Apr 13, 2024 08:25 AM
(This post was last modified: Apr 13, 2024 05:40 PM by C C.)
Cynic's Corner: Perhaps the reason he can say he's not worried about being fired is because he'll be asked to voluntarily resign or retire later in the year, after the attention safely dies down. Or maybe, at his age, he was already planning to do that, or transition to a different market, or become a touring lecturer. (Ergo, why he finally felt free to write such an essay.)
From NPR's own response to or news account of Berliner's criticism:
Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted, "I know Uri. He's not wrong."
[...] NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff ... that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment. ... She added, "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."
Which is superfluous theater if all the hired employees share the same political characteristics, in addition to being intimidated sycophants.
As usual, even in right-wing circles, "liberal" is a misguided term to use below for certain opponent-defining and self-identfication slots. (In the original sense, anyone who advocates basic rights and is on board with the 18th-century Enlightenment program qualifies. IOW, the later baggage added or altered for the pursuit of an intelligentsia's utopia dystopia isn't the minimal eligibility requirement, and leftangelical factions themselves actually frown on some "conservative" or traditionalist liberal attitudes: "CRT scholars argue [...] that the liberal notion of U.S. law as 'neutral' plays a significant role in maintaining ... unjust social order.")
NPR whistleblower Uri Berliner said colleagues secretly agree with him
https://nypost.com/2024/04/10/media/npr-...-with-him/
EXCERPTS: 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.”
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.”
[...] 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.”
[...] Berliner said that while NPR reporters were always liberal, it was never as evident in their work as it has been in recent years.
[...] Berliner 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.”
[...] 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.” (MORE - missing details)
- - - - - - - - - - -
NPR editor Uri Berliner: Here’s how we lost America's trust
https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-n...icas-trust
INTRO (Uri Berliner: You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.
I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.
So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.
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.
If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.
But it hasn’t.
For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.
That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model... (MORE - details)