"on April 9, NPR journalist Uri Berliner published on The Free Press — a repository of anti-trans coverage that champions detransitioners, founded by former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss — his complaint that his employer has been overridden by liberal bias. The Free Press states it’s “#1 on Substack,” the same platform on which Erin Reed publishes.
In short, Berliner believes a woke culture at NPR in recent years has transformed the outlet to its detriment."
Berliner had also spoken on an episode of Bari Weiss's Honestly podcast.
One diagnosis by Jamelle Bouie (Bluesky 1): "aging white journalist intensely resentful of younger colleagues of color who are getting acclaim and recognition he desires — many such cases" (Bluesky 2): "the anti-woke hysteria in journalism is about jobs and status, not standards"
Another by IDtheMike (Bluesky): "I finally read the Uri Berliner essay, and it's just an old guy looking for reasons to vote for RFK Jr who happens to have worked at NPR for 25 years. In short, he's losing his marbles and diagnosing his paranoia as a conspiracy by NPR. It's sad."
The New York Times reported credulously on Berliner's appearance: "NPR in Turmoil After It Is Accused of Liberal Bias."
On April 12, NPR suspended Berliner without pay for five days (which it revealed on April 16) on the basis that he violated NPR's policy by not seeking approval to appear in another news outlet. He was warned that another violation would result in his termination. Berliner resigned from NPR the morning of April 17.
Berliner's essay had "angered many of his colleagues, led NPR leaders to announce monthly internal reviews of the network's coverage, and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR," as David Folkenflik wrote for NPR.
Folkenflik continued:
"Conservative activist Christopher Rufo is among those now targeting NPR's new chief executive, Katherine Maher, for messages she posted to social media years before joining the network. Among others, those posts include a 2020 tweet that called Trump racist and another that appeared to minimize rioting during social justice protests that year. Maher took the job at NPR last month — her first at a news organization."
He added: "Several NPR journalists told me they are no longer willing to work with Berliner as they no longer have confidence that he will keep private their internal musings about stories as they work through coverage."
As Parker Molloy describes it:
"Berliner, a senior business editor and reporter, argues that NPR lost conservative listeners in recent years, making vague accusations about biased coverage and an unsupported claim that the organization “tell[s] people how to think” — something that would have benefitted from even a single example.
As one Democratic House staffer noted on X (fka Twitter), few of Berliner’s claims held up to scrutiny. Whether claims about NPR supposedly ignoring “Russiagate” stories that made Democrats look bad (they didn't), claims about NPR not covering Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 (they did), or claims about NPR brushing off the “lab leak” theory of the COVID-19 origin (they didn’t) — these simply didn’t hold up to light scrutiny."
For more info, Molloy recommends:
“The Real Story Behind NPR’s Current Problems” (Slate, Alicia Montgomery, 4/16/24) “Uri Berliner dragged NPR. What now?” (The Night Light, Joshua Johnson, 4/10/24) “How my NPR colleague failed at ‘viewpoint diversity’” (Differ We Must, Steve Inskeep, 4/16/24)Jon Becker says (Bluesky): "I have now read responses to Uri Berliner by 3 current and former NPR employees (Joshua Johnson, Steve Inskeep, and Alicia Montgomery). They are all very strong critiques and fact checks. But, nobody who reads The FP will see them. I wish I knew how to solve that problem."
Judd Legum gives this history:
"In 2020, Bari Weiss quit her job as an editor and writer at the New York Times editorial page in a huff. In her public resignation letter, Weiss argued that she was forced out because the paper had become 'illiberal' and her more conservative beliefs made her 'the subject of constant bullying by colleagues.'
In January 2021, Weiss launched a newsletter, Common Sense, with her partner, Nellie Bowles. Weiss billed Common Sense as the antidote to 'cancel culture'...
In 2022, Common Sense rebranded itself as The Free Press to reflect its growing ambitions. It now reportedly employs about 30 people and generates millions in revenue annually.
* * *
Ironically, as Weiss cashes in on her critique of "cancel culture," The Free Press has become a central part of a sophisticated right-wing ecosystem that seeks to tear down anything and anyone who diverges too far from their ideology."
Judd Legum, "The real cancel culture," Popular Information, May 13, 2024
That, Legum says, is what the Berliner performance was about. He says Berliner's formulaic narrative — I'm a lifelong open-minded liberal, but my employer has leaned too far to the left and is no longer open-minded — is typical for the free press.
I can provide another example:
"[Nellie] Bowles, meanwhile, has spent an entire career writing to an audience many times larger than mine— first at the San Francisco Chronicle, then the New York Times and more recently at The Free Press. She is, like all of us, concerned about other people’s opinions, but I suspect mostly if those people have fancier bylines and larger social media followings than myself. It’s that specific group’s knee jerk progressivism and intolerance to “heterodox” thinkers that serves as Morning After’s origin story. You see, Bowles once toed the elite liberal media party line (she cites such bonafides as supporting universal healthcare, attending a Verso Books/The Nation party and drinking an I’m-with-her-icane the evening of the 2016 election), but that was before the book’s titular “revolution.” After the summer of 2020, Bowles began reporting on woke excesses like the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle and the speaking order at Democratic Socialists of America conferences. She fell in love with a self-proclaimed apostate, the Times writer turned Free Press founder Bari Weiss. Her old friends grew more annoyed with her new opinions, so she, in turn, grew less generous towards theirs.
* * *
You want to know what really got me? Remember that cancellation essay? The one that earnestly considered the human cost to a politics of in-group signaling and performative cruelty? That appears at the end of the book, after Bowles has spent pages upon pages being, well, performatively cruel to people with whom she disagrees politically. She doesn’t technically engage in a cancellation, if only because the only people she criticizes by name have long been anti-woke punching bags (former San Francisco prosecutor Chesa Boudin, Black Lives Matter founder-turned-millionaire Patrisse Khan-Cullors, “Characteristics of White Supremacy” author Tema Okun), but there’s a clear pattern as to which characters, over the course of the book, are offered a sympathetic read and which ones merely appear as barely-two-dimensional, origami paper villains."
— "Trying to be curious about an incurious book: An essay (and a letter) written the morning after I read Nellie Bowles' "Morning After The Revolution", Garrett Bucks, The White Pages, May 15, 2024
By the way:
It would be so much braver and more honest if the "politically tribeless tribe" would just admit they want Trump to win — and that they don't really have any major problems with him or anything he's done or promises to do.
— anthonylfisher (@anthonylfisher.bsky.social) September 19, 2024 at 4:40 PM
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So, for example:
"Another central component of Berliner's critique is this statistic: "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None." There are a few problems with this. First, Berliner doesn't disclose that there are 662 employees at NPR producing content. It's unclear how or why he selected a subset of just 87 people. Second, in DC, voters have the option of registering as independents. That's how Berliner and other NPR employees who live in DC, like host Steve Inskeep, have registered. Finally, many NPR employees live in places like Virginia, which does not have voter registration by party."
Berliner publicly called out his boss, but "NPR didn't follow the script," Legum notes. Instead, they suspended him. At that point, Chris Rufo stepped in, because (as Legum puts it) "for Rufo, expressing liberal views at any point in your life is a fireable offense." Thus,
"Rufo escalated his attacks on [Berliner's boss, NPR president Katherine] Maher. In an April 24 article published in City Journal, Rufo suggested that Maher was a clandestine CIA operative. Rufo's 'evidence' for this claim is Maher's work for the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a non-profit that observes elections and provides other support for democratic processes and institutions worldwide, and other NGOs. Rufo described Maher as 'a regime-change agent, both foreign and domestic.'"
Again, Legum emphasizes,
"There is a relentless right-wing operation seeking to inflict pain on their ideological adversaries. Some, like Rufo, are the political equivalent of street brawlers, willing to say or do anything to achieve their objective. Others, like Weiss and The Free Press, give the movement a more journalistic and professional sheen. But no one involved is a supporter of free expression or an opponent of cancel culture. Rather, they are the cultural force aggressively pursuing cancellation."
More on 'cancel culture'
Claire Dederer:
The inevitability of monstrousness is a central occupation of the internet, which hums along, fueled by biography —the internet is made of disclosure about ourselves and about other people’s selves. The very phrase “cancel culture” presupposes the privileging of biography—a whole idea of culture built on the fact that we know everything about everyone.
We live in a biographical moment, and if you look hard enough at anyone, you can probably find at least a little stain. Everyone who has a biography—that is, everyone alive—is either canceled or about to be canceled.
Claire Dederer. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.
The very term “cancel culture” is hopelessly non-useful, with its suggestion that the loss of status for the accused is somehow on a par with the suffering endured by the victim. Stephen Fry’s distance from the past—his assumed enlightenment—allows him to say something to a historical figure [Richard Wagner] that he might not say to someone alive.
* * *
What (miserably) gets called cancel culture is the contemporaneous act of telling someone that the thing they’re doing or saying is, to use Fry’s word, “nasty.” Cancel culture is, from this perspective, the most sensible thing in the world—rather than fantasizing about confronting someone in the past, practitioners of cancellation are confronting someone in the present. And such confrontations should be welcome, right?
* * *
Some people endure shaming, deserved or undeserved, so that some other people can say what happened to them. Instead of accepting that bargain, we make up an insulting and increasingly dumb name—cancel culture…
* * *
The liberal fantasy of effortless enlightenment simply assumes we’re getting better all the time. But how on earth can we improve unless we listen to people saying what’s wrong?
Margaret Sullivan, The power of a single word about media malfeasance (American Crisis, September 7, 2024):
"This weekend, I’m in Austin at the annual Texas Tribune event called TribFest. I’ll be interviewing on stage the CEO and president of National Public Radio, Katherine Maher. A former CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, she’s only been at NPR since March — but it’s been eventful. The following month, as you might recall, a longtime NPR staffer, Uri Berliner, published a blistering critique; he wrote that NPR’s liberal bias and lack of “viewpoint diversity” has damaged public trust. Maher soon became part of the controversy.
NPR’s excellent media correspondent David Folkenflik did a fair-minded job of covering the story at his own workplace — never a fun assignment. Berliner later resigned and went to work at The Free Press, the internet outfit co-founded by Bari Weiss. If my conversation with Katherine Maher is available as a recording, I’ll post it here. NPR has its faults but it does a lot right, including being one of the few remaining news organizations to employ a public editor or ombudsman."
Further reading
On the theme of consequences, may I please direct you to my essay: "When I, A Trans Person, Spoke to a Bioethicist About Consequences: We did not agree, and I was wrong," Jan 7, 2024"
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