Longtime NPR Editor Who Documented Their Liberal Bias Suspended Without Pay, Threatened With Termination
“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. Berliner’s five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported.”
Legal Insurrection reported last week on the lengthy story written by Uri Berliner, a longtime senior business editor and reporter for NPR, detailing his employer’s transition from being liberally biased to full-scale woke, complete with staffers who were “anguished” over Donald Trump’s presidency as well as the death of George Floyd and what followed.
In the article, which was published by the Bari Weiss-founded Free Press, Berliner noted how the arrival of Donald Trump onto the national political scene in 2016 was a triggering point for NPR’s hardcore leftist newsroom, the D.C. location of which there were 87 Democrats in editorial positions and none who were Republicans:
Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.
[…]
Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.
Needless to say, Berliner’s report sparked outrage at NPR headquarters and beyond, with some staffers reportedly feeling betrayed while non-NPR media figures have busily tried to downplay Berliner’s accusations or to outright accuse him of lying.
Meanwhile, NPR chief executive Katherine Maher called Berliner’s write-up “profoundly disrespectful”:
Here’s some of the memo: pic.twitter.com/c9NKlPWNK5
— Ben Mullin (@BenMullin) April 12, 2024
A few days later, news broke that Berliner had been suspended without pay for a week for the crime of saying the quiet part out loud:
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.
Berliner’s five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported.
[…]
In presenting Berliner’s suspension Thursday afternoon, the organization told the editor he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists. It called the letter a “final warning,” saying Berliner would be fired if he violated NPR’s policy again. Berliner is a dues-paying member of NPR’s newsroom union but says he is not appealing the punishment.
[…]
Berliner says he did not get permission from NPR to speak with me for this story but that he was not worried about the consequences: “Talking to an NPR journalist and being fired for that would be extraordinary, I think.”
NPR did some soul searching and found the guy who told the truth about what NPR has become was the problem. https://t.co/Wq06ZkVRSU
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) April 16, 2024
Their response to him saying dissent isn’t tolerated at NPR was to suspend him for criticizing their political agenda.
Taxpayer-funded. https://t.co/g79xp3L5lq
— Sunny (@sunnyright) April 16, 2024
Incredible.
He wrote a piece suggesting that the organization doesn’t take criticism seriously, is dominated by activists, & doesn’t engage in any self-reflection.
The CEO, who has a history of supporting activism, then responds by ignoring the substance and suspending him. https://t.co/CRasfq2igA
— AG (@AGHamilton29) April 16, 2024
Adding to the turmoil at NPR are tweets from Katherine Maher that have resurfaced and which prove that she is the epitome of a woke, self-loathing leftist. Here are a few examples:
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
(Also to be clear, I am not conflating provocateurs with protestors. Instead, saying this should not be the thing anyone sheds tears over. Cheesecakes are insured; the right to be black and breathe is without measure.)
— Katherine Maher (@krmaher) May 31, 2020
In response to Berliner’s story and the backlash that followed, George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley, who himself is no stranger to criticism from left-wing media outlets, hit the nail on the head:
…Again, it is reminiscent of what we have seemed in higher education where faculties have been purged of conservative, libertarian, or dissenting voices. NPR obviously has a right to be slanted and bias. It does not have a right to public funding in presenting such coverage.
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) April 16, 2024
Amen.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
Anybody actually surprised here? Bueller?
Only surprised they didn’t sack him outright.
Nah, they gonna try to put him through some series of ritual humiliations first, then fire him.
snitches get stitches.
Union and under contract. It would get very messy. They are going to force him through struggle sessions, hostility, humiliation and freeze him out. He will be persona non grata until he leaves “of his own accord”. What do you bet he already had a departure strategy in place before his bombshell?
And he’s gone
Resigns after torching the new ultra woke, Trump hating CEO
Only surprised they didn’t sack him outright.
First he will be forced to abase and apologize.
Then he will be forced ti pay and undergo re-education.
Then, when he finally and truly love Big Brother, they will fire him, and destroy his life.
Neomarxist Propaganda Rascism
NPR delenda est.
Proving once again that leftists cannot tolerate criticism.
Time to shut NPR down.
Leftist can’t tolerate the truth
So “All Things Considered” doesn’t consider all things?
Like everything Democrat/leftist, Loaded with Lies.
I disagree. It is not time to shut them down, that is a progressive answer to a disagreeable issue. What I do agree with removal of all public funding, 100% to every entity of the corporation. If, because of the removal of that funding mechanism, they shut themselves down, so be it.
NPR lies about how much federal funding they get. It’s a shell game. NPR claims it gets little in direct federal funding. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting however gives direct Grants to individual public radio stations that commingle those taxpayer funds with listener donations to obscure the amount of federal funding. The individual stations are the required to “purchase” NPR programs at hugely inflated prices from NPR. They then claim little in direct federal funding but in a backdoor way taxpayers are paying for a majority of this leftist propaganda.
So “All Things Considered” doesn’t consider all things?
Wait! Wait! Don’t tell me…
/ducking
I find it fascinating that whenever a conservative position is revealed, even when it is merely a backhanded recognition that conservative ideas need to be considered for a meaningful discussion, that the leftwing communicator first self-identifies as an intellect and then informs us that any who wish a conservative idea broached are simplistic.
Yet it is the cult of the left that is simplistic, tied to a competition as to who is most tyrannically woke. Bound by chains of conformity. Graded by enthusiastic nodding to any proposal by the Party.
Why are taxpayers funding NPR? Or Sesame Street? Or any media outlet for that manner? I could see it back in the day when they at least pretended to be objective, but these insane collectivists dropped the mask way back in the day when that puke Obama was in office. It is WAY past time to cut off their taxpayer funding.
I can’t see it even “back in the day” regardless the reason. The justification for NPR and PBS was to bring culture to rural areas that didn’t have a variety of broadcast sources blah blah blah.
They did the same with rural telephone service which we are or were til recently subsidizing after phone service became virtually universal. Now they are doing it with the internet.
When Sesame Started making a profit from merchandising, we should have stopped PBS funding.
It’s because back then there were areas in America that didn’t have their own newspapers, radio stations, or TV stations, so the federal government Stepped Up To Answer The Call.
It’s just like the areas that we have today where the citizens are all too stupid to know how to obtain identification cards.
Whatever NPR was, it’s now another victim of Robert Conquest’s Second Law:
“Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”
No need to any “long march through the institutions.” Capture will take care of itself.
Lefty “progressive” “thought” is infectious, debilitating, and highly-transmissible, with opportunistic, mutating spike protein for access. Hijacks institutions to generate hordes of propagation particles, spewed into the environment. Otherwise cripples the institutions ability to do anything useful, while doing nothing useful itself.
“Lefty “progressive” “thought” is infectious”
All productive life and endeavor is beset by parasites and vermin. There is an ecological niche for moochers, and it abhors a vacuum.
Hm, perhaps the flood of toe fungus ads on LI several months ago were trying to tell us all something.
Isn’t that “goosestepped up to answer the call?”
Before NPR went crazy woke I used to listen to them, at some point they became too obnoxious, now it has been many years without even trying to listen.
Same here. I used to listen to them in the early nineties, even though their reporting sometimes rubbed me the wrong way. Haven’t listened to them in over 20+ years.
The Democrat Party, the party of tolerance, has no tolerance whatsoever for anything or anyone with a thought or idea that disagrees with it.
I stopped listening to NPR because of their bias more than 30 years ago.
If anyone remembers the “contract with America,” one of the points included in it was defunding the left. There wasn’t even a good try at that. Today, the Left gets much more money than it did then.
Will the Current congress follow through and defund NPR now? My bet is that their funding will go UP.
Why do Republicans agree to bills that fund NPR?
Why do the Republicans continue business as usual while lawfare against Trump continues?
Why do Republicans allow organizations that discriminate against conservatives, Catholics, and gun owners to continue to be funded?
Why do Republicans agree to bills that allow for abortions and sex-change operations in the military?
Why did Republicans vote to reauthorize FISA without meaningful limits on surveillance of American citizens?
The inescapable answer is that they either tacitly approve or are too cowardly to do anything about them.
Do some Republicans in Congress vote for this crap? Yep. The question though is what CD or State do they represent and what is the composition of the electorate? A CD in a deep red State that voted +10 for Trump is NOT the same as CD in a purple or blue State carried by Biden and we shouldn’t really expect the Rep or Senator form those areas to be some uber conservative stalwart.
The fact is that in many cases the GOP members representing CD in blue/purple States and GOP Senators from those Purple/Blue States often outperform relative to their electorate. They often deliver more conservative votes than their electorate would suggest while Senators and HoR members from Red States/CD under perform relative to their electorate. See Sen John Cornyn of TX and Sen Graham of SC as examples.
I get PO as well but let’s try and put the most blame where it is most deserved and not blame ‘Republicans’ in Congress as a whole when in reality it isn’t close to all or even most. Research the voting records and blame the ones who actually voted against our interests.
Because these are buried in Brobdingnagian bills that nobody can, or will, ever read due to size and limited time (hence the last minute, breathless, submissions to Congress).
It is all a game that they win and we lose.
Because they are not an opposition party.
I’ve sat on here for years that the country needs a viable alternative party.
Let me add to what I said: Donald Trump is actually somebody that could drum up enough grassroots support to start a true opposition party.
OK. So what is your solution? You hate Republicans. I get that. So your solution is to sit out the election and not vote at all, thereby conceding the election to Biden and the radical/left-wing Democrats? Is that your solution? If it is, then you are a coward. The only thing you are good at is sitting on your big fat ass in front of a computer screen and typing in comments on this blog that do nothing to save America. Congratulations!
Is this a response to my post?
You have the right to your opinion (which is why I never downvote anyone). I served in the military and deployed overseas to defend the right to freely express an opinion.
But you are correct — I am perturbed by a substantial number of Congressional R’s.
Right now it feels like my service was for nothing when these jerks in Congress provide the Deep State with justification (i.e. approve FISA) to ignore the Constitution.
The other point that you should be aware of is that your approval is not very important to me.
We get saddled and monkeywrenched by John McCains and Jeff Flakes and Mitt Romneys etc. etc. etc.. The names change, but the sabotage continues apace.
And when we dare complain? Chickenhawks swoop in and defend the indefensible.
His old nickname here was Ragspierre.
Nobody said jack-shit anywhere about not voting, you monomaniac.
JR being a complete peckerhead again. Quelle surprise.
Congratulations!
You need to go play somewhere else JR, this section is adults only.
Solution for you is to stop eating paste.
Defund NPR !
Just an odd observation… Look at the photo at the top of the article. The letters on the sign are arranged so the bottoms are on the right. Now look at the books on your bookshelf, the DVD covers by your TV, whatever. The letters are “bottomed” to the left. They can’t even get their sign right!
What — the “jdu” sign?
Note that many countries, including western European ones, do book spines the other way. And I’m not ever talking about the right-to-lefties, like Hebrew.
Maybe the sign maker was British. Take a look at any book that comes off of English presses and they generally have the titles arranged with the letters bottoms facing to the right.
You are both correct, and I have a few such books in my library. However, that is not the standard in the United States
“Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”
Except when we’re selecting mayors, Vice Presidents and Supreme Court Justices.
Those bullies! They should be shamed for this. Al he has to do is claim that he is LBGTQ then they will be in real trouble.
Defund these loser and ripe the band aid off.
They prove his case with this retaliatory act and hiring of a CEO that fits the script perfectly, not to mention the score of 87-0!
Anyone else note WikiMedia Foundation in her vita?
Authoritatiave source there, with no bias at all. /end sarc
Can’t he claim protection under the whistle blower laws?
Once again, that only works when there is a leftist complaint against the right, no matter how fabricated.
NPR insists they are an impartial balanced news source. And to prove it, they suspend their only impartial balanced employee, without pay.
Good job confirming what everyone already knew, NPR.
NPR- Nauseating, Patronizing, Revolting
New NPR program announced: Some Things Considered, but Not All.
tax funded so the government can not limit free speech
NEXT!!!!
They just amended their slogan: “All Things Considered, But Some Considered More Than Others!”
This will get attention and “outrage” for a news cycle or two, then right back to normal. Some new leftist idiocy will replace it. Nothing to see here folks, move along. Only in a sick and declining society do the taxpayers have to pay for this nonsense……