National Public Radio is having a rough month. The flagship of progressive radio news got hit by two torpedoes when its senior business editor, Uri Berliner, decided to pen a lengthy essay about how his employer has been engulfed in liberal bias that has impacted its reporting. And they decided to make this public relations nightmare worse by suspending Berliner, essentially confirming his remarks about the network, and the hiring a far-left looney toon as their CEO. It was a parade of horribles (via NY Post):
Their response to him saying dissent isn’t tolerated at NPR was to suspend him for criticizing their political agenda.
— Sunny (@sunnyright) April 16, 2024
Taxpayer-funded. https://t.co/g79xp3L5lq
Could NPR possibly make their image problems worse? Gasoline, meet fire. https://t.co/rPrLtT8s5N
— Ed Morrissey (@EdMorrissey) April 16, 2024
NPR suspended a top editor who ripped the network last week over its left-leaning bias – but the journalist doubled down on Tuesday, saying its new, controversial CEO is the “opposite” of what the embattled radio outlet needs.
Uri Berliner – who published a bombshell essay last week claiming NPR has “lost America’s trust” by reporting the news with a left-wing slant – was sidelined for five days without pay beginning last Friday after his article ignited a firestorm.
Nevertheless, Berliner in a Tuesday interview ripped NPR CEO Katherine Maher over a trove of past posts unearthed on X. Those included calling Donald Trump “racist” in 2018 and blasting Hillary Clinton for using the terms “boy” and “girl,” saying she was “erasing language for non-binary people.”
“We’re looking for a leader right now who’s going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about,” Berliner told NPR media scribe David Folkenflik Tuesday. “And this seems to be the opposite of that.”
The open secret here isn't that what she's saying is controversial and should make her a pariah in journalism. It's that most of them all agree with her on this. https://t.co/Ozgk2sk7J1
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) April 17, 2024
Berliner resigned today:
My resignation letter to NPR CEO @krmaher pic.twitter.com/0hafVbcZAK
— Uri Berliner (@uberliner) April 17, 2024
Here’s portions of his essay that led to his ouster:
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.
That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.
[…]
Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.
It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.
[…]
In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “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.”
But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.
The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.
When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.
[…]
Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and management, are common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what’s notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.
And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.
It goes to what everyone has been seeing in recent years, which is that normal liberal, those who are willing to have tough conversations with people holding differing views, and welcome it, are being ostracized and cast out. What Berliner wrote isn’t so different that want an ombudsman is hired to do. It’s a concise and detailed critique of how NPR went off the rails, which unsurprisingly occurred once Trump was in the White House.
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