NPR suspended its veteran senior business editor, Uri Berliner, for five days without pay after he wrote a critical essay detailing how the public radio network succumbed to liberal groupthink.
Working at NPR for 25 years, Berliner criticized his employer for no longer being open-minded in its approach to reporting the news. In a scathing exposé published by the Free Press on April 9, he declared that the radio network had “lost America’s trust” because of this progressive bent.
Berliner began his temporary suspension on Friday, NPR reported Tuesday morning, and was warned that he would be fired if he failed to get approval for work at other news outlets, which is outlined in company policy.
In the essay, Berliner took issue with NPR’s biased coverage of stories involving the false allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, the origins of Covid 19, the Hunter Biden laptop, the transgender movement, the Israel–Hamas war, and Republican policies. He also noted that the organization formed affinity groups based on a given employee’s racial and sexual identity, while ignoring viewpoint diversity. When Berliner looked into the partisan affiliations of NPR’s editorial employees based in Washington, D.C., he found 87 registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans.
The media outlet has since taken flak over resurfaced social-media posts of its new CEO, Katherine Maher. In 2020, Maher tweeted that former president Donald Trump is a racist, and she minimized the rioting and looting during the George Floyd protests that summer. Conservatives, most notably journalist Christopher Rufo, circulated her past posts on X in the last week.
“In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen,” Maher said Monday in response to her progressive social-media posts. “What matters is NPR’s work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests.”
Meanwhile, NPR defended its leader amid the public backlash.
“Since stepping into the role she has upheld and is fully committed to NPR’s code of ethics and the independence of NPR’s newsroom,” a spokesperson said. “The CEO is not involved in editorial decisions.”
Without any prior journalistic experience, Maher became CEO of NPR late last month.
Maher “was not working in journalism at the time and was exercising her First Amendment right to express herself like any other American citizen,” the statement added.
In response to the statements, Berliner said Maher is not the best person for the job because of her divisive comments online and should not get a free pass just because she wasn’t working in the journalism industry four years ago.
“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 News media correspondent David Folkenflik later Monday. “And this seems to be the opposite of that.”
The longtime editor noted that, before going public, he had approached his bosses and the preceding CEO with his concerns about the organization’s news coverage.
“I love NPR and feel it’s a national trust,” Berliner said. “We have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they’re capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners.”
Katherine Maher’s tweets from 2020 could have come straight from the mouth of an ardent liberal activist.
“What is that deranged racist sociopath ranting about today? I truly do not understand,” she wrote in May 2020.
“I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive,” she wrote in a separate post that month. “But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.”
And from July 2020: “Lots of jokes about leaving the U.S., and I get it. But as someone with cis white mobility privilege, I’m thinking I’m staying and investing in ridding ourselves of this specter of tyranny.”
So perhaps it should come as little surprise that an organization who would hire Maher as its president and CEO has been exposed this week as having an increasingly liberal bent.
Maher is now being forced to steer NPR through a controversy sparked by a revealing essay in the Free Press in which veteran NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner writes that the organization has lost its way and succumbed to liberal groupthink.
“There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line,” Berliner writes.
NPR has in many ways handed the reins over to its loudest activists. In 2020, in response to the nationwide riots after the murder of George Floyd, NPR’s then-CEO John Lansing said NPR staffers “can be agents of change” when it comes to “identifying and ending systemic racism.” He declared that diversity of staff and audience would become the “North Star” of NPR.
As such, a number of affinity groups based on identity were formed, in Berliner’s telling: MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).
And now NPR management, per its current contract, must “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups.” If language differs from the groups’ guidance, management has a responsibility to inform employees, at which point a dispute could be decided by the DEI Accountability Committee.
And the organization’s liberal culture is unlikely to improve anytime soon: Berliner conducted an analysis of the voter registration for NPR’s D.C. editorial staff and found 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans. When he brought his findings to the editorial staff in 2021, he says he was “met with profound indifference.”
The organization has a strong grasp of implicit bias and its effects when it comes to how white people treat people of color (see headlines including “Sick With COVID-19 And Facing Racial Bias In The ER,” “Bias and Police Killings of Black People,” “Bias Isn’t Just A Police Problem, It’s A Preschool Problem.”)
But it apparently can’t fathom that its own politically homogeneous makeup might impact its coverage – with Maher going so far as to suggest any comment to the contrary is “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”
“I joined this organization because public media is essential for an informed public. At its best, our work can help shape and illuminate the very sense of what it means to have a shared public identity as fellow Americans in this sprawling and enduringly complex nation,” Maher told staff in a memo Friday. “NPR’s service to this aspirational mission was called in question this week, in two distinct ways. The first was a critique of the quality of our editorial process and the integrity of our journalists. The second was a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are.”
She added: “Asking a question about whether we’re living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions. Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”
She went on to claim NPR’s employees “represent America” and that the organization succeeds through its diversity.
But Berliner outlines several areas where NPR’s biases led to lacking coverage, including its reporting on Russiagate, the origins of the Covid-19 virus, and the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“What began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency,” he writes, adding that NPR “hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff,” who by Berliner’s count was interviewed by the organization 25 times about Trump and Russia.
According to Fox News, Schiff actually participated in 32 interviews with the network, with segments featuring headlines including:
“Rep. Adam Schiff On The Latest In The Russia Investigation,” “Rep. Schiff On Russia Influence Investigation,” “Rep. Adam Schiff On Trump’s Wiretapping Claims And Russia,” “Rep. Adam Schiff On Donald Trump Jr. And Russia,” “Rep. Adam Schiff Weighs In On Russian Hacking Evidence,” “Rep. Adam Schiff On Trump, Comey And Russia,” “House Intel Chairman Schiff Vows To Get Trump Jr. Phone Records — And More,” “Schiff On The Latest Developments In The Russia Probe,” and “House Intel Committee’s Adam Schiff On Russia Developments.”
Schiff told NPR in 2019 there was “ample evidence of collusion very much in the public eye.”
And after the Mueller report dispelled the accusations around Trump collusion with Russia, NPR failed to issue a mea culpa.
Just before the 2020 election, NPR’s then–managing editor for news brushed off the New York Post’s bombshell reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop 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.”
The outlet chose to frame the story as a “Questionable ‘N.Y. Post’ Scoop Driven By Ex-Hannity Producer and Giuliani.”
The story reads:
This week, the New York Post published a story based on what it says are emails — “smoking gun” emails, it calls them — sent by a Ukrainian business executive to the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The story fits snugly into a narrative from President Trump and his allies that Hunter Biden’s zealous pursuit of business ties abroad also compromised the former vice president.
Yet this was a story marked more by red flags than investigative rigor.
And on the competing theories of Covid-19’s origins, Berliner writes that at NPR, reporters “weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story.”
In April 2020, NPR declared, “Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory of Pandemic Emergence,”
“Scientists dismiss the idea that the coronavirus pandemic was caused by the accident in a lab. They believe the close interactions of people with wildlife worldwide are a far more likely culprit,” NPR senior correspondent Geoff Brumfiel wrote in a post on the NPR website.
The next day, Brumfiel wrote, “Virus Researchers Cast Doubt on Theory of Coronavirus Lab Accident,” in which he added that “virus researchers say there is virtually no chance that the new coronavirus was released as result of a laboratory accident in China or anywhere else.”
Berliner notes NPR still “didn’t budge” even when the Department of Energy concluded with low confidence that Covid-19 most likely originated in a lab leak.
The outlet still claimed “the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.”
It went on to claim in a series of stories that there is “very convincing” data and “overwhelming evidence” pointing to an animal origin,” and published an interview with Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, who threw his hands up and said, “I think the bottom line message is that we just are not ever going to have enough information to come up with a definitive answer, just like some of the classic cold criminal cases have been over the decades.”
In another story, the outlet quotes a virologist who claimed the Energy Department’s report “could make it harder to study dangerous diseases.”
The ensuing backlash after Berliner’s essay led to “internal tumult” at the organization, according to the New York Times, and led Trump to call for “NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM!
Maher does have free speech rights. But no one should ever believe that NPR will treat conservatives remotely fairly in its news coverage ever again. And your tax dollars are paying for this.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
How much of the latter list really counts as smaller government beyond stopping government overreach?