On 17th April, Public-funded National Public Radio (NPR) in the USA has suspended veteran editor Uri Berliner for authoring an essay where he was critical of the news outlet’s liberal bias. Berliner was a senior editor on the NPR business desk and worked for the outlet for 25 years. He was suspended without pay after which he resigned from his post.
In a statement, Berliner said, “I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don’t support calls to defund NPR,” Berliner said in a statement. “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.”
Berliner’s critical essay on the news outlet
On 9th April, The Free Press published an essay authored by Uri Berliner titled ‘I’ve been at NPR for 25 years. Here’s how we lost America’s trust. In the essay, he discussed that NPR always had a liberal bent but remained open-minded and nerdy. However, they were not a knee-jerk activist or scolding-type outlets. However, in recent years things changed. “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,” he wrote.
He described how the the outlet lost its conservative, moderates and traditional liberals over time and by 2023, 67% of the listeners were very or somewhat liberals. According to Berliner, it all started when former President Donald Trump took charge at the office in 2016. People at NPR were not pleased with him becoming the President and provided a platform to those who conspired against him. For example, Adam Schiff, a top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, was interviewed 25 times about Trump and Russia. However, when no credible evidence of the so-called Russiagate was found in the Mueller report, NPR’s coverage on it was ‘sparse’. The media outlet quietly stopped fanning the Russiagate narrative.
Interestingly, NPR also decided to turn a blind eye to the explosive expose by the New York Post on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Uri Berliner wrote that NPR’s managing editor for news discarded the reports as “not really stories”. The managing editor for news explained the thinking of ignoring the story as “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.”
Despite evidence, NPR stuck to the narrative that Covid was natural
Furthermore, despite the evidence and research over the years, NRP stuck to its stand that COVID-19 was of natural origin and not a lab leak from China. Berliner wrote, “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.”
Berliner gave several examples where NPR could have taken a different, more conservative path but decided to stick to its liberal bias.
NPR and its controversies
It must be mentioned that the media outlet has been at the forefront of peddling Hinduphobia and anti-India propaganda in the United States.
In September 2019, the then NPR producer Furkan Khan went on a vitriolic tirade against the Hindu community. “If Indians give up Hinduism, they will also be solving most of their problems with all the piss drinking and dung worshipping.”
The dehumanising language used by Furkan Khan was similar to the last video message of terrorist Adil Ahmed Dar, who carried out the Pulwama attack of 2019.