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On April 17, senior NPR Editor Uri Berliner resigned following NPR’s decision to suspend him for five days without pay. The reason? Mr. Berliner had written an op-ed in the anti-establishment site The Free Press: a scathing critique of his employer of 25 years, where he lays down the argument that NPR over time has become less of the “inquisitive liberal” media outlet it once was and is now predominantly controlled by “scolding, knee-jerk activists.” Berliner highlights the severe change in viewer political identification from 2011 to 2023: In 2011, 26% of listeners identified as conservative, 23% center and 37% liberal. By 2023, conservatives had dropped to 11%, 21% for centrists and liberals increased to 67%. Now, 87% of the staff are self-identified Democrats. Berliner argues that NPR’s tilt, especially considering its role as a public news body, is detrimental to the society it serves and itself.
Berliner cites various cases in the past 10 years that, in his view, greatly diminish the credibility of NPR. He starts with NPR’s coverage of “Russiagate”: how the network was quite attentive to every detail of the investigation up until the Mueller report concluded that, while Trump’s campaign team capitalized on election disruptions by Russia, there was no active conspiracy between Trump and the Russian government, when it stopped such detailed reporting. He follows with NPR’s handling of COVID’s natural versus lab origins, stating that even while information on how it came to be was in dispute by scientists, NPR uncritically embraced the nature theory. Berliner accuses the staff’s attempts of sidestepping the possible lab theory as an overcompensation to “[avoid] a second Iraq WMD.” Berliner also criticizes NPR for making employees self-examine for systemic biases following George Floyd’s death, holding meetings with staff to talk about one’s race, publishing bizarre articles on the Beatles being racially problematic and most recently, coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. He accuses NPR of leaning fully for Palestine, blind to whatever faults it has in favor of a victim-intersectionality narrative.
Now, whether you agree with Mr. Berliner’s assessment is up to you. What I think most people on all parts of the spectrum of politics can agree on is that Berliner’s indictment of NPR is a severe blow to a media body who, in recent years, has joined many of its fellow journalistic outlets on the 2022-low for media trustworthiness according to Gallup, seeing as 38% of Americans distrust mainstream sites entirely. To Berliner, NPR’s supposed leftist tilt is not only killing the company, but it is killing a pillar of moderate journalism in the already polarized American mediascape.
I myself have relied on NPR and its Wisconsin branch, WPR, for general news and classical music current events for many years, and while I still support them, I believe that in recent years, some of Mr. Berliner’s remarks are becoming alarmingly truer by the second. In my article on Adam Hochschild’s “Spain in Our Hearts” interview with NPR host Terry Gross, I emphasized the blithe bias and ignorance both host and interviewee demonstrated on the very history they were talking about, using their rose-tinted view of the Spanish Republic as a shield and litmus test for world democracy against the forces of Hitler. In fact, Gross noticeably over-focused on Hitler’s supporting role in the war compared to Francisco Franco, one of the actual protagonists in the Spanish Civil War, leading the Nationalist faction. The interview itself is a riveting but appallingly inaccurate depiction of a civil war that tore through a polarized Spain. It diminishes the role of communists in hurting the Republican faction and pillaging the country in favor of a sanitized outlook that presents a paragon of righteousness against the Nationalists.
In recent months, WPR has adjusted some of its programming to feature broadcasts from Democracy Now, a leftist news organization managed by Amy Goodman, who has repeatedly associated with radical leftists such as Noam Chomsky, Seymour Hersh and Luke Mogelson to platform their views. Imagine if they platformed Nick Fuentes or Steve Bannon. There would likely be great backlash and outrage, given that Fuentes and Bannon have made many statements in support of anti-liberal regimes, defended atrocities by America’s adversaries and others and promoted the destruction of the home country itself, but when leftists do it, it’s apparently fine?
I should also cite the major issue regarding NPR’s newest CEO, Katherine Maher, who is, for lack of a better term, a post-modernist who propagates the failed concept of “multiple truths” (à la Russian nationalist Alexandr Dugin’s “Western truths and Russian truths”), then failed to clarify on the dilemma of multiple conflicting perspectives in a tepid TED Talk from summer 2022. Just as concerning are Maher’s remarks regarding Wikipedia’s open-sourcing and the free internet, where in a recently publicized interview she openly calls these policies a “recapitulation of power structures and dynamics” and complains that such a joy as the open internet is a “white male Westernized construct.” She also states in an Atlantic Council digital interview that she believes the First Amendment was in itself a liability holding back against what she deems “free speech.” By her own words from her TED Talk and her statements regarding Wikipedia and the internet, what listeners of NPR must be aware of is the fact that its current head believes that truth is only relative to one’s perspective, but that whatever goes against her must be censored, deplatformed and erased.
Maher also defended looting back in the 2020 riots, stating, “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.” Maher was roundly condemned for this extremely ignorant and malicious comment, but the damage was done, and in recent days people have been questioning why NPR’s newest CEO is a rich lady who thinks the looting of small businesses is fine, as long as she’s not the victim.
What’s clear about all of this is that a centerpiece of American media that has been long relied on is now put in quite an awkward position with a senior editor accusing NPR of major biases, but more concerningly a CEO who believes in an Orwellian “democracy” of information — i.e., allowed as long as it agrees with her — and who has made various statements defending violence. Then again, NPR has had a strange relationship with looting since 2020, hosting self-described “agitator” Vicky Osterweil who wrote a book in defense of looting, painting it as a proletarian redistribution of wealth from the unjust system. The decision to host someone so extreme was met with backlash; even the similarly left-leaning Atlantic called NPR out in an article belatedly titled “The Pinnacle of Looting Apologia.”
The Uri Berliner drama is only the most recent of blows to a venerable news service that has been more or less considered one of the most reliable news platforms for the past 53 years. It frankly should be a warning call to all Americans and, for that matter, people worldwide who truly value accurate journalism, because seeing such a formerly-reliable institution sink lower and lower into ideological drivel is, as Mr. Berliner put it, lowering the numbers of people who can proudly say, “I love NPR!,” and it is a danger to journalism confidence as a whole.