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Brendan Carr, the newly appointed chair of the FCC, has made no secret of his antipathy for mainstream press—including NPR, which he recently alleged may be violating the law by broadcasting commercial messages.
It’s an unusually timed claim, but as Carr made clear in a conversation with Semafor’s Ben Smith last week, he’s out for vengeance after four years of a Democratic administration in Washington. That’s why it’s all the more encouraging to see NPR stand tall with its tough-but-fair coverage of the Trump administration.
One of NPR’s latest and most significant examples: reporter Stephen Fowler dug into many of the most absurd, multimillion-dollar claims made by Elon Musk’s DOGE group. He found error upon error—each of which pointed in the same direction of exaggerated or nonexistent savings for taxpayers. Among the foul-ups: DOGE was claiming savings from a contract that wasn’t actually canceled; it was trumpeting $99 million in savings from a $9.9 million contract; and it was promoting savings of $150 million while linking to a contract for $119,000.
When Marty Baron was running the Washington Post’s newsroom during Trump’s first term, he was famously quoted as saying, “We’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work.” NPR is in the FCC’s gunsights, but that hasn’t distracted its reporters from doing their jobs.
In 2023, a trio of social workers came to the newsroom of NowKalamazoo, a nonprofit site that covers the Michigan city. They wanted reporters to check out conditions at a local apartment complex that depends heavily on government subsidies.
Here is what the team from the website and its partner, local NPR affiliate WMUK, would discover over the next two years of reporting: sewage-covered carpets, water gushing through ceilings, roaches crawling on apartment walls, mouse feces near chewed-up cribs.
The result is this detail-rich, 5,300-word investigation—which also ran as a three-part series on WMUK—into a place about which a local judge said, “I don’t know why anybody would want to stay there.” (Alas, the judge said that even as she approved the eviction of a tenant who had withheld rent—after a ceiling fell on her niece and daughter.)
Let’s say you’re the governor of a really big state, and you’re about to give a really big speech to a really big crowd. You’d think you’d want to include as much news media as possible, and that includes—nay, it requires—press photographers.
But you are not Texas governor Greg Abbott, and you were not delivering your State of the State speech to eleven hundred people. Thus, you might not understand why the governor’s office would forbid news photographers from covering the event.
But that’s what happened last month. In response, the Texas Tribune covered the speech, but used an old photo from a press conference on the US-Mexico border to illustrate the story. They could’ve used the handouts that came from the governor’s office, but the editors felt that constituted “wedding photography.”
Have you ever watched an interview and screamed, “Why aren’t you asking the follow-up questions that are running through my brain?”
I do! All the time!
Last week, NewsNation broadcast an interview with “DataRepublican,” an X pal of Musk’s who says she has a “working relationship” with the DOGE team. “I have communicated with some people who are involved with DOGE. And I don’t want to say much more than that.”
The interview was conducted in an “undisclosed location,” and the woman was partially disguised behind big sunglasses. But none of that stopped her from making some extraordinary claims, nor did it prompt the host to ask any obvious follow-up questions. Asked about the extent of government waste, DataRepublican said, “Whew. If I had to guess, I would say it is over $100 billion.” Asked about how things work in DC, she said that after digging into “relationships between people in the government…you start to notice that they’re all working together, they’re all married, that they’re all in-laws.”
“They’re all in-laws”?
The NewsNation reporter nodded dutifully throughout the thirty-minute interview, even as she told him, “Sometimes God calls you for a mission, and you must answer that call.”
The story took off from NewsNation, winding its way into a gullible New York Post piece, then a video on The Hill’s website, and on into a slew of tweets, posts, and other social media.
It didn’t take long, though, for DataRepublican’s identity to become known. The next day, Jacqueline Sweet (the same independent journalist who broke some important George Santos stories) revealed her as a software engineer from Utah.
Thanks to Ben Lando and Michael Thaddeus for their tips for this week’s column. If you have a suggestion, please send it to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We can’t acknowledge all submissions, but we will mention you if we use your idea. For more on the column, please click here.
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