ROGER KIMBALL: Cambridge University should be ashamed of itself for honoring Angela Davis.

Remember Angela Davis? Few people under fifty do. Was Cambridge University counting on that historical ignorance when it decided to honor Angela Davis with an honorary degree?

In case you, Dear Reader, are a little fuzzy about Davis, I note for the record that the former Black Panther and two-time vice-presidential candidate on the Communist Party ticket with Gus Hall is the recipient of many honors, including the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize.

Cambridge University, of course, has long demonstrated a certain fondness for Commies, as the names “Kim Philby,” “Guy Burgess” and “Anthony Blunt” remind us. But as far as I have been able to discover, Angela Davis is the first person who appeared on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted list to have been honored by Cambridge.

As David Harsanyi wrote in 2019: Angela Davis, Women’s March Honoree And Champion Of Terror, Prisons, And Tyranny.

It was “human rights activist Angela Davis,” as NPR astonishingly described the woman in an article this week, who bought the shotgun that was used in a 1970 Marin County court room kidnapping and shootout that ended up killing a superior court judge and three others. The subsequent manhunt and trial of Davis, a proud lifelong communist, would be a very big deal in Soviet nations.

In 1971, in fact, the CIA noted that Davis’s case had become “a Soviet manipulated international anti-US campaign reminiscent of the orchestrated by Communist propaganda efforts made on behalf of atomic spies, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.” The CIA estimated that at least 5 percent of the entire Soviet Russian propaganda budget had been aimed at propping up Davis. To put that in context, that’s more than was being spent on propaganda directly about the Vietnam War. All schoolchildren in East Germany were ordered to collect flowers and stamps for Davis.

Davis soon traveled to many of these nations to stand with leaders who, collectively, had jailed hundreds of thousands of political dissidents. She visited East Germany, and effusively praised Erich Honecker while the Stasi were torturing political prisoners and his border police were summarily executing those who tried to escape.

As Richard Brookhiser tweeted last year, “Reagan asked Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. Angela Davis appeared at a ceremony honoring the guards who shot people trying to escape over it.”

URI BERLINER: Happy Independence Day, NPR.

The Senate voted this morning to claw back $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding for NPR, PBS, and local stations. Pending final approval in the House, the federal government will, after more than half a century, no longer be in the business of supporting NPR.

The vote is a victory for Republicans who have long had National Public Radio (NPR) in their sights. But it is also a victory for those of any political stripe who believe the government has no business funding the media.

I didn’t use to count myself among them. But over the past year, under the leadership of a divisive new CEO, instead of taking criticisms of its coverage to heart, NPR instead doubled down on agenda-driven journalism. So, as someone who had spent most of his career at the network, I didn’t support defunding. I instead suggested that NPR could build back credibility by voluntarily giving up federal support. Obviously that didn’t happen.

NPR has said President Donald Trump’s push for defunding is an attack on press freedom and the First Amendment. While defunding is a harsh rebuke to NPR, it’s not fatal. A relatively small portion of its budget—some 5 to 10 percent depending on how you do the math—comes from direct and indirect federal funding. But for small public radio stations that rely more on federal support, the repercussions could be severe. While Republicans cast the votes to defund, NPR also has itself to blame for the outcome.

It’s a self-inflicted wound, a product of how NPR embraced a fringe progressivism that cost it any legitimate claim to stand as an impartial provider of news, much less one deserving of government support.

I witnessed that change firsthand in my 25 years at the network—and I tried to do something about it. I was a senior business editor at NPR when, a little more than a year ago, I published my account in The Free Press of how the network had lost touch with the country, and, like the legacy media everywhere, forfeited the trust of the public.

I explained how over time, as NPR became a boutique product for a well-heeled audience clustered around coastal cities and college towns, it shed moderate and conservative listeners.

Fortunately for leftists, thanks to their long march through the institutions, a surfeit of socialist-friendly content remains available, including obscure niche outlets such as CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. 

FIVE-O FIASCO: NY Times Editorial Board Claims Defunding NPR, PBS Is Like Defunding Police.

The newspaper even admitted that “Republicans complain, not always wrongly, that public media reflects left-leaning assumptions and biases.” “Not always wrongly?” What does that even mean in this context? Like this is rare? Instead of hourly?

Then the editorial board took a detour onto Cuckoo Avenue to describe current legislative efforts to strip NPR and PBS (finally) of their taxpayer-subsidized license to continue belching up left-wing propaganda with impunity:

 We are reminded of the excesses of the ‘defund the police’ and ‘abolish ICE’ movements on the other side of the ideological spectrum. They adopted a fatalistic view of vital government services, suggesting that their imperfections justified their elimination. They were wrong, and so are the conservatives who want to defund public media.

And now an ironic message from PBS’s Sesame Street brought to you by the number “5” and the letter “O.”

One big difference: Minorities really want the police very well-funded: “White Progressives Shocked To Learn Black And Latino Voters Don’t Share Their Radical ‘Defund The Police’ Views,” Ashe Schow wrote at the Daily Wire in 2021. In contrast, as Uri Berliner wrote in his Free Press cri de coeur last year about how NPR went off the rails:

Despite all the resources we’d devoted to building up our news audience among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.

How odd. NPR honchos assured me that it was vital to the safety of small Texas towns during weather emergencies.

AND THE ROLE OF PAULINE KAEL WILL BE PLAYED BY…: New Yorker writer admits he’s never met a Trump supporter at work in 15-year media career. ‘So, yes, there is a liberal bias to the news,’ the longtime journalist wrote.

Jay Caspian Kang, a staff writer for The New Yorker, ascribed media bias not to a conspiracy among journalists, but to the fact that the overwhelming majority of journalists are left-leaning.

Kang wrote a piece for The New Yorker, “How Biased Is the Media, Really?” in response to a recent Gallup poll showing that Americans’ trust in mass media remains not only historically low, but consistently abysmal for the third year in a row.

He responded by addressing multiple common critiques from Americans on both sides of the political spectrum, including the accusation that “Every news organization that feigns objectivity is actually heavily slanted toward the left. Not only that; the media is actively working with the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump.”

“The most obvious explanation for this impression is that the press corps is mostly made up of liberals,” he wrote in the piece, adding that “At prestige outlets—many of which do don the armor of impartiality—the imbalance skews a lot further to the left than what many outsiders might imagine.”

He recalled Uri Berliner emerging as a whistleblower against NPR and the rise of progressive identity-politics, but argued the effect of such politics on journalism is ultimately “negligible compared with the effect of the fact that nearly everyone who works [in the media]” are “college-educated Democratic voters from middle- to upper-middle-class families. I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: in the course of a fifteen-year career that has included stints at radio shows, print outlets, digital media and television, I have yet to meet a Trump supporter at work.”

As Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s film critic was quoted after the 1972 election, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

But certainly not in a newsroom, curiously enough.

But then, given the way that the New York Times’ uber-woke young staffers turned on former Weekly Standard assistant editor Adam Rubenstein like the torch and pitchfork-wielding rampaging mob out of a 1930s Universal horror movie for publishing Tom Cotton’s op-ed in 2020, would anyone who’s even Trump-curious admit to such inclinations in a 2024 newspaper newsroom?

URI BERLINER, NPR WHISTLEBLOWER, JOINS THE FREE PRESS:

Bari Weiss’ Free Press keeps getting better and better.

The business model, if you could call it that, is pretty simple: scoop up all the best of the liberal to moderate refugees from the increasingly totalitarian progressive media outlets and give them a home to do real journalism.

It’s so good that I subscribed to it even before it officially existed–back when it was Bari Weiss’ Substack. It has only gotten better since then.

Bari has just scooped up Uri Berliner, the recently fired National Public Radio Business editor.

Berliner burned his bridges with NPR by writing a piece on how the news organization lost its way in the Trump years. All of us here at Hot Air wrote something about this story, but Ed wrote the definitive piece on Berliner’s original essay.

Bari is, of course, a refugee from The New York Times, as is her wife. Uri comes from NPR. Catherine Herridge, who just wrote a piece about her struggle to protect a source, was let go from CBS.

Which of course is why Berliner being hired by the Free Press earned this snarky subhead from the Daily Beast today:

If the Beast thinks of that lineup as being on the “right,” then the Website has just done an excellent job of triangulating itself rather far in the opposite direction.

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: Katherine Maher’s Color Revolution.

The Color Revolution is restless. Beginning in the former Soviet republics in the early 2000s, it moved along the coast of North Africa with the so-called Arab Spring in the 2010s, and, into the current decade, has spread further.

The ostensible purpose of Color Revolutions—named after the Rose Revolution, Orange Revolution, and Tulip Revolution in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, respectively—is to replace authoritarian regimes with Western liberal democracies. American and European intelligence services are often heavily involved in these revolutions, with ambitions not only to spread modern ideologies but also to undermine geopolitical opponents.

The West’s favored methods of supporting Color Revolutions include fomenting dissent, organizing activists through social media, promoting student movements, and unleashing domestic unrest on the streets. Americans hold varying opinions on such efforts, but what many don’t realize is that they occur not only overseas but also here in the United States. The summer of rioting following the death of George Floyd, which ushered in the new DEI regime, was in many ways a domestic Color Revolution, advanced by progressive NGOs, media entities, and political actors.

A minor figure in these movements, a woman named Katherine Maher, has recently come to greater prominence. Maher was involved in the wave of Color Revolutions that took place in North Africa in the 2010s, and she supported the post-George Floyd upheavals in the United States in the 2020s. She was also the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and was just recently named the new CEO of National Public Radio.

At NPR, Maher has already been embroiled in controversy. Longtime editor Uri Berliner, who has now resigned, accused her of left-wing bias and suppressing dissent. Following these accusations, I did extensive reporting demonstrating that Maher has a troubling history of arguing against the notion of objective truth and supporting censorship in the name of democracy.

Now I have gathered additional facts that raise new questions about Maher’s role as a regime-change agent, both foreign and domestic. She has brought the Color Revolution home to America.

Meanwhile, here’s a look at her predecessor’s last days at NPR:

NYT reports that the previous CEO of NPR was formally accused of racism and investigated by an outside firm, because he asked employees on a call to be "civil." pic.twitter.com/QdzpL0LrdK

— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) April 24, 2024

Translation: like the New York Times’ Dean Baquet, NPR’s John Lansing couldn’t leave fast enough once his troops turned on him during the early days of America’s Color Revolution.

VETERAN JOURNALIST AND JOURNALISM PROFESSOR W. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: NPR’s Uri Berliner Was Right. “Uri Berliner’s provocative recent essay lamenting ‘the absence of viewpoint diversity’ at NPR brought to mind the critiques of Liz Spayd, the little-remembered final public editor at the New York Times.”

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: NPR’s Uri Berliner Was Right.

Uri Berliner’s provocative recent essay lamenting “the absence of viewpoint diversity” at NPR brought to mind the critiques of Liz Spayd, the little-remembered final public editor at the New York Times.

Spayd, like Berliner, was a veteran journalist whose departure was a study in the limited tolerance at elite American news organizations for contrary thinking and inward-directed criticism. Spayd left the Times in 2017 when her position as in-house critic was unceremoniously dissolved. Berliner was suspended without pay soon after his essay about NPR was posted this month at the “Free Press” site on Substack. He resigned within days, closing a 25-year career at the public broadcaster.

The two cases, while dissimilar in their details, are both instructive, signaling a distaste for challenges arising from within newsrooms of major media outlets, even when raised by journalists with many years of experience. They also point to an eclipse of values of impartiality, fair-mindedness, and ideological distance that defined American journalism, at least nominally, for decades.

Spayd alluded to those diminished values in her swan song column, writing that “in the long run stories that are measured in tone are more powerful. Whether journalists realize it or not, with impartiality comes authority — and right now it’s in short supply.”

It’s Joseph’s first column at the PJM Mothership, so please click over and read the whole thing.

BUNKERTIME: NPR’s Katherine Maher Is Not Taking Questions About Her Tweets.

[Uri] Berliner’s tell-all mostly took aim at specific examples of NPR being led astray by its deference to progressive shibboleths: the Hunter Biden laptop, COVID-19, etc. He implored his new boss—Maher’s tenure as CEO had only begun about four weeks ago—to correct NPR’s lack of viewpoint diversity. That’s probably a tall order, since Maher had once tweeted that ideological diversity is “often a dog whistle for anti-feminist, anti-POC stories.”

* * * * * * * *

When asked by event organizer Jon Bateman, a Carnegie senior fellow, to address the Berliner controversy, she said that she had never met him and was not responsible for the editorial policies of the newsroom.

“The newsroom is entirely independent,” she said. “My responsibility is to ensure that we have the resources to do this work. We have a mandate to serve all Americans.”

She repeated these lines over and over again. When asked more specifically about whether she thinks NPR is succeeding or failing at making different viewpoints welcome, she pointed to the audience and said that her mission was to expand the outlet’s reach.

“Are we growing our audiences?” she asked. “That is so much more representative of how we are doing our job, because I am not in the newsroom.”

We’ve all seen veteran newspaper columnists who swear up and down that they’re totally objective, and then, when bumped up or transferred over to write opinion columns, invariably start producing nothing but cant that’s so far to the left it would make Che Guevara blush. Maher has simply reversed the process — after more than a decade of being a Titania McGrath clone, now she wants us to believe that her radio network is totally objective and “serving all Americans.”

One person who isn’t buying her shtick: Larry Sanger Speaks Out. The Wikipedia co-founder discusses Katherine Maher and the corruption of the Internet.

Christopher Rufo: What are you thinking as you’re watching these statements from former Wikipedia CEO Katherine Maher, who is now the CEO of NPR?

Larry Sanger: I’ve been following your tweets. You’ve kind of shocked me. The bias of Wikipedia, the fact that certain points of view have been systematically silenced, is nothing new. I’ve written about it myself. But I did not know just how radical-sounding Katherine Maher is. For the ex-CEO of Wikipedia to say that it was somehow a mistake for Wikipedia to be “free and open,” that it led to bad consequences—my jaw is on the floor. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised that she thinks it, but I am surprised that she would say it.

Rufo: In another clip, she says explicitly that she worked with governments to suppress “misinformation” on Wikipedia.

Sanger: Yes, but how did she do that in the Wikipedia system? Because I don’t understand it myself. We know that there is a lot of backchannel communication and I think it has to be the case that the Wikimedia Foundation now, probably governments, probably the CIA, have accounts that they control, in which they actually exert their influence.

Exit quote:

Given her current position as head of state-run radio, her obsession with top-down government control and propaganda, and with racial identity, exactly!

As for the rest of us: Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) Pushes to Defund Taxpayer-Funded NPR.

Faster, please:

Once again, and magically, old-school lib @NellieBowles at TGIF crystallizes my right-wing-religious-nut thoughts precisely, as Paul Shaffer used to do for David Letterman. From today's TGIF newsletter: https://t.co/EGRwQQopQh pic.twitter.com/1fWwxnEarf

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) April 19, 2024

But of course, as Jesse Walker writes at Reason: Another Day, Another Doomed Plan To Defund NPR. “Maybe someday we’ll get there. But if [Jim] Banks [R-IN] and Blackburn manage to pull it off this year, I’ll eat an NPR tote bag.”

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: Quotations from Chairman Maher.

Maher understands the game: America’s elite institutions reward loyalty to the narrative. Those who repeat the words move up; those who don’t move out.

Next, you notice the partisanship. Maher was “excited” about Elizabeth Warren in 2012. She “just [couldn’t] wait to vote” for Hillary in 2016. She once had a dream about “sampling and comparing nuts and baklava on roadside stands” with Kamala Harris. She worked to “get out the vote” in Arizona for Joe Biden but slightly resented being called a “Biden supporter”; for her, it was simply a matter of being a “supporter of human rights, dignity, and justice.”

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a “deranged racist sociopath.”

If you read Maher’s tweets closely, you also get glimpses of the human being. She spent much of her time in airports, taxis, meetings, and conferences. She expressed anger over the fact that most first-class flyers were white men, then noted that she went straight “to the back of the bus.” In her thirties, unmarried and without children, she felt the need to explain that “the planet is literally burning” and that she could not, in good conscience, “bring a child into a warming world.”

Behind the frenetic activity and the moral posturing, you wonder. Maher once posted her daily routine, which involved yoga, iced coffee, back-to-back meetings, and Zoom-based psychotherapy. She resented being served maternity advertisements on Instagram, she said. She was not “currently in the market for a baby” and would not be “tending her ovaries” according to the dictates of American capitalism.

Americans, even CEOs, are entitled to their opinions and to their own life decisions, of course. But the personal and psychological elements that suffuse Maher’s public persona seem to lead to political conclusions that are, certainly, worthy of public criticism.

The most troubling of these conclusions is her support for radically narrowing the range of acceptable opinions. In 2020, she argued that the New York Times should not have published Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed, “Send in the Troops,” during the George Floyd riots. In 2021, she celebrated the banishment of then-president Donald Trump from social media, writing: “Must be satisfying to deplatform fascists. Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.”

As CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher made censorship a critical part of her policy, under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.

In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” These speech protections, Maher continued, make it “a little bit tricky” to suppress “bad information” and “the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”

Related: Where are Uri Berliner’s defenders in the press?

What should be most troubling, however, is that Maher flaunted a Biden campaign hat in a post from 2020, as she canvassed a Get Out the Vote operation in Arizona. NPR now has a dilemma: they can keep Maher as CEO (which I believe they will), but they can no longer dispute the accusations of what Berliner claimed the network has become in recent years. I would argue this is what NPR wants, and has wanted for a while. NPR, their hosts and their CEO can now exhale and stop pretending to be anything other than another progressive media outlet. The problem for NPR in that realm now becomes an issue of public funding (cue a Marsha Blackburn bill to defund NPR). This debate has be re-energized by Berliner’s resignation and NPR’s stiffening spine in defending their new activist CEO.

What cannot be ignored is the lack of outcry from Berliner’s fellow journalists and his union. Berliner was made to be a leper in the media cool-kids’ clique simply for telling the truth of what NPR is. Berliner’s public flogging is a warning to anyone else who dares speak out about what media organizations, and the journalists working for them, have become. They all know what they are, and they all now know what happens to them if they speak out about it like Uri Berliner did.

More: Dozens of NPR Staffers Sign Letter to CEO and Unwittingly Prove Uri Berliner’s Point.

MATT TAIBBI: On Uri Berliner’s Resignation from NPR.

“THAT’S THE SECOND HIGHEST-RATED COMMENT on the NYT article, ‘NPR Editor Who Accused Broadcaster of Liberal Bias Resigns/Uri Berliner, who has worked at NPR for 25 years, said in an essay last week that the nonprofit had allowed progressive bias to taint its coverage.'”

The comment: “Having rarely missed a Morning Edition or All Things Considered every day every week for every year between 1984 and 2013, by 2014 NPR became less and less tolerable to this centrist… until by 2020 I just stopped caring and certainly stopped listening. I doubt I am alone in having concluded NPR had become something of a joke. And a really sad one.”

Plus: “Highest rated: ‘Kudos to Berliner for having the backbone to write the essay he did. Weren’t we all thinking it anyway and he just voiced the reason many of us stopped listening to NPR on a regular basis?'”

And: “Third-highest: ‘Mr. Berliner was on suspension not for working for outside organizations but for truthfully criticizing NPR’s bias.”

Fourth: “I’ve been listening to NPR my entire life. Things took wild turn after 2016. And now I am finding myself disjoint from almost all conversation happening on NPR.”

Plus: “Remember, these are NYT readers. These are most likely liberals who are put off by the left-wing slant. I was going to write What happened in 2016? I had to laugh at myself.”

ANOTHER ONE GETS RED-PILLED: Just the News is reporting that Uri Berliner, a National Public Radio veteran editor who authored an essay that was critical of the news outlet’s liberal bias, resigned Wednesday.

“Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population. If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way. But it hasn’t,” he wrote last week in an essay for The Free Press.

He’s probably in line for the same insane demonization the Margaret Sullivan and MSNBC crowd have leveled against Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.

If you step off the reservation and think for yourself, you’re dead to us and we must destroy you. Because we’re liberals. That means we embrace dissent, except when we don’t agree.

NPR WHISTLEBLOWER URI BERLINER RESIGNS: ‘I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged.’

Longtime NPR editor Uri Berliner, who was suspended after blowing the whistle on liberal bias at the organization, announced Wednesday he has resigned.

“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don’t support calls to defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cited in my Free Press essay,” Berliner wrote in a statement published on X.

Berliner was referring to Katherine Maher, who took over last month as President and CEO and has gone viral for past social media posts showing far-left personal views.

Berliner penned a piece in the Free Press that criticized NPR’s coverage of Russiagate, the COVID lab leak theory, Hunter Biden’s scandalous laptop, embrace of the theory of systemic racism and accused the organization of downplaying antisemitism following Oct. 7.

Ed Morrissey speculates that “The mention of disparagement seems like a warning to NPR’s lawyers, or maybe Maher’s personal attorneys.”

Old and busted on the left: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The new hotness?

EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says the "the number one challenge" in her fight against disinformation is "the First Amendment in the United States," which makes it "a little bit tricky" to censor "bad information" and "the influence peddlers" who spread it.

NPR's censor-in-chief. pic.twitter.com/0vY6hIpbmO

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 17, 2024

URI BERLINER BURNED HIS BRIDGES AT NPR, THEN SET THE HOUSE ABLAZE:

In a profession where journalists and pundits read these sorts of big dishy insider pieces differently than normal folks do — searching for hidden implications, listening for dog whistles, and frankly sometimes wearing tinfoil hats — that paragraph instantly sounded a blaring klaxon. “PLEASE TAKE NOTE OF THIS INCOMING BOSS WHO I WILL MENTION BY NAME AND WHO I MIGHT ADD LACKS ANY JOURNALISTIC BACKGROUND WHATSOEVER.”

And, mother of God, look what turned up once people like Christopher Rufo did just that. You see, it turns out that Katherine Maher is no ordinary ascendant progressive media executive. No, this woman’s social-media history reveals her to be the Kwisatz Haderach of white wokeness, presumably bred through generations of careful genetic selection to be the supernaturally perfect embodiment of Affluent White Female Liberalism. (As many have noted, she not only acts but looks like Titania McGrath.) It’s vaguely unreal: If there was a trendy progressive take floating around on Twitter and popular within media circles, then you can reliably bet she was there to voice it in the most preeningly insulting way possible.

I cannot possibly do justice to the comical depth and breadth of her posting history. (Matt Taibbi has a fun summary here, framed as a journey through the American holiday calendar with NPR’s incoming CEO.) This is a woman who loudly condemns her own “cis white mobility privilege,” and I’m still not sure whether she’s referring to her ability to quickly change jobs or her ability to roll out of bed in the morning. Maher is so cringe-inducingly woke that she almost reads like an intentionally cruel parody of wokeness from beyond the uncanny valley — as if she were tweeting in the progressive equivalent of blackface, her endless ultra-orthodoxy an act of desperate, sweaty-palmed minstrelsy. I prefer an empathetic take myself: Don’t hate the player, hate the game. As a rich white heterosexual woman from Connecticut in a world of brutally cutthroat media identity politics, she needs to give a truly committed performance at all times simply in order to survive.

Do you think Uri Berliner was unaware of any of this? Do you think he failed to do research on the background of the new CEO before he gave her a shout-out by name at the end of a piece savaging NPR’s decaying ethical culture? I don’t. He might as well have wished her luck with a capital “F.” He had to be aware of what would happen when he shot a giant signal flare into the air at the end of a piece like this: People like me would notice, and soon investigators would come a-calling. He basically scripted his own one-act play: Waiting for Rufo. As it draws to its climax, I am left with one overwhelming question: Why on earth are American taxpayers footing the bill for any of this, again?

Excellent question. In the meantime – at least before Maher locks down or deletes her Twitter account – Rufo’s Twitter feed is currently full of Maher’s Titania McGrath-style woke performance art over the past decade.

Saul Alinsky smiles: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage…Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it:”

UPDATE:

This quote is best read in the voice of a Stasi officer speaking to a dissident newspaperman who is tied to a chair. https://t.co/g9ODXIFOKB

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) April 17, 2024

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Journalist At NPR Suspended, Leading To Shocking Discovery There Was A Journalist At NPR.

A journalist and senior editor at National Public Radio has been suspended, leading to the astounding revelation that there was a journalist working at NPR.

Uri Berliner, who has worked at the taxpayer-funded media organization for 25 years, was suspended after he recently wrote an essay exposing how NPR had lost all trust among the nation’s public.

“Wow, they had a real journalist at NPR? That’s news to me!” said one member of the astonished nation’s public. “I thought they were just mellow voices on the radio that told me in a matter-of-fact, upper-crust, college-educated manner what Leftist narrative I was supposed to believe about any given story.”

Indeed; as our leftist betters become more and more surreal and comical, the Babylon Bee is increasingly doing straight-up reportage.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot: Another Boeing whistleblower says he faced retaliation for reporting ‘shortcuts.’

—NPR, Friday.

Chaser: NPR suspends veteran editor Uri Berliner who called out left-wing bias.

NPR has suspended Uri Berliner, the senior editor who published a bombshell essay a week ago that claimed that the publicly funded outlet has “lost America’s trust” by approaching news stories with a left-wing bias.

NPR media writer David Folkenflik revealed on Tuesday that Berliner beginning on Friday was suspended for five days without pay. Folkenflik, who reviewed a copy of the letter from NPR brass, said that the company told the editor he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets — a requirement of NPR journalists.

NPR called the letter a “final warning,” saying Berliner would be fired if he violated NPR’s policy again.

Neither NPR nor Berliner immediately responded to requests for comment.

Curiously, beleaguered NPR CEO Katherine Maher hasn’t locked down her Twitter account or deleted her tweets yet: Christopher Rufo Goes Through New NPR CEO’s Amazingly Woke Twitter Timeline, which could well be driving Berliner’s suspension:

Gentlemen, start your screenshots; there’s a pretty good chance the treasure trove of hot takes from Maher that Rufo uncovered won’t be online much longer:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Perhaps red-state legislators and governors should require their public universities to disassociate themselves from NPR, given its commitment to racism and hate. NPR is all over red states, supported financially and otherwise by public universities.

NPR’S LURCH TO THE LEFT:

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.

* * * * * * * *

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.”

TWO NPRS IN ONE!

Shot: Another Boeing whistleblower says he faced retaliation for reporting ‘shortcuts.’

—NPR, Friday.

Chaser: NPR’s New CEO Scolds 25-Year Veteran For Exposé Outing Network’s Bias.

National Public Radio (NPR) CEO and president Katherine Maher lashed out at senior Editor Uri Berliner over a scathing op-ed he wrote for The Free Press — in which he claimed that NPR had displayed political bias on a number of occasions and, in doing so, had “lost America’s trust.”

Maher, who stepped into her role at NPR just three weeks ago, claimed that Berliner’s assessment — made after 25 years with the outlet — was “deeply simplistic” as well as “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”

Without mentioning Berliner by name — or giving any specifics with regard to his comments — Maher simply claimed that NPR was devoted to providing information to the public, and that the outlet’s “service to this aspirational mission was called in question this week.”

“Asking a question about whether we’re living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions,” Maher continued. “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.”

Maher certainly seems obsessed with “identity:”

Of course, she does have other issues on her mind as well:

UPDATE: Funny, I thought a future public radio executive would be a lot more concerned about the intermingling of church and state:

MORE: NPR CEO AWFL Doubles Down on the Intense Regime Bias at the State Media Company; In Past Tweets, She Declared Trump a “Racist.”

NPR’S NEW CEO GETS EMBARRASSINGLY EXPOSED AMID EDITOR BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON THE OUTLET:

It hasn’t been a good week for NPR. The once somewhat respected “news outlet” was taken to task by one of its current editors for its systemic bias and eagerness to censor stories on behalf of the far left.

Uri Berliner detailed in his write-up how NPR has suppressed and skewed stories, including those involving the Hunter Biden laptop, COVID-19 origins, and the Russian collusion hoax. At the center of the outlet’s dramatic shift from generic left-wing bias to full-on rabid activism was an aggressive DEI push spawned by the George Floyd riots.

NPR forcefully defended its obsession with “diversity” in a response to Berliner, claiming that it allows more nuanced and varied views of the news. In reality, it has turned the outlet into an echo chamber of like-minded radicals because as I explained in my piece on the matter, DEI is self-selective. Those hired as a result of it inevitably support it and the far-left ideology that backstops it.

Which brings me to NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher. She’s now facing backlash for several posts she made relating to the aforementioned George Floyd riots.

Oh, I don’t know — her evenhandedness is impeccable. There can be no question of bias or putting her thumb on the scale of slanted coverage. She would never even announce who she supports in presidential elections, except of course when she does just that:

Katherine Maher—the new CEO of NPR—didn’t get the job despite of these views, she got the job precisely because of these views: pic.twitter.com/vE9K87H9Th

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) April 14, 2024

HOW IT STARTED: In 2015, Ashe Schow, then with the Washington Examiner wrote, “With all the attention being paid to college-aged social justice warriors and microagressions, one has to ask: What happens when all these delicate snowflakes enter the workforce?”

How it’s going: “NPR, New York Times are in immense turmoil with the world on the verge of global conflict,” Michael Goodwin wrote in the New York Post last night:

The world is [on] the verge of global conflict, America is splintered into angry factions and New York is sliding into hell.

On the other hand, the newsrooms of the New York Times and National Public Radio are in turmoil.

OK, that’s hardly as important as the widespread surge of violence and disorder, but we have to take good news where we find it.

And these internal media battles are good news because the lefty outlets are getting a taste of their own medicine.

Although the details differ, the common denominator is that insiders at both places are accusing management of bias and bigotry.

* * * * * * * *

Just 32% of Americans say they trust the media “a great deal” or “a fair amount,” according to Gallup, which says the number matches a historic low.

The eruption at NPR has been especially dramatic, thanks to a brave long-time reporter and editor who is torching the partisanship.

Meanwhile, the Gray Lady is finding that no matter how far left it goes, it’s never far enough to satisfy the staff radicals who demand that the paper embrace their agenda.

They want to rip away any pretense of neutrality and become hard-core advocates on behalf of extreme policies.

The NPR battle went public when veteran journalist Uri Berliner wrote an essay condemning what he called the “lack of viewpoint diversity” in his workplace.

He checked the political registrations of editorial colleagues in Washington, DC, and found 87 were registered Democrats, and none were registered Republicans.

Bingo.

The result of that built-in bias is a one-sided view of America, he writes for the Free Press:

“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.”

He cites “bizarre stories” about how “bird names are racially problematic,” others justifying looting and claims that “fears about crime are racist.”

In September of 2020, the Washington Examiner ran the headline, “NPR regrets elevating pro-looting anti-Semite.” But why was this person “elevated” in the first place? Why would NPR be running pro-looting segments filled with softball questions? Now we know pro-looting is apparently a top-down position at NPR, or at least it was during that period of transition among our leftist betters in the spring of 2020, when their daydreams seemed to transform overnight from nationwide covid lockdowns to nationwide riots and destruction: NPR’s new CEO Katherine Maher haunted by woke, anti-Trump tweets as veteran editor claims bias.

The next day, she lectured her 27,000 followers on “white silence.”

“White silence is complicity,” she scolded.

“If you are white, today is the day to start a conversation in your community.”

The NPR job is Maher’s first position in journalism or media.

She was previously the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, after holding communications roles for the likes of HSBC, UNICEF and the World Bank.

Maher earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies from New York University, according to her LinkedIn account, and grew up in Wilton, Conn. — a town that her mother, Ceci Maher, now represents as a Democratic state senator.

In 2022, we linked to a Substack by Josh Barro headlined, “Are There Any Adults at the Washington Post?”

You may have noticed a bizarre trend at organizations whose staffs are full of younger liberals: Internal disputes aren’t kept internal anymore but are aired in public, on social media or in the press, with rampantly subordinate staff attacking their colleagues or decrying managerial decisions in full public view — and those actions apparently tolerated from the top.

In the most extreme cases, you get meltdowns like the one at the Dianne Morales campaign for mayor of New York, where staff went on strike to demand, among other things, that the campaign divert part of its budget away from campaigning into “community grocery giveaways.” But it’s especially a problem in the media, where so many employees have large social media followings they can use to put their employers on blast — and where those employers have (unwisely) cultivated a freewheeling social media culture where it’s common for reporters to comment on all sorts of matters unrelated to their coverage.

Around the same time, Iowahawk tweeted this classic juxtaposition:

Which brings us back to question raised by Ashe Schow’s 2015 article. Berliner’s recent Free Press expose on NPR, the 2020 meltdowns at the New York Times and the ongoing craziness at the WaPo all lead to the same question: are there any adults staffing today’s DNC-MSM newsrooms? In 2015 Ben Rhodes of the Obama administration famously admitted the obvious: “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” But where are the adults who should be in charge of their journalistic Romper Rooms?

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: After Being Completely Exposed By Its Own Editor, NPR Responds in the Worst Possible Fashion.

The NPR article responding to Berliner goes on to miss the point yet again by bragging about how four out of 10 staffers are “people of color.”

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR’s leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

It’s like talking to a wall. They just can’t grasp how stocking the newsroom with DEI hires instead of hires based on actual viewpoint diversity could possibly lead to the outcome Berliner exposed in his piece.

Former NPR CEO John Lansing, who resigned a month prior to this writing, defended his tenure this way.

“The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?” Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner’s piece. “I’d welcome the argument against that.”

Sure, I’ll provide the argument against that. DEI does not “make sure it sounds like all of America” because left-wing ideologies are naturally self-selective. In practice, diversity quotas as produced by organizations like NPR create bubbles where only those who agree with DEI in the first place have their opinions heard and published. Thus, you get the insane bias and censorship demonstrated by NPR.

Naturally, no lessons will be learned and Berliner, who is himself a left-wing Democrat, will be cast into the abyss for speaking the truth. Meanwhile, NPR’s ratings will continue to flatline all while looking to the federal government for hand-outs. The cycle repeats.

As Don Surber adds, responding to Berliner’s article at Bari Weiss’ Free Press: DEI opens a liberal’s eyes.

The goal is not to diversify views because the MGIPOC and the LGBTQIA selected are all socialists. The goal is to convert the rest of the MGIPOC and LGBTQIA.

The biggest selling point to the MGIPOC and LGBTQIA is that white people caused all their problems, particularly the straight men. He pointed out that the union contract with NPR is a tool for DEI.

Berliner said, “In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.”

Well, well, well, what do we have here? A white boy is complaining about paying union dues to make it harder for a white boy to make it at NPR.

They say a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. We will see how true that is because DEI just mugged Uri Berliner.

Berliner claims that “It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.” Fair enough on that last point — “scolding” would require dropping the famously tepid NPR announcer voice, if only temporarily. But the rest of those boasts seem ridiculous to anyone who hadn’t already drunk the leftist Kool-Aid pre-Trump. At Power Line, Steve Hayward links to a hilarious 1993 article by Glenn Garvin. The references are of their time, but the point is made nonetheless: How Do I Hate NPR? Let Me Count the Ways.

UPDATE: ‘Amazing!’ Here’s Who Was Picked to Defend NPR’s ‘Journalism’ Integrity.

How can we ever forget NPR's courageous stance to ignore a major, relevant story on the eve of a presidential election.

True journalistic heroism. pic.twitter.com/bC5dSAK2wB

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) April 10, 2024

ED MORRISSEY: All (Approved) Things Considered: How We Lost Our Way at NPR.

“If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way,” NPR veteran Uri Berliner writes. “But it hasn’t.” Perhaps not, but it’s been that way for longer than Berliner wants to admit, too.

And it’s not just NPR that Berliner dresses down in this detailed and damning mea culpa from inside the house, so to speak, at The Free Press. What Berliner writes about his own media organization pretty much applies to all American mainstream media outlets, and just as much as at NPR, if not more.

Berliner puts the beginning of the corruption at the election of Donald Trump, when NPR went all-in on Adam Schiff’s McCarthyism — and failed to call it out when it collapsed:

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.

What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.

In 2010, NPR attacked the Tea Party, a group of fiscally responsible grownups whose protests against government waste often ended with their cleaning up their protest sites, not destroying them:  Taxpayer-Funded Immaturity: NPR Teaches Readers ‘To Speak Tea Bag.’

As Glenn noted in October of 2016, “I’m increasingly concerned that the neutralization of the Tea Party movement — an effort by both major parties — may have convinced a lot of people that civics-book style polite political participation is for chumps.”

As did the DNC-MSM’s coverage of Mitt Romney. In 2012, when Romney faced off against Obama, NPR attacked him with racial dog whistles that only Cokie Roberts could hear.

And then the network wondered why the Republican rank and file united behind Trump in 2016:

Oh you guys want to Portray Mitt Romney as an extreme and abusive sociopath? Okay, well here's the real thing then.

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) February 22, 2024

Flashback: How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class. “For a long time, the notion that America is an unrepentant white-supremacist state—one that confers power and privilege to white people and systematically denies them to people of color—was the province of far-left activists and academics. But over the past decade, it’s found its way into the mainstream, largely through liberal media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post, Vox, CNN, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. What changed? Most obviously: white liberals. Their enthusiasm for wokeness created a feedback loop with the media outlets to which they are paying subscribers. And the impact has been monumental: Once distinct publications and news channels are now staggeringly uniform.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Our Ruling Class Monoculture.

I’M NOT SURE I WANT TO KNOW WHAT GOES ON AT COMMENTARY’S COCKTAIL PARTIES: Free the Meat.

Okay, my cheap joke aside, Noah Rothman is spot-on:

In Western New Jersey, a population-dense state with an equally high concentration of whitetail deer, the problem is an increasingly urgent one. “Sustainable levels of deer should be 5 to 15 individuals per square mile,” one local arboretum fretted in 2021. “New Jersey averages 112 per square mile, with some areas as high as 270.” And yet, deer concentration levels, their acute and injurious effects on the environment, and the threat they pose to life and property exist alongside a bewildering phenomenon: They are positively delicious.

The “star” of the menu at Washington D.C.’s Café Berlin every autumn, an NPR profile of the restaurant’s fare read, is venison. Loin, ribs, chops, tartar—take your pick. “It’s food that takes your mind back to old European castles, where you can imagine eating like aristocracy,” the piece gushes. But you can’t buy deer meat at your local grocer or often even at upscale food purveyors. This NPR reporter found venison loin selling for a staggering $40 per pound. And about 85 percent of all deer meat sold in American restaurants is imported from New Zealand.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST:

● Shot:

BERLIN (AP) — Temperatures on Earth will shoot past a key danger point unless greenhouse gas emissions fall faster than countries have committed, the world’s top body of climate scientists said Monday, warning of the consequences of inaction but also noting hopeful signs of progress.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change revealed “a litany of broken climate promises” by governments and corporations, accusing them of stoking global warming by clinging to harmful fossil fuels.

“It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track toward an unlivable world,” he said.

—“UN warns Earth ‘firmly on track toward an unlivable world,’” AP, last Monday.

● Chaser:

A leaked draft report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints the starkest picture yet of the accelerating danger caused by human use of coal, oil, and gas. It warns of coming unlivable heat waves, widespread hunger and drought, rising sea levels and extinction. To understand the report’s warnings, William Brangham turns to atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayoe.

Judy Woodruff: A leaked draft report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints the starkest picture yet of the real and accelerating danger caused by humans’ use of coal, oil, and gas.

William Brangham has the latest.

William Brangham: That’s right, Judy.

This is a draft report, so it may still change. And it was obtained by the AFP, the Agence France-Presse., even so, the report says the threat from climate change is real, it’s here, and it’s getting worse.

It lays out a myriad of impacts, unlivable heat waves, widespread hunger and drought, rising sea levels that will force millions from their homes, and the extinction of many species.

For a U.N. agency, the draft language is blunt, saying — quote — “The worst is yet to come, affecting our children’s and grandchildren’s lives much more than our own.”

—“A leaked UN report warns ‘worst is yet to come’ on climate change. Here’s how you can help,” NPR, June 23, 2021.

● Hangover:

In the late 1980s the U.N. was already claiming the world had only a decade to solve global warming or face the consequences.

The San Jose Mercury News reported on June 30, 1989 that a “senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”

That prediction didn’t come true 15 years ago, and the U.N. is sounding the same alarm today.

—“25 Years Of Predicting The Global Warming ‘Tipping Point,’” Michael Bastach, the Daily Caller, May 4, 2015.

(Classical reference in headline.)