LEFT EXPOSED
NPR editor resigns after suspension
A senior editor at NPR has resigned after the news organization suspended him for penning an essay at an outside media outlet criticizing what he described as his employer’s liberal bias.
Uri Berliner, a senior editor on NPR’s business desk, resigned Wednesday, a day after a five-day suspension handed down by his bosses last Friday became public.
“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years,” Bernilner said in his resignation letter to CEO Katherine Maher, which he also posted to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
“I do not 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 cite in my Free Press essay.”
NPR’s media correspondent, David Folkenflik, wrote in a post Tuesday that Berliner was told he violated the company’s policy that it must approve work done for outside news organizations.
Maher, a former tech executive appointed in January as NPR’s chief executive, has been criticized by conservative activists for social media messages that disparaged former President Donald Trump. The messages predated her hiring at NPR.
NPR’s public relations chief said the organization does not comment on individual personnel matters.
In his essay, written for the online Free Press site, Berliner said NPR is dominated by liberals and no longer has an open-minded spirit. He traced the change to coverage of Trump’s presidency.
“There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed,” he wrote. “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 said he’d brought up his concerns internally and no changes had been made, making him “a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love.”
His commentary became an instant hit with outside conservative activists who have made similar criticisms of NPR.
In the essay’s wake, NPR top editorial executive, Edith Chapin, said leadership strongly disagreed with Berliner’s assessment of the outlet’s journalism and the way it went about its work.
It’s not clear what Berliner was referring to when he talked about disparagement by Maher.
In a lengthy memo to staff members last week, she wrote: “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. Questioning whether our people are serving their mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful and demeaning.”
One of his NPR colleagues, “Morning Edition” co-host Steve Inskeep, wrote on Substack Tuesday that Berliner’s essay in The Free Press was filled with errors and assumptions.
“If Uri’s ‘larger point’ is that journalists should seek wider perspectives, and not just write stories that confirm their prior opinions, his article is useful as an example of what to avoid,” Inskeep wrote.