Truth and consequences at NPR

Uri Berliner, a senior editor at NPR, should have known better.

In a scathing essay published last week in the Free Press, Berliner pulled back the curtain on NPR’s newsroom. He revealed how the broadcaster has lost its way, abandoning objective journalism in favor of pushing a “progressive worldview” that caters to a narrow slice of elite, left-leaning America.

It was no surprise to any of us, but Berliner’s essay was a breath of fresh air, a rare moment of honesty from inside the mainstream media bubble. He called out NPR's slanted coverage of major stories like the Trump-Russia investigation, Hunter Biden's laptop, and the origins of COVID-19. He went after the newsroom’s myopic obsession with race and identity politics.

If NPR wants to be a mouthpiece for the far left, fine. But don’t expect us to foot the bill.

He wrote things like, “There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless — one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”

Unfortunately for Berliner, this is his boss, the CEO of NPR …

Let’s not completely judge Maher by her ball cap but take a look at her words instead. Here’s a sampling of her Twitter life, where she unironically labels herself a “boss lady”:

White silence is complicity. If you are white, today is the day to start a conversation in your community.

What is that deranged racist sociopath [Donald Trump] ranting about today? I truly do not understand.

America is addicted to white supremacy and that’s the real issue.

Finally, perhaps my favorite: As people were being killed and thousands of businesses burned during the 2020 riots, she was sympathizing with the protesters “not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression.”

It should come as no surprise that Berliner tendered his resignation on Wednesday, saying he could not “work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.” Previously, NPR had given him an unpaid five-day suspension. Management claimed he violated policy by publishing his essay without approval, and that may be true. But his real crime was speaking about NPR’s biases aloud, and the higher-ups can’t handle the truth.

Conservatives have long seen NPR’s liberal bias, and Berliner’s essay confirmed what we already knew. This is an organization that has lost touch with half the country. It sneers at red-state values while taking the people's tax dollars.

So what about that public funding? NPR likes to downplay it with Clintonian word games. From its website: “On average, less than 1% of NPR's annual operating budget comes in the form of grants from [the Corporation for Public Broadcasting] and federal agencies and departments.”

Think about that for a second. If less than 1% of the network’s budget comes from the government, NPR could easily trim that budget and, like the Huffington Post or MSNBC, do its own thing.

In reality, there’s a whole lot of indirect funding going on that kicks up the government share to about 17% of NPR’s $300 million budget. (By the way, if a Republican presidential candidate did the same thing, a progressive prosecutor would undoubtedly file felony charges of money laundering.)

Sooner or later, NPR will have to reckon with the half of America it has systematically ignored and belittled. NPR brass don’t care about ratings, but eventually, conservative lawmakers will tire of funding their opposition.

If NPR wants to be a mouthpiece for the far left, fine. But don’t expect us to foot the bill.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at Ken LaCorte’s Substack.