Last week, Uri Berliner reported inconvenient facts. Now he no longer works at NPR.
Such is the fate of truth-tellers employed by propaganda outfits.
After a quarter-century as a reporter and editor with the government-funded radio operation, Berliner resigned on Wednesday.
“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years,” he emailed NPR honcho Katherine Maher. “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 cite in my Free Press essay.”
Maher suspended Berliner without pay last Thursday for not clearing his article and allegedly sharing proprietary information regarding listener demographics (i.e., very white, very, very left-wing).
The political leanings of NPR’s audience, and the radio network’s leftward shift over time, do not surprise any listener who does not subscribe to the left-of-the-dial’s prevailing ideological ethos.
Berliner stressed how the slant led NPR to fixate on ideologically seductive narratives that lacked the one common denominator of all good news stories: truth.
He pointed to NPR’s obsession with the theory that Donald Trump conspired with the Kremlin to win the presidency — and its reliance on as partisan a character as Adam Schiff for more than two dozen interviews to propel that notion — as one example of a dubious story pursued because it flattered the political outlook of virtually everyone employed in a journalistic capacity by NPR.
Undoubtedly, this particular pitfall of bias arises. The prosaic manifestation of NPR’s bias occurs in a story selection utterly alien to a woman delivering the mail, a man atop a tractor, and the vast majority of the African American and Hispanic demographic that NPR so desperately covets.
In the past month or so, Fresh Air aired such progressive lectures disguised as news as “How Cars Became a Gendered Technology,” “Climate-Driven Migration in the U.S.,” and “Coming Out Trans at Age 67.” Their harangues, like all harangues, drive all but the true believers away.
Science Friday, which seems a less honest name than “Climate Change Update,” broadcast such recent segments as “Abortion-Restrictive States Leave Ob-Gyns with Tough Choices,” “How Election Science Can Support Democracy,” and “A New Book Puts ‘Math in Drag.’”
On a science show, they find a way to talk about transgenderism and Jan. 6, 2021. Clear-eared listeners often come away wondering where the network’s science coverage begins and its political coverage ends.
Hidden Brain, which often delves into topics of a scientific nature, undermines NPR’s notion of the necessity to saturate a program with politics to make it interesting. Indeed, that Saturday program always proves more captivating than the Friday one precisely because it exudes a fascination with scientific matters rather than uses them as a Trojan Horse to smuggle left-wing newsporn onto the airwaves.
Even Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me bizarrely pushes a political agenda, unlike Jeopardy!, Press Your Luck, or any other game show you have ever come across. A sizable number of people would tune in to hear Bill Kurtis read the phone book, so the limericks act as a bonus. But the liberal B-listers, host Peter Sagal’s Tourette’s-like quips announcing his solidarity with progressive ideology, and trivia often betraying a political bent uniformly in one direction unsettles anyone who ever encountered mass media behind the Iron Curtain.
More Charles Nelson Reilly, less Mo Rocca, please; more Bret Somers, less Paula Poundstone, please.
A singular affectation rather than diverse accents accent NPR’s insularity. One hears testosterone-depleted voices announce “really leaning into” this streaming show or finding that comedian quite “problematic.” Before you ever heard “cisgender,” “white privilege,” or “diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging” (yes, the “belonging” is increasingly obligatory), someone listening to NPR heard them first. They communicate not to the mass of potential listeners. They communicate instead: we belong to a club.
That club wants your tax dollars and pledge-drive commitment. The club does not want your opinions — as guests, reporters, editors, or callers. Uri Berliner’s revelation that NPR’s D.C. newsroom contained 87 registered Democrats but not a single Republican screams as much.
That bit of truth-telling exposing NPR’s rigid, Izvestia-like conformity stands as his offense for the so-nicknamed Chairman Maher. To those outside NPR’s political cult, Berliner errs in his delusion that he labored for “a great American institution” rather than Agitprop Radio, whose very existence acts as a non sequitur in a free country.
READ MORE:
It’s Bigger Than NPR’s Katherine Maher
