SAUNDERS: Role reversal: CNN and NPR are now the story — finally

WASHINGTON — CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins and NPR President Katherine Maher got their hats handed to them Wednesday, and everything was right with the world.

For Collins, the takedown was swift and remorseless. Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins (no relation) was her guest. He wanted to talk about Veterans Affairs. She wanted to talk about Signalgate, that scandal that exposed President Donald Trump’s national security team texting about U.S. airstrikes against the Houthis. The texts inadvertently were sent to the editor at The Atlantic.

VA Collins, an Air Force and Navy veteran who deployed to the Balad Air Base in Iraq in 2008 and 2009, balked when CNN Collins asked him if he thought the Signal messaging app texts were a mistake.

It was day three of the story. The VA secretary wasn’t part of the Signal chat, so he offered he “would love to talk about the veterans.” The CNN anchor said she’d like to talk about veterans, but then repeatedly asked about Signalgate.

Doug Collins turned the tables on the anchor. “Kaitlan, since you undoubtedly do not want to talk about the VA, I have a question as VA secretary,” he countered. The secretary then asked about a defamation lawsuit filed against CNN by a Navy veteran and private security contractor. A Florida jury ruled against CNN and determined the network should pay $5 million to the vet after jurors learned that correspondent Alexander Marquardt sent this message to a colleague: “We gonna nail this Zachary Young.” There was a settlement for an unknown sum before jurors addressed punitive damages.

The VA secretary wanted to know, “Is that employee still employed?”

The CNN anchor did not answer her guest’s question. Later she segued to the topic of VA budget cuts.

The exchange went viral on X — as a show of Team Trump’s willingness to challenge the media machine.

This will happen again.

Also Wednesday, a House Oversight Subcommittee held a hearing, “Anti-American Air Waves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.”

NPR’s image has been reeling ever since The Free Press ran an expose last year by former NPR reporter Uri Berliner about how NPR lost America’s trust.

This was NPR head Maher’s chance to rehabilitate NPR’s tarnished image. Instead she left no doubt that she has no interest in doing anything about NPR’s progressive politics. So, no surprise, Berliner was right.

In The Free Press, Berliner counted 25 times NPR hosts interviewed perennial Trump scold Adam Schiff, now a California Democratic senator, about Trump’s purported collusion with Russia. When the story fizzled, he wrote, “NPR’s coverage was notably sparse.”

Berliner also noted that NPR failed to report on the Hunter Biden laptop after the New York Post broke the story three weeks before the 2020 election.

Perhaps the most damning part of the Free Press piece: Berliner looked at the voter registration of NPR’s D.C. newsroom and found 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans.

When House Republicans asked Maher about Berliner’s 87-0 registration gap, she replied, “That’s concerning if those numbers are accurate.”

If those numbers are accurate? That tells you she didn’t check. She doesn’t want to know.

Maher also said she never saw evidence of political bias at NPR.

Berliner wrote that when he brought his concerns to NPR brass, “no one trashed me. That’s not the NPR way. People are polite. But nothing changes.”

And that might be OK if taxpayers were not bankrolling a business model that has lost listeners and public support.

At the moment Washington finally may be waking up to the need to curb auto-pilot spending, this was Maher’s chance to convince skeptics that NPR could change and grow beyond what Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., dismissed as “a narrow audience of wealthy liberal elites who are out of touch with everyday Americans.”

And Maher blew it.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.