Editor Uri Berliner ‘eagerly’ voted against Trump, but criticized NPR’s lack of viewpoint diversity
By David Rutz Fox News – Published April 9, 2024 4:30pm EDT – Fox News
An NPR editor is speaking out against his own outlet about its past media coverage of Donald Trump and Russia, the Hunter Biden laptop story and more. (Left: (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) Center: (Photo by Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images), Right: (Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images))
An NPR editor blowing the whistle on the left-leaning outlet’s biased coverage says voter registration records showed an astonishing disparity between Democrats and Republicans in the newsroom: 87 to zero.
NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner penned a thorough rebuke of his own outlet for The Free Press published Tuesday, criticizing it for telling listeners and readers how to think through a progressive worldview. He pointed in particular to its flawed coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop, Russiagate and the COVID lab-leak theory, and he also claimed NPR leadership’s reaction to the George Floyd killing in 2020 was to declare systemic racism was “a given” and “our mission was to change it.”
Berliner said the lack of “viewpoint diversity” had spilled over into how NPR covered such topics as the Israel-Gaza war and avoided terms like “biological sex” in its reporting. He said he looked up voter registrations for the NPR newsroom in 2021 and found that in the city’s headquarters of Washington, D.C., there were 87 registered Democrats in NPR editorial positions and “zero Republicans.”
“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,” he wrote in The Free Press. “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.'”
Berliner, who’s been at NPR for 25 years, “eagerly” voted against Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, but wrote he found NPR’s advocacy-style coverage of his presidency wrongheaded. He said he’d had regular conversations with news leaders about the homogeneous political culture, to no avail.
“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,” he wrote.
Asked for comment about the numbers claimed by Berlinger, an NPR spokesperson told Fox News Digital the organization had nearly 1,200 full-time and temporary employees, and wasn’t sure where Berliner had gotten his numbers on the newsroom’s voter registration.
Berliner noted that polling showed NPR’s audience had become significantly less diverse over the years as well, going from slightly left-leaning overall in 2011 to overwhelmingly so by 2023.
“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,” he said of the most recent survey.
“An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America,” he added. “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.”
In his essay, Berliner was particularly critical of how NPR embraced the Russiagate conspiracy narrative, saying it frequently used Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., for interviews and followed his lead about the story: “The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.”
When the story fizzled after the Robert Mueller investigation found no evidence to prove a conspiracy between the Donald Trump campaign and Russia to fix the 2016 election, Berliner admitted, “NPR’s coverage was notably sparse.”
Reached for comment, an NPR spokesperson directed Fox News Digital to a memo to staff by editor-in-chief Edith Chapin, where she said she and her team “strongly disagree” with Berliner’s assessment of the quality of NPR’s journalism and integrity.
“We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories. We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world,” she wrote.
“Journalism is a collaborative process. Rigorous debate and self-examination are necessary parts of our pursuit of the facts, and exploring the diverse perspectives that drive world events is necessary to our public service mission. That’s why we have built in processes to verify accuracy and why we adhere to the highest editorial standards…
“With all this said, none of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole, fostering a culture of conversation that breaks down the silos that we sometimes end up retreating to. Ideally, we engage in this debate respectfully, with the goal of lifting up and strengthening each other’s work. As our emerging strategic focus brings new insights into what audiences we do and do not currently serve, we have an obligation to more rigorously consider and measure how our coverage fulfills our public service to all audiences.”
“Let’s not forget that the reason we remain one of the most trusted news organizations in the country is that we respect people’s ability to form their own judgments,” she added.
David Rutz is a senior editor at Fox News. Follow him on Twitter at @davidrutz.
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