early music hosted by Suzanne Bona (WSHU-FM) Controversies Over the course of NPR's history, controversies have arisen over several incidents and topics. Allegations of ideological bias NPR has been accused of displaying both liberal bias, as alleged in work such as a UCLA and University of Missouri study of Morning Edition; and conservative bias, including criticism of alleged reliance on conservative think-tanks. Public radio host Lisa Simeone, who worked for NPR from 1998 to 2002, accused NPR's Pentagon reporting of being "little more than Pentagon press releases." The NPR ombudsman has described how NPR's coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict has been simultaneously criticized as biased by both sides. University of Texas journalism professor and author Robert Jensen has criticized NPR as taking a pro-war stance during coverage of Iraq war protests. During the 2020 election, NPR declined to cover the controversy surrounding a New York Post article on Hunter Biden, saying "We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions, ..." Live from Death Row commentaries In 1994, NPR arranged to air, on All Things Considered, a series of three-minute commentaries by Mumia Abu-Jamal, a journalist convicted in a controversial trial of murdering Philadelphia Police officer Daniel Faulkner. They cancelled airing them after the Fraternal Order of Police and members of the U.S. Congress objected. Euphemisms for "torture" In a controversial act, NPR banned in 2009 the use of the word "torture" in the context of the Bush administration's use of torture. NPR's Ombudswoman Alicia Shepard's defense of the policy was that "calling waterboarding torture is tantamount to taking sides." Berkeley Professor of Linguistics Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out that virtually all media around the world, other than what he called the "spineless U.S. media", call these techniques torture. In an article which criticized NPR and other U.S. media for their use of euphemisms for torture, Glenn Greenwald discussed what he called the enabling "corruption of American journalism": This active media complicity in concealing that our Government created a systematic torture regime, by refusing ever to say so, is one of the principal reasons it was allowed to happen for so long. The steadfast, ongoing refusal of our leading media institutions to refer to what the Bush administration did as "torture" – even in the face of more