Terry Gross

Monday’s lead New York Times story by the paper’s Andes bureau chief Nicholas Casey was a grim report on the ongoing societal collapse of Venezuela: “Pillaging by Venezuelans Reveals Depth of Hunger.” But in typical media fashion, Casey managed to avoid the S-word -- socialism -- for almost all his report, and in an interview for NPR's Fresh Air actually blamed “consumerism” for the country’s…

Ultraliberal former Congressman Barney Frank promoted his book Frank on National Public Radio on Monday on the badly named Fresh Air show with Terry Gross. Only one point of view is normally allowed on that stale show. Early in the 38-minute softball session, Gross really loaded a question about Christian-right “homophobia” in the Reagan years, proclaiming you would have to be avoid saying “…

The liberal myth surrounding the hypercompetent Barack Obama faded long ago, but the liberal myth of “cultural icon” Jon Stewart is only getting stronger. Stewart’s tour of interviews for the new movie he directed, “Rosewater,” has created a parade of flatterers, sycophants, and every other synonym in the thesaurus for “obsequious.” Roy Sekoff at The Huffington Post stands out by insisting the…

On July 17, the day before NPR's Diane Rehm Show had a unanimous panel of four leftists on transgender issues (including a Time reporter), NPR’s nationally distributed Fresh Air talk show devoted 43 minutes to “the growing number of people who identify as transgender.” Host Terry Gross brought on three transgender “rights” advocates to promote the book Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for…

On Friday, CBS This Morning was the only one of the Big Three network morning shows to cover Hillary Clinton's testy Thursday exchange with NPR host Terry Gross over Clinton's shifting position on gay marriage. Neither NBC's Today nor ABC's Good Morning America bothered to mention the unflattering incident for the potential 2016 presidential candidate. [Listen to the audio or watch the video…

It started sounding like Unholy Week on NPR. On the national show “Fresh Air,” one day after Bart Ehrman insisted Jesus didn’t see himself as God, host Terry Gross brought on another atheist author, Barbara Ehrenreich. The segment was titled "A Nonbeliever Tries to Make Sense of the Visions She Had as a Teen." Or as Hanna Rosin summarized it for Slate: “Could Barbara Ehrenreich, fourth-…

NPR's Terry Gross anticipated the Christian holy day of Easter on Monday's Fresh Air by boosting "popular" author Bart Ehrman's latest book, where the agnostic scholar asserted that "Jesus himself didn't call himself God and didn't consider himself God, and that none of his disciples had any inkling at all that he was God." During the segment, Gross wondered if "Christians made the claim that…

NPR’s Terry Gross is best remembered by conservatives for her 2003 assault interview with Bill O’Reilly. But it was all fuzzballs and flowers for Chris Matthews when he came to Gross’s show “Fresh Air” on Tuesday. They were discussing the new Matthews book on his old boss Tip O’Neill and Reagan. The first laugh line from Gross? She asked Matthews, “Can you remember that far back, to when you…

Inside the liberal echo chamber that is National Public Radio, the stale show known as “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” addressed Congress on Wednesday with New York Times congressional reporter Jonathan Weisman. Host Terry Gross announced “this Congress has been one of the least productive in history. They have accomplished so little that the president is looking into how he can bypass Congress…

The next time a public-radio station goes into pledge-drive mode and begs listeners to chip in $100 for those snazzy premiums like the Nina Totin'-Bag, it would be wonderful if, in the spirit of balance and fairness, they would read off some salary numbers for NPR stars. Do people on modest incomes really want to chip in $25 to make sure an anchor can take home $375,000? Instead, pledge-drive…

On Tuesday's Fresh Air on NPR stations from coast to coast, host Terry Gross interviewed author Stephen King on his new book  "Joyland," which features a young man in a wheelchair with muscular dystrophy and his grandfather, a radio evangelist named Buddy Ross, who insists the disease is divine punishment. King might have surprised the secular-left devotees of public radio -- not with the…

In a cozy radical-to-radical interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross on Wednesday, incoming MSNBC primetime host Chris Hayes announced he’s watched Bill O’Reilly “very, very, very little...I’m positive I have never watched an hour of the O’Reilly show.” Hayes is going to pretend that Fox News and MSNBC aren’t really competitors at all: “I genuinely don’t think of myself as in…

Pardon the age of this item, but it's on an issue of campaign history. On March 13, NPR Fresh Air host Terry Gross interviewed new CNN host Jake Tapper about politics and journalism, and whether there was blowback from presidents and candidates over tough questions. But Gross felt compelled to bring up the "lies" told about John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign -- without expressing…

As if a puffy seven-minute-plus story on Morning Edition wasn't enough publicity for Irish novelist Colm Toibin's abrasive takedown of the Virgin Mary, NPR's Terry Gross offered another promotional 45 minutes on Monday's Fresh Air. There's nothing NPR likes better than taking this humble, devout disciple and transforming her into some sort of bitter Real Housewife of Nazareth. Toibin was…