Scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali slammed the media and NPR for their activist journalism on Fox News Thursday.
NPR updated its ethics policy to allow reporters to advocate for “freedom and dignity of human beings” on social media and in person, Fox News reported.
“I think stop calling it journalism,” said Ali, according to Fox News. “If you want to engage in activism, go ahead. But to call it journalism, it’s a joke. It’s not journalism. It’s not reporting, it’s not analyzing, it’s not investigative reporting because for all of those activities, you require an open mind, you require a kind of philosophy that you follow the facts to where they lead and then you have to have that disposition of honest, impartial reporting. That’s not what activism is about.”
Ali also called it a “shame” for NPR to engage in activism with taxpayer money, Fox News reported. (RELATED: POLL: 53% Of Americans Don’t Trust ‘Traditional Media’)
Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center was also outraged and agreed that NPR should not be participating in activism with taxpayer money.
“It’s not news that NPR is leftist, but that they won’t even try to hide it anymore is astonishing,” Gainor said, according to Fox News. “This is a taxpayer-funded ‘news’ organization. Why do we give it a penny?”
Several other media critics blasted NPR’s “ethics policy” on twitter.
Can’t wait to see how the studiously non-partisan and steadfastly non-ideological NPR interprets which protests count as “advocating for the freedom and dignity of human beings” and which ones don’t. https://t.co/Qr2pM6bKBI
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 29, 2021
A survey released Tuesday ranked America last in public trust for news media among 46 countries.