  I have to admit, even I accepted as "fact" that NPR leans more "left" than other commercial media outlets. Yet this recent urlLink F.A.I.R. study of NPR's guest list shows something quite different. FAIR’s study recorded every on-air source quoted in June 2003 on four National Public Radio news shows: All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition Saturday and Week-end Edition Sunday. Each source was classified by occupation, gender, nationality and partisan affiliation. Altogether, the study counted 2,334 quoted sources, featured in 804 stories. In addition to studying NPR’s general news sources, FAIR looked at the think tanks NPR relies on most frequently, and at its list of regular commentators. To ensure a substantial sample of these subsets, we looked at four months (5–8/03) of think tank sources and commentators on the same four shows... That NPR harbors a liberal bias is an article of faith among many conservatives.
Spanning from the early ’70s, when President Richard Nixon demanded that “all funds for public broadcasting be cut” (9/23/71), through House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s similar threats in the mid-’90s, the notion that NPR leans left still endures. Despite the commonness of such claims, little evidence has ever been presented for a left bias at NPR, and FAIR’s latest study gives it no support. Looking at partisan sources—including government officials, party officials, campaign workers and consultants—Republicans outnumbered Democrats by more than 3 to 2 (61 percent to 38 percent). A majority of Republican sources when the GOP controls the White House and Congress may not be surprising, but Republicans held a similar though slightly smaller edge (57 percent to 42 percent) in 1993, when Clinton was president and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.
And a lively race for the Democratic presidential nomination was beginning to heat up at the time of the 2003 study. Republicans not only had a substantial partisan edge, individual Republicans were NPR’s most popular sources overall, taking the top seven spots in frequency of appearance. George Bush led all sources for the month with 36 appearances, followed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (8) and Sen. Pat Roberts (6).
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Secretary of State Colin Powell, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer and Iraq proconsul Paul Bremer all tied with five appearances each. And then there are all of the think tank sources that the network uses: FAIR’s four-month study of NPR in 1993 found 10 think tanks that were cited twice or more. In a new four-month study (5/03–8/03), the list of think tanks cited two or more times has grown to 17, accounting for 133 appearances. FAIR classified each think tank by ideological orientation as either centrist, right of center or left of center. Representatives of think tanks to the right of center outnumbered those to the left of center by more than four to one: 62 appearances to 15. Centrist think tanks provided sources for 56 appearances. It's interesting, after reading this study, that many of us still considering NPR a "left-leaning" organization.
Apparently, with the hard shift to the right this country has seemingly taken, even an organization which airs right-wing voices considerably more than left-wing voices seems "liberal" just by airing what is probably a higher percentage of liberal viewpoints compared with what we get from mainstream commercial media outlets. This makes the poorly publicized, launched and staffed Air America even more important in today's political climate. Too bad it seems doomed to spectacular failure. It's the Chevy Chase talk show equivalent of talk radio. 
