The headline caught my eye as I perused the offerings at Lucianne.com: “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.”
It was written by Uri Berliner, who has a Peabody Award, a Loeb Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and a Society of Professional Journalists New America Award. They gather dust long after whatever financial award was spent.
Berliner wrote, “It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.
“In recent years, however, that has 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 blamed Trump, writing, “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.”
What? You expected Berliner to take responsibility for his actions? He’s a liberal.
He went through the big three lies NPR told: Russiagate, Hunter’s laptop is fake, and all things considered covid.
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His mea culpas were enjoyable.
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 there was no admission of wrongdoing by NPR for its role in suppressing the laptop scandal or in promoting covid as coming from bats. Berliner’s confession comes up short because he never admits that Trump told the truth each time and NPR (and the rest of the press) lied, Lied, LIED!!!
We already know all this. Some of us saw right through Russiagate and the Wuhan flu from the get go — and pretty much all of us knew Hunter’s laptop was the real deal.
Nevertheless his confessions of these indiscretions (the Big P in NPR stands for Propaganda) are refreshing if overdue.
But the bigger delight came from his motive to finally own up to what was obvious to anyone with the ability to see through media bias. The very liberalism that he promoted on NPR for 25 years ago finally bit him where he sits. And readers can see for themselves how it hurts. Berliner wrote:
You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. Lansing came to NPR in 2019 from the federally funded agency that oversees Voice of America. Like others who have served in the top job at NPR, he was hired primarily to raise money and to ensure good working relations with hundreds of member stations that acquire NPR’s programming.
After working mostly behind the scenes, Lansing became a more visible and forceful figure after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. It was an anguished time in the newsroom, personally and professionally so for NPR staffers. Floyd’s murder, captured on video, changed both the conversation and the daily operations at NPR.
Enter the dragon we call DEI. Lansing — a white-haired old white guy — spouted the party line about systemic racism, white privilege and unconscious bias. He did this because that is where the money is now. Remember, Berliner said Lansing’s job was to raise money and keep the member stations happy, happy, happy.
Berliner linked a Poynter Institute story from April 2021.
It said, “Journalists across NPR are now tracking the demographics of their sources in real time thanks to a new piece of software that launched last month.
“Dubbed Dex (after Rolodex), the tool is attached to NPR’s content management system. For each story, reporters, producers, correspondents and editors submit information about their sources’ race and ethnicity, gender identity, geographic location and age range. They can also indicate if a source declined to provide that information. Dex tracks all of this information so that journalists can later pull up reports to monitor their source diversity.
“The hope is that NPR, National Public Radio, will produce stories and shows that more accurately reflect its audience — the public. In other words, NPR wants to look and sound like America.”
It’s censorship because we know that when NPR talks to a black man, he won’t be Tim Scott, and the token gay won’t be Ric Grenell.
But as I said, follow the money. Berliner did. DEI got the gold mine; he got the shaft. He wrote:
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).
The goal is not to diversify views because the MGIPOC and the LGBTQIA selected are all socialists. The goal is to convert the rest of the MGIPOC and LGBTQIA.
The biggest selling point to the MGIPOC and LGBTQIA is that white people caused all their problems, particularly the straight men. He pointed out that the union contract with NPR is a tool for DEI.
Berliner said, “In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.”
Well, well, well, what do we have here? A white boy is complaining about paying union dues to make it harder for a white boy to make it at NPR.
They say a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. We will see how true that is because DEI just mugged Uri Berliner.
Steven Hayward at Power Line wrote, “Given this confession from inside NPR, why shouldn’t Trump, if elected again, arrest and jail the entire staff of NPR on January 20? The legal grounds are simple: NPR accepts taxpayer funds, and have misappropriated public funds for partisan purposes, which has to be a violation of several statutes as Leticia James and Alvin Bragg can surely explain.”
That won’t happen. And he won’t get fired.
Ben Mullin at the New York Times tweeted, “Scoop: NPR editor in chief Edith Chapin responds to Uri Berliner’s essay in the Free Press: ‘I and my colleagues on the leadership team strongly disagree with Uri’s assessment of the quality of our journalism…’”
Gee, they strongly disagree. Who would have thought that?
Of course, the real story is he keeps his job. That should be punishment enough having to work for another 20 years with people who don’t like him
Berliner wrote, “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.”
It is an assembly line. Its job is to promote an ever-deepening deep state. Every news organization in America has a similar assembly line. NPR’s assembly line was already running when the network hired Berliner.
DEI wants to throw Berliner under the assembly line. He protests.
He wrote, “So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an 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. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. 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.”
The messages to him were on target. He was telling them water is wet. And their hostility was understandable because it has been that way all along. The only reason he finally complained is spelled D-E-I.
But his motivation does not make him wrong. It just shows how turtle slow lefties are.
This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.
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