This past week, a longtime NPR journalist, Uri Berliner, blew the lid off with an article headlined “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.”
Appearing on the Free Press online Substack, the piece has gone viral, as noted in a front-page Washington Times story last Thursday.
Mr. Berliner seems to be the kind of well-intended liberal who believes, despite thousands of years of evidence, that people are basically good and that we just need more government to fix everything.He says right off the bat that he is “Sarah Lawrence-educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley. I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.”
In other words, he isn’t some MAGA Republican wringing his hands at the outrageous liberal bias that infects most of the press — and NPR in spades.
As of this writing, he is still working for NPR, but I would guess his days are numbered there, and he knew that when he wrote his remarkably candid essay.
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The “message from the top,” Mr. Berliner recalls, was that “America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.”
NPR’s staff was subjected to charges of White privilege and forced to undergo diversity training.
“Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace,” Mr. Berliner says. “Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to ‘start talking about race.’”
Affinity groups sprouted, including those representing LGBTQ employees. NPR staffers faithfully pushed transgenderism and were told to “avoid the term biological sex.”
There’s more, but you get the idea. The irony is that Mr. Berliner’s article is superbly written, first-class journalism.
I blame “late-stage capitalism” for NPR-post-2016 decline:
I almost can't believe this woman is real. Normal human beings just do not talk like this https://t.co/tpKkouRqom pic.twitter.com/6Q5FXtlONL
— Nate Hochman (@njhochman) April 15, 2024
Related: ‘White Silence is Complicity:’ NPR’s New CEO Sounded More Like an Activist Than a Journalist in 2020 Tweets. Katherine Maher said ‘it’s hard to be mad’ about riots that caused up to $2 billion in damage.
UPDATE: New NPR CEO Dubbed Bill Maher ‘Racist Bigot.’
“The future NPR CEO had some choice words for the liberal comedian at the time, although she omitted any facts to back them up,” Christian Toto writes. “Why would the new NPR CEO ever say such a thing? As Bill Maher repeatedly warns, he hasn’t shifted to the Right over the past decade. Many modern liberals shifted to the extreme Left while he stood his ground. For that, he’s been savaged by his fellow progressives.”