If you listened to it in the 90's or before, it was a different place. Then the Republicans attacked its funding in the culmination of a general attack at funding of the arts, and a specific attack on hearing hated perspectives on particular issues (80% of those issues being Palestinians being allowed to speak.)

The head was replaced with the ex-head of Radio Free Europe (a propaganda station), and a permanent pair of ombudsmen were placed there (one meant to always be a Democrat and the other always meant to be a Republican) to help censor news and editorial on behalf of the two private clubs who trade off leadership in the US. Funding from the government was decimated, and funding was taken over by giant managed funds, heavy extractive industries, and medical/insurance companies.

Any semblance of the hoped-for manufactured balance (to be provided by the ombudsmen) was eliminated by 9/11 and the need to invade Iraq for some reason. I'm pretty sure the positions are long gone (the mainstream media hates ombudsmen, the job attracts the ethical.) The place became neocon central until the property-inflation bubble burst. Everything that went on in society with the crash, and with weariness from the wars and the draconian surveillance laws and media censorship that resulted from them, resulted in the Obama media frenzy and election victory.

Democrats who had felt silenced during G.W. Bush felt like they had turned the tables. The problem with that was twofold. One, the Democrats who had stayed with NPR for that entire period were people with no values at all, who had continued working as if nothing had changed.

Two, the Obama presidency was not going to be a significant departure from the previous presidency, was going to extend the Bush doctrine and the surveillance indefinitely, and he made it his first priority to indemnify the people who had done very illegal things up to and including atrocities and a torture network. He was even eventually going to bring back the Espionage Act, and start surveilling journalists and political campaigns. He was also going to put all of his economic effort into protecting wealthy people from the fallout of all of those poor people losing their homes. Years later, there would be a big to-do about Trump's taxes, and the most horrifying thing in them is that Obama's legislation irt the crash had simply refunded an entire year of Trump's taxes.

Obama couldn't be more liberal, economically, other than the favoritism towards party insiders, the weakening of the boundaries between church and state, and the idea that government social programs should all be outsourced to nonprofits through heavy, usually indirect, infusions of cash. In fact, the only thing left of the social ambition that had characterized the Democratic Party from Kennedy until the destruction of the Rainbow Coalition by the Clintons' New Democrats (and their funders) was the constant discussion of race, homosexuality, immigration, abortion, and gun control (edit: and global warming.) Never decisively, of course, but stretched into endless length and endless detours, with constant claims of being too weak to actually change any policy in the face of Republican evil, eventually resulting in executive orders, again carrying forward GWB's antidemocratic executive philosophy.

That's how you end up with an NPR totally staffed with elite, careerist Democrats who are somehow now also completely neoconservative and neoliberal. The only consistent position they have on any issue is that elite Democrats are the best people to be deciding on them, not the ignorant, evil Republicans whom they agree with on almost every issue. The big controversy between them? How guilty should they feel. Democrats say very guilty. Republicans say, not guilty at all, but actually proud.

This is Democrats arguing with Republicans about who should feel guilty and who should feel powerful, not anything meaningful. The only reason Republicans are speaking up is because Palestinians are trying to talk again, and the Democrats at NPR have to give in at about a million starving children, especially if there are pictures. The guilt messes with their digestion.