down the middle,’” the source said. “This is a public and institutional problem that has nothing to do with Mara. Obviously, you can’t give Mara a hard time for what’s coming out of her mouth. ... She’s very careful. She isn’t trashing anybody.”

The White House’s more aggressive stance against Fox took shape back in September after officials became concerned that unfair stories were migrating from Fox to other news outlets, including The New York Times. By month’s end, the White House had gone from pointing out inaccuracies on Fox to using an official blog post to denounce “even more Fox lies.”

The anti-Fox campaign became more overt in an Oct. 8 Time story in which Dunn denounced Fox as “opinion journalism masquerading as news.”

White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod later escalated the fight by calling on other news outlets to reconsider their approach to Fox. “They are not really a news organization,” Axelrod said in an Oct. 18 interview on ABC. “It’s really not news, it’s pushing a point of view; and the bigger thing is that other news organizations, like yours, ought not to treat them that way.”

Last month, Dunn declared that the White House’s effort to raise other journalists’ doubts about Fox’s reports had succeeded.

“What was important was the idea that just because something gets aired on them didn't mean that they — that everybody else needed to go chasing it. And I think that if you looked at some of the fake stories that were created that the mainstream media felt they needed to go chase — because, you know, for whatever reason, they were getting pressure to, quote, ‘Why aren't you being balanced?’” she said at a conference sponsored by Bloomberg News. “I think it did — it did help people get a sense of perspective again ... to the extent that, you know, people took a step back and said, ‘Hmm, am I really wanting to go chase those stories?’”

“I kept saying to people, ‘You know, if you're going to go chase those stories, get a second source,’” Dunn said.

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