Did you hear? NPR is biased!
Who—other than any mentally uncompromised listener to National Public Radio—knew?
What made the non-revelation newsworthy of late was that an editor (now former editor) at the publicly-funded radio powerhouse dared to say the quiet part about NPR out loud.
Uri Berliner, who has long worked as a senior business editor and reporter at NPR—and has a Peabody Award, a Loeb Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, among others, under his journalistic belt—wrote a lengthy piece about his employer in the online medium The Free Press. In it, he offered his judgment that the network, which, he writes, he long admired, lost its way in recent years when, instead of doing objective reporting, it started telling listeners how they should think.
For decades, Mr. Berliner explained, since its founding in 1970, NPR offered reliable journalism, if with a mild liberal bent. And was widely respected; as recently as 2011, 26 percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By last year, though, only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and fully 67 percent as very or somewhat liberal.
The reason? According to Mr. Berliner, because “an open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR,” leaving the network to reflect America only as in the funhouse mirror of its executives’ wokeness.
There are plenty of media that unabashedly skew severely right or left on the political spectrum. But NPR’s mission is to offer straight, not ideologically tailored, news. That is the assumption on which the government’s largesse to NPR rests. In 2021, the media organization reported $90 million in revenue from “contracts from customers,” which means federal money allocated through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to local public television and public radio stations across the country that pay to run NPR programs.
But NPR also offers plenty of programming—including ostensible news reporting—that subtly or blatantly promotes its “progressive” ideals.
“Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace,” wrote Mr. Berliner, and “we were given unconscious bias training sessions.”
He describes “an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed.” Especially desirable were stories about “instances of supposed racism…signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies.”
In recent months, notes Mr. Berliner, “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… 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 anti-Semitic hate around the world.”
As a result of his article, Mr. Berliner was suspended without pay. Ostensibly because he violated a rule requiring NPR employees to clear any outside writing or appearances beforehand with the network heads. Whether he would have been similarly punished had he published an article about cooking or mountain climbing is an open question.
A silly one, actually. NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher called Mr. Berliner’s essay “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning” to his colleagues. The co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition” program, Leila Fadel, told The Washington Post that “Many feel [the Berliner essay] was a bad faith effort to undermine and endanger our reporters around the country and the world.”
In the end, citing those and other NPR folks’ criticisms of his principled cri de cœur, the erstwhile editor felt he needed to resign.
There has never been any doubt that NPR has become the wokeist of players in American media, as bent in one direction as the bloviators who inhabit right-wing “talk radio” are bent in another. But, considering the organization’s reaction to rational criticism, something else can be added to the list of NPR’s demerits: a thin skin.
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