The whistleblowing 25-year veteran editor of National Public Radio (NPR) has resigned from his position after exposing the taxpayer-funded network’s pervasive leftist bias.
As Slay News reported earlier, NPR suspended Uri Berliner last week after he blew the whistle about the outlet’s far-left culture.
Berliner exposed the left-wing bias at the taxpayer-funded outlet during a public rebuke of the organization last week.
Berliner’s five-day suspension without pay began on Friday, NPR media reporter David Folkenflik reported on Tuesday.
In a bombshell article in the Free Press, Berliner criticized NPR’s coverage of the Russiagate Hoax, the Covid lab leak theory, Hunter Biden’s scandalous laptop, severe anti-Trump bias among staff, and the embrace of the far-left theory of “systemic racism.”
He said writers refused to report on stories they felt would “help” President Donald Trump, among other things.
In Berliner’s scathing review of his employer’s ideological homogeneity, he revealed that there were “87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions” at the Washington, D.C., headquarters.
He also noted that the HQ employs “zero Republicans. None.”
In a Wednesday post on X, Berliner announced that he has now resigned from NPR following his suspension.
“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years,” Berliner wrote.
“I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism.”
Berliner asserted 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.”
My resignation letter to NPR CEO @krmaher pic.twitter.com/0hafVbcZAK
— Uri Berliner (@uberliner) April 17, 2024
Berliner was referring to Katherine Maher, the CEO at NPR.
Maher has come under fire for a series of “woke” social media posts.
In one post, she criticized Hillary Clinton for using the terms “boy” and “girl” because it was “erasing language for non-binary people.”
Maher also appeared to justify looting during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots.
She argued that it was “hard to be mad” about the destruction.
In 2018, she wrote a post denouncing then-President Donald Trump as a “racist” before deleting it.
On Tuesday, NPR spokeswoman Isabel Lara said in a statement that Maher “was not working in journalism at the time and was exercising her First Amendment right to express herself like any other American citizen.”
Nevertheless, while Maher was entitled to express her opinions, the posts also exposed her radical ideology, which is inappropriate for a taxpayer-funded network.
Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist, called out journalistic blind spots around major news events.
He highlighted the reporting regarding the origins of Covid, the Irsael-Hamas war, and the Hunter Biden laptop.
He blew the whistle in an essay published last Tuesday on Bari Weiss’s online news site the Free Press.
In his essay — titled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust” — Berliner 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. It was met with profound indifference.”
Maher, who took up the role as CEO of NPR 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.”
Berliner also called out his bosses at NPR for their refusal to seriously cover the laptop story, which was widely censored by social media.
The laptop contained emails showing that the son of Democrat President Joe Biden was engaged in influence-peddling overseas.
However, NPR and other corporate media outlets refused to cover the story in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.
Instead, they chose to aggressively and falsely smear the reports as “Russian disinformation.”
According to Berliner, senior editors at NPR feared that devoting airtime to the story would help Trump’s re-election chances just weeks before voters cast their ballots.
Berliner wrote that NPR had deteriorated into “an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience.”
“The laptop was newsworthy,” Berliner wrote.
“But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched.”
Berliner also accused NPR of giving disproportionately more attention to allegations that Trump was colluding with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential election.
Meanwhile, the outlet devoted far fewer resources to Robert Mueller’s findings that the “Russian collusion” narrative was a hoax.
After the contents of the laptop proved to be authentic, NPR “could have fessed up to our misjudgment,” Berliner wrote.
“But, like Russia collusion [allegations against Trump that were debunked], we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.”
Berliner also called out NPR for pushing other left-leaning causes, such as subjecting staffers to “unconscious bias training sessions” in the wake of the May 2020 death of career criminal George Floyd, who died of a fentanyl overdose in police custody.
Employees were ordered to “start talking about race,” he said.
NPR journalists were also told to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” that were based on racial and ethnic identity, including “Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color” (MGIPOC), “NPR Noir” (black employees at NPR) and “Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media.”
According to Berliner, if an NPR journalist’s language “differs from the diktats of those groups,” a “DEI Accountability Committee” would settle the dispute.
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