A veteran NPR editor admits the news organization has gone too far in its bias by turning its journalists into activists who tell its audience what to think.
Uri Berliner, the senior business editor for NPR, cites its promotion of the Russian collusion conspiracy theory to shed a negative light on former President Donald Trump, its turning a blind eye to the Hunter Biden laptop report, its refusal to acknowledge the Wuhan lab leak theory as the source of COVID, and its emphasis on “bizarre” stories about systematic racism as major issues that signaled to him there is a problem.
Mr. Berliner told The Free Press that the NPR of today, as opposed to the one he started working at 25 years ago, reflects “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”
“An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America,” he said. “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.”
The shift became more rapid with the election of former President Donald Trump, he said.
NPR latched on to the conspiracy theory that President Trump colluded with the Russians and interviewed California Rep. Adam Schiff 25 times despite his never producing evidence.
NPR failed to acknowledge its mistake even after the Mueller report said there was no evidence of collusion.
Instead, he said, “Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.”
NPR responded to the New York Post’s report on Hunter Biden’s laptop by issuing a public statement in which it said it wouldn’t waste its 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 laptop was newsworthy,” Mr. Berliner said. “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.”
NPR also dismissed the lab leak theory as “a right-wing conspiracy theory” despite plenty of available evidence suggesting that the COVID virus could come out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
“Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak,” he said. “But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story.”
NPR’s ‘North Star’
Instead of trusting journalism to “let evidence lead the way,” NPR has become a hotbed of activists obsessed with systematic racism now striving for diversity, or what it called the “North Star.”Not only were reporters required to ask interviewees about their race, gender, and ethnicity—"among other questions”—but they were also required to enter that information into a “centralized tracking system.”
“We were given unconscious bias training sessions,” he said. “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.”
However, in its striving to become diverse, it lost its “viewpoint diversity,” calling its “unspoken consensus” on stories about transphobia, climate change, and the demonizing of Republicans “an assembly line.”
NPR began to avoid language that it perceived as “racially problematic” and “alarmingly divisive,” he said, citing a story about bird names being racist as an example.
Mr. Berliner said he tried to contact news executives when he saw that NPR had “gone off the rails” to have a discussion but to no avail.
“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,” he said. “I pushed to set the record straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate—Latinx.”
Despite its drive to build up a diverse news audience, he said, NPR’s 2023 demographic research reports only 6 percent of its audience is black, while Hispanics made up only 7 percent.
“Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America,” he said. “It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.”
In February 2023, NPR laid off roughly 10 percent of its staff, which amounted to 100 people, due to what CEO John Lansing said was an “erosion of advertising dollars.”
“Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020,” he said. “The digital stories on our websites rarely have national impact.”
A Proposal for Change
NPR has lost the trust of its audience, he said, leaving the company at a crossroads.“We can keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it will all work out,” he said. “Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism.”
This would involve admitting NPR’s mistakes, he said.
“News organizations don’t go in for that kind of reckoning,” he said. “But there’s a good reason for NPR to be the first: we’re the ones with the word public in our name.”
Defunding NPR isn’t the answer, he said, because the country needs a public square where stories have a platform.
Instead of being defunded, NPR needs to change, he said, adding that it could begin with its new CEO, Katherine Maher.
“Her first rule could be simple enough: don’t tell people how to think,” he said. “It could even be the new North Star.”
The Epoch Times contacted NPR for comment.
