Wow. Someone on The Other Side is Finally Admitting It
NPR Editor Uri Berliner Tells Us What We Already Knew, Only This Time It's From An Insider's Perspective. I'm Proud of Him.
I’ve talked about the leftward slant of the media around these parts for as long as this Stack has existed(admittedly not that long) so it shouldn’t come to the surprise of anyone when I say I read a post about National Public Radio (NPR) and its liberal bias I started off unphased. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: All news sources are biased and if you’re reading something that sounds non-biased it’s because you agree with it. This goes for all humans, to include myself, anyone who agrees with me on anything and anyone who disagrees with me on anything. That’s just the way it is. And yes, this is an article with a rightward slant on it. Why? Because that’s who I am.
But then I took a quicker look at the article I was reading. It was written by Uri Berliner. Uri, it turns out, is a senior editor on the business desk at NPR. He’s been there twenty-five years. And, get this. He’s not calling me a conspiracy theorist for stating that NPR is slanted hard to the left. As a matter of fact, he’s on my side this time, and he came armed with facts.
For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.
That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.
Okay, let me stop right here for a second. Uri, my friend you are one of the ballsiest men on the planet. Dude, you work in a liberal bastion, one of the places where the heart of cancel culture beats, and you’re saying this public. I really, really, REALLY hope you don’t lose your job for this.
That much having been said, I wonder how many other liberals understand his point here. Berliner gets something that a lot of lefties don’t: Not everyone agrees with them. And it’s not just some fringe group of horrible racists chewin’ baccy that disagrees. There is a real diversity of opinion in the country and Berliner has taken a good, long look at how that manifests itself. And he admits that misuse of facts takes place on his side, too:
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.
Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.
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.
And here again, Berliner gets it. NPR screwed the pooch. Trust the wrong people, get the wrong results. It happens. Human beings make mistakes and that goes for NPR here. If they wanted to go to Adam Schiff for their information they had the right to do so. NPR is a news outlet and I have no right to tell them who they can and cannot trust. I get that, but there’s something they’re forgetting here.
There is an adage that has been drilled into my head by many people over my entire life, both by people with PhDs in the classrooms where I got my degree and in everyday life by people who may or may not have even graduated from high school: “When evaluating information, always consider the source.”
They knew that Schiffman and the Hillary campaign were both trying to make Trump look bad. That’s fine. Both sides do it. But, at the end of the day, find the agenda, analyze it and figure out how that influences what someone is saying. Now, the fact that they didn’t like Trump didn’t mean that they were wrong. But it does make sense to find out what’s going on.
But okay, confirmation bias. They “knew” that Trump was evil and assumed the Russiagate thing was true because it matched what they already thought. Stop laughing. We all do it. Yup, me too although I try not to. It’s part of what makes people human. But then, when they won’t admit that they screwed up…
They’re like the insurance company that takes all your money and won’t fix your car when you get in a wreck. Once that trust is broken you’re not going back. And that is something we’re dealing with on a national level right now. But NPR sold its audience out. They put blatant falsehoods on the air and then failed to correct the error. That’s not on their audience. That’s on them. Berliner continues:
Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.
In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. 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.”
But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.
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.
When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.
Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin—supporting the hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.
The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.
But that wasn’t the case.
When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded.
Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential scientific paper known as “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Its authors wrote they didn’t believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die. And understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his colleagues, “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.”
Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.
Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that “the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.”
When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.
And again, NPR has the right to put out all the political content they want. The failure to label it as such is what bothers me. (And yes, if you look at my blog description it clearly states that this Stack is about politics and history. I’ve stated publicly that I’m a rightist. If you don’t believe me at this point, that’s your bad and not mine.)
For the record, I bought the Bush/Iraq thing. There’s a good chance I was wrong.
Okay, now it’s time for the elephant in the room.
Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. 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.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.
These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.
They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).
All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR’s internal website suggested, the groups were simply a “great way to meet like-minded colleagues” and “help new employees feel included,” it would have been one thing.
But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR’s union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.
Okay, listen folks, I get the fact that the single most political thing in this country right now is race. DEI, whether you like it or not, is a hot button topic. Whether “systemic racism” exists in a country where DEI exists, and who gets discriminated against if it does, are just as loaded. Reparations for slavery are hotly debated…
I could go on for days. The fact remains that there is a huge part of the American population that is sick about hearing about race every time they turn on the radio or television. I’m one of them. The fact remains that there are very many people in this country who see efforts those Berliner is talking about here as being, in and of themselves, racist. By acknowledging what happened, he’s pointing out something obvious.
People who don’t want race shoved down their throats aren’t going to listen to a station that’s constantly harping about it. The same goes for the LGBT movement. We don’t want to hear it. Talk all the smack you want to about that fact, it’s still a fact. They’re losing audience by forcing this crap on people who don’t want it.
And here is the most telling part of his entire article:
And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.
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.
The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.
More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the “intersectional” lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.
If there is a single liberal who reads my stack, and you’re welcome here even if I find myself surprised by your existence, then what you need to know is this: We all knew how biased all of this was. We did. We’ve been pointing it for years, since well before we had to change the phrase “liberal media” to “Mainstream Media” because you wouldn’t admit that the media was biased. All of the specific instances he names in the story came after that, but the movement didn’t.
I guess the most amazing thing about Berliner’s whole story is that he thinks that any of this is a revelation. Maybe for the liberals out there it is. But for those of us on the right, this is a cause of relief and hope. Relief because we’ve been trying to get the other side to cop to this for so long. Hope because maybe, just maybe, when it’s someone from NPR coming clean, liberals will finally see what they’re doing. I’m not optimistic, but we can hope, right?