Last week, The Free Press published a piece by a senior editor for National Public Radio in which he laid out why he thinks the network has lost the trust of its listeners.
On Tuesday, seeming to prove him correct, NPR suspended him for daring to speak out.
Uri Berliner, who has been with NPR for 25 years, wrote in the April 9 article that diversity of thought has been systematically eliminated in favor of the leftist media narrative at his network.
“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.” @uriberliner‘s hope for a U.S. media institution. https://t.co/EclQJO838a pic.twitter.com/CvFfSoL3xx
— The Free Press (@TheFP) April 9, 2024
Berliner explained that NPR went fully to the left and used the listeners to prove his point.
He said the percentage of them who described themselves as liberal jumped from 37 percent in 2011 to 67 percent in 2023. His point was that the network lost a huge chunk of its centrist and right-leaning listeners because its content lurched to the far left.
A prime example of this leftward lurch was when NPR decided to ignore the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 presidential race between his father, Joe Biden, and then-President Donald Trump.
“The laptop was newsworthy,” Berliner wrote. “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.”
Should NPR lose all taxpayer funding?
Indeed, NPR took an official and public stance on the laptop story. Instead of merely ignoring it, the network boldly announced it would not report on the story at all.
In October 2020, Terence Samuel, NPR managing editor for news, issued a statement revealing why his network had not covered the credible reports from the New York Post and others that then-Democratic presidential nominee Biden was heavily involved in his son’s lucrative — and possibly illegal — international business activities.
“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,” Samuel said in a statement shared on the NPR Public Editor Twitter account.
At the time, many left-wingers claimed the laptop was “Russian propaganda.” But now we know for certain that the contents on that laptop’s hard drive were all legitimate and the laptop did, indeed, belong to Hunter Biden.
The refusal to report on that story was only one of several examples Berliner gave to demonstrate how NPR had lost its credibility. He also cited its far-left views on race being promulgated from the top in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.
Berliner said NPR should have had the role of reporting on race in 2020 through honest journalism “that lets evidence lead the way.”
“But the message from the top was very different,” he said. “America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.”
With his Free Press essay, Berliner had a simple message: NPR has lost its way, becoming a blind mouthpiece for the far left, and needs to swerve back toward the middle where honest reporting lies.
He even had hopes for the network’s new chief executive.
“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,” Berliner wrote.
Well, it now looks as though Maher has had her say about his warning. Instead of heeding Berliner’s call to work to regain NPR’s credibility, she has suspended him for daring to speak out against the network’s leftist bias on a non-NPR media outlet.
She claims that he did not get permission to write for another media outlet, and she handed him a suspension for the violation.
“NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had ‘lost America’s trust’ by approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset,” NPR business reporter David Folkenflik reported on Tuesday.
But maybe Maher did what was expected given her personal bias. The suspension comes on the tail of reports digging up her extreme-left-wing social media posts.
I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. 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.
— Katherine Maher (@krmaher) May 31, 2020
Berliner was hoping this woman, who started her new job on March 25, would be the one to bring back NPR’s credibility — and with one of her first big acts, Maher proved she is the worst candidate to restore the network’s status as a trusted news source.
All this shows that NPR does not deserve the financial support it receives from our tax dollars. If it is boldly going to represent only the radical leftist point of view, the network should not be funded by moderate and center-right Americans.
The left loves the idea of “representation.” So, where is NPR’s effort to represent the very people paying its bills?
