Uri Berliner is a senior business editor at National Public Radio. As a current employee, Berliner has just gone public with something rotten in the organization — and it has critics calling for the radio station to be defunded.
At the risk of stating the obvious, Berliner named a lack of viewpoint diversity as a contributing factor to NPR’s vanishing ratings, slumping revenue, and lost prestige among audiences.
Then, Berliner attributed that problem — in part — to a truly odd directive from NPR’s leadership. Specifcally, Berliner being ordered to ask every sources their race or gender, for entry into NPR’s database.
After this directive, what conservative would have wanted to offer this information to NPR reporters, work in NPR’s environment, or listen to NPR at all?
“To truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step inside the organization,” Berliner wrote.
“Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.”
Berliner even described interest groups’ role in negotiating the union’s contract and deciding on the tone of news coverage.
“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),” Berliner wrote.
“The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to ‘keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups’ and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee. 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.”
Given this environment, Berliner remains unsurprised at the staff’s all-Democrat makeup… and its poorly-aged coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans,” Berliner wrote.
“We didn’t really understand a lot of what was going on in America,” Berliner said on a podcast, citing the NPR staffers’ surprise at the results of the 2016 election.
Berliner has blamed many of these ills on former CEO John Lansing, the top dog from 2019 until recently. He remains optimistic about the new CEO taking office this month.
🚨BREAKING: Rep. Matt Gaetz is calling for defunding the NPR.
Do you approve? pic.twitter.com/Ud99vrePdR
— Wake Up America (@_wake_up_USA) April 9, 2024
The Horn editorial team