The veteran National Public Radio journalist who blew the whistle on the broadcaster’s overt liberal bias said that he has heard from colleagues who secretly agree with him but can’t go public with their criticisms.
Uri Berliner, an award-winning business editor and reporter during his 25-year career at NPR, said his essay in Bari Weiss’ online news site The Free Press generated “a lot of support from colleagues, and many of them unexpected, who say they agree with me.”
“Some of them say this confidentially,” Berliner told NewsNation anchor Chris Cuomo on Tuesday.
Berliner said that he wrote the essay partly because “we’ve been too reluctant, too frightened to, too timid to deal with these things.”
“And I think that this is, this is the right opportunity to bring it all out in the open.”
In the essay — titled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust” — Berliner said that among editorial staff at NPR’s Washington, DC, headquarters, he counted 87 registered Democrats and no Republicans.
He wrote that he presented these findings to his colleagues at a May 2021 all-hands editorial staff meeting.
“When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile,” Berliner wrote.
“It was worse.”
Berliner wrote that his colleagues reacted with “profound indifference.”
“I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues,” he wrote. “But the messages were of the ‘oh wow, that’s weird’ variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.”
Berliner accused his bosses at NPR of allowing their pro-Democrat political leanings to seep into editorial judgments, including its decision to turn a blind eye to the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The Post was the first to report on the existence of the laptop, which contained emails that shed light on Hunter Biden’s business relationships overseas.
Former national security officials opposed to Trump signed a letter claiming that the laptop story was the product of Russian disinformation. Still, independent investigators and the FBI later confirmed that the emails and the contents of the computer were authentic — confirming The Post’s reporting.
According to Berliner, senior editors at NPR refused to cover the Hunter Biden story for fear that it would help Trump’s re-election chances just weeks before voters cast their ballots in the fall of 2020.
He wrote that NPR had skewed so far to the left that it played up Russia collusion allegations against Donald Trump while giving scant attention to the findings by special counsel Robert Mueller, who recommended no criminal charges against the Trump campaign.
When asked by Cuomo if he fears for his job given the fact that he’s a “white guy” who’s “not 18 [years old],” Berliner said: “I’m not worried.”
“I think people want open dialogue…[and] honest debates,” Berliner told Cuomo. “There’s a hunger for this. Most people are not locked into ideologies, and I think many people are just sick of it.”
Berliner said that while NPR reporters were always liberal, it was never as evident in their work as it has been in recent years.
“We were kind of nerdy and really liked to dig into things and understand the complexity of things, I think, that’s evolved over the years into a much narrower kind of niche thinking,” he told Cuomo.
Berline said that NPR has been plagued by “a group think that’s really clustered around very selective, progressive views that don’t allow enough air enough, enough spaciousness to consider all kinds of perspectives.”
Berliner’s bosses responded to the claims of bias, saying they “strongly disagree” with his take that NPR suffered from “the absence of viewpoint diversity.”
“We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” NPR’s chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote to employees.
Chapin wrote that “none of our work is above scrutiny or critique.”
“We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole,” she told employees in a memo.
A spokesperson for NPR said the agency would have no further comment.
When asked by Cuomo about management’s memo, Berliner said he was “not surprised” by the response, which came from “the same managers that I’ve been making a lot of these points about.”
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