Longtime NPR Senior Business Editor Exposes How DEI and Trump Derangement Ruined The Organization

Longtime NPR Senior Business Editor Exposes How DEI and Trump Derangement Ruined The Organization

There are some things in life for which you need no official confirmation to know it’s true, like “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin being a couple of fries short of a Happy Meal. There’s also the likelihood that Joe Biden is just one hair sniff away from being booted off the ticket during the DNC.

NPR’s liberal bias is one of those things, too, which we’ve seen by way of their emphasis on wokeness in their reporting, their rampant TDS, and their burgeoning disgust with long-held American ideals – just to name a few.

But every once in a while, confirmation is a good thing, and that’s just what we got this week when Uri Berliner, a longtime senior business editor and reporter for NPR, spilled the tea in a very revealing piece at The Free Press.

The article is way too long to extensively quote, but the highlight reel includes an admission that his employer and colleagues completely lost it when Donald Trump was elected president, something Berliner – who admits he’s a leftist – suggested was a significant factor in NPR ripping off their paper-thin veneer of objectivity once and for all:

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.

He went on to cite their obsession with the Trump/Russia collusion hoax and how there was no acknowledgment after the Mueller Report was released that they got it wrong:

I really recommend reading that entire scathing indictment of why NPR and media similar to it are failing by every metric, but these paragraphs in particular are such pure truth about the US corporate media and how they now think and behave: pic.twitter.com/qzMbElYnL6

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 9, 2024

“Russiagate quietly faded from our programming,” after the report’s release, Berliner noted.

Berliner also talked about the New York Post’s October 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story, which Big Media and Big Tech openly tried to suppress ahead of the November presidential election.

NPR did too, as Legal Insurrection reported at the time. But Berliner’s insight shed new light on what was going on behind the scenes:

With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “We don’t want to waste our 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. 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.

After detailing how “Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage,” Berliner also discussed how the George Floyd case and the riots that followed were the catalysts for NPR going Full Woke, complete with “anguished” staffers who no doubt played a role in the shift:

Corporate newsrooms that insist objectivity is their guiding principle also routinely crowdsource editorial guidelines from left-wing interest groups. An editor once shared a "style guide" from GLAAD as I was writing on trans issues. More in @TheFP today: https://t.co/tplOAUqRFq pic.twitter.com/7f7fUOabL1

— Gabby Orr (@GabbyOrr_) April 9, 2024

The insidious nature of DEI was taking over.

For instance, here’s what now-former CEO John Lansing said at the time:

“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.”

And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

Berliner also revealed the findings of an internal analysis he’d done in 2021 on political leanings in the newsroom. The result? Zero Republicans among the editorial staff in the D.C. office:

In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question. 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.

'CRITICAL FAILURE': After sounding the alarm about a lack of viewpoint diversity in the newsroom, one NPR editor said, "the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse." The editor is blowing the whistle on the left-leaning outlet's biased coverage: https://t.co/NqHGiy17hA pic.twitter.com/PcFagBSwyk

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 9, 2024

Berliner kept trying to have meetings with Lansing to discuss the lack of viewpoint diversity at NPR, but no meeting ever happened.

The discerning reader will note while reading the article in full that Berliner inserts a lot of generously forgiving terminology like “misjudgment” and “miscues” when it’s clear that NPR’s editorial decision-making was very deliberate, and very targeted, having little to nothing to do with something as innocent as mere “misjudgment” or “miscues.”

But in my opinion, this shouldn’t necessarily be held against him. Berliner still works for NPR, still takes pride in his history with the network, and no doubt wants to be viewed as a good-faith actor in all of this who is pushing for positive change.

The piece was like a desperate plea to try and get them to reverse course. But unfortunately for Berliner, in all probability, it’s too late for that to happen. Hardcore committed leftists rarely admit when they’ve made a mistake, and that goes double when wokeness slithers into the mix.

— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —

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