David Zimmermann:

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.”

About Maher, who no doubt signed off on the suspension, from Brittany Bernstein:

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.

Uri Berliner:

You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.

I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.

So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

But it hasn’t.

For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.

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.

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.

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.

What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.

Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.

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.

Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin—supporting the hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.

The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.

But that wasn’t the case.

When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded.

Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential scientific paper known as “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Its authors wrote they didn’t believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die. And understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his colleagues, “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.”

Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that “the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.”

When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.

I’m offering three examples of widely followed stories where I believe we faltered. Our coverage is out there in the public domain. Anyone can read or listen for themselves and make their own judgment. But to truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step inside the organization.

You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. Lansing came to NPR in 2019 from the federally funded agency that oversees Voice of America. Like others who have served in the top job at NPR, he was hired primarily to raise money and to ensure good working relations with hundreds of member stations that acquire NPR’s programming.

After working mostly behind the scenes, Lansing became a more visible and forceful figure after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. It was an anguished time in the newsroom, personally and professionally so for NPR staffers. Floyd’s murder, captured on video, changed both the conversation and the daily operations at NPR.

Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death, it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s—in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way.

But the message from the top was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.

“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.”

And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included 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).

All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR’s internal website suggested, the groups were simply a “great way to meet like-minded colleagues” and “help new employees feel included,” it would have been one thing.

But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR’s union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.

In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.

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.

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.

The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.

More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the “intersectional” lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.

For nearly all my career, working at NPR has been a source of great pride. It’s a privilege to work in the newsroom at a crown jewel of American journalism. My colleagues are congenial and hardworking.

I can’t count the number of times I would meet someone, describe what I do, and they’d say, “I love NPR!”

And they wouldn’t stop there. They would mention their favorite host or one of those “driveway moments” where a story was so good you’d stay in your car until it finished.

It still happens, but often now the trajectory of the conversation is different. After the initial “I love NPR,” there’s a pause and a person will acknowledge, “I don’t listen as much as I used to.” Or, with some chagrin: “What’s happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?”

In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question. Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.

So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.

In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive told me that she had been “skewered” for bringing up diversity of thoughtwhen she arrived at NPR. So, she said, “I want to be careful how we discuss this publicly.”

For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our coverage has gone off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news leaders, sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. On March 10, 2022, I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word gay. I pushed to set the record straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate—Latinx. On March 31, 2022, I was invited to a managers’ meeting to present my observations.

Throughout these exchanges, no one has ever trashed me. That’s not the NPR way. People are polite. But nothing changes. So I’ve become a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes heartbreaking.

Even so, out of frustration, on November 6, 2022, I wrote to the captain of ship North Star—CEO John Lansing—about the lack of viewpoint diversity and asked if we could have a conversation about it. I got no response, so I followed up four days later. He said he would appreciate hearing my perspective and copied his assistant to set up a meeting. On December 15, the morning of the meeting, Lansing’s assistant wrote back to cancel our conversation because he was under the weather. She said he was looking forward to chatting and a new meeting invitation would be sent. But it never came.

I won’t speculate about why our meeting never happened. Being CEO of NPR is a demanding job with lots of constituents and headaches to deal with. But what’s indisputable is that no one in a C-suite or upper management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint diversity at NPR and how that affects our journalism.

Which is a shame. Because for all the emphasis on our North Star, NPR’s news audience in recent years has become less diverse, not more so. Back in 2011, our audience leaned a bit to the left but roughly reflected America politically; now, the audience is cramped into a smaller, progressive silo.

Despite all the resources we’d devoted to building up our news audience among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.

These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren’t conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio—where for years NPR had no peer—is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from.

Even within our diminished audience, there’s evidence of trouble at the most basic level: trust.

In February, our audience insights team sent an email team proudly announcing that we had a higher trustworthy score than CNN or The New York Times. But the research from Harris Poll is hardly reassuring. It found that “3-in-10 audience members familiar with NPR said they associate NPR with the characteristic ‘trustworthy.’ ” Only in a world where media credibility has completely imploded would a 3-in-10 trustworthy score be something to boast about.

With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not promising. Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we’ve gone wrong. News organizations don’t go in for that kind of reckoning. But there’s a good reason for NPR to be the first: we’re the ones with the word public in our name.

Despite our missteps at NPR, defunding isn’t the answer. As the country becomes more fractured, there’s still a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith. Defunding, as a rebuke from Congress, wouldn’t change the journalism at NPR. That needs to come from within.

A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who’s been a leader in tech. She doesn’t have a news background, which could be an asset given where things stand. I’ll be rooting for her. It’s a tough job. Her first rule could be simple enough: don’t tell people how to think. It could even be the new North Star.

Longtime readers may recall that I was a non-liberal political pundit on both Wisconsin Public Television and Wisconsin Public Radio. I accepted their invitations because I thought their viewers and listeners needed to hear some viewpoint diversity on the political issues of the day regardless of whether the audience was hostile (sometimes it was) or the other guest was obnoxious (sometimes they were). I never shied away from appearing in what some people of my political bent might consider the enemy camp because you’re not particularly persuasive if you keep preaching to the choir.

The show (“WeekEnd”) and the segment (the Friday 8 a.m. Week in Review) were both canceled, so there are no shows for me to be on. That’s too bad because the past few years those would have been really interesting segments.

This is yet another example of how the political left values all forms of diversity except for intellectual diversity.