NOW HE’S LEFT OUT
Embattled NPR journo quits after suspension
NPR correspondent Uri Berliner, who was suspended without pay after calling out what he called the radio broadcaster’s rampant liberal bias, resigned Wednesday, and took a parting shot at the network’s CEO.
“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years,” Berliner wrote on his X social media account. “I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism.” Berliner added that he “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 was referring to Katherine Maher, who has come under fire for a series of “woke” social media posts in which she criticized Hillary Clinton for using the term “boy” and “girl” because it was “erasing language for nonbinary people.”
‘ [I] cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by ’ a new CEO. — Uri Berliner
‘Hard to be mad’
Maher also in 2020 appeared to justify looting, saying it was “hard to be mad” about the destruction during some of the Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. In 2018, she wrote a post denouncing then-President Donald Trump as a “racist” before deleting it.
On Tuesday, National Public Radio spokeswoman Isabel Lara said that Maher “was not working in journalism at the time and was exercising her First Amendment right.”
Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist, called out what he considered to be journalistic blind spots at NPR around major news events, including the origins of COVID-19, the war in Gaza and the Hunter Biden laptop revelations, in an essay published April 9 on Bari Weiss’ online news site the Free Press.
In Berliner’s essay, “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” he said that among editorial staff at the network’s Washington headquarters, he counted 87 registered Democrats and no Republicans. He wrote that he presented these findings to his colleagues at a May 2021 allhands editorial staff meeting.
“When I suggested we had a diversity problem . . . the response wasn’t hostile,” Berliner wrote. “It was worse. It was met with profound indifference.”
Maher, who took the role of CEO in late March, responded to Berliner’s essay by claiming that the veteran journalist was being “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning” to his colleagues.
She accused Berliner of “questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity . . . based on little more than the recognition of their identity.”
A report this week by NPR correspondent David Folkenflik said Berliner took umbrage at that, saying she had “denigrated him.” Berliner also said he had a private exchange with Maher in which he supported diversifying NPR’s workforce to look more like the US population at large, a point that she failed to address in the exchange, according to Berliner.
Elsewhere, Berliner called out his bosses for their refusal to seriously cover the laptop story.
“The laptop was newsworthy,” Berliner wrote. “But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched.”