There’s been a disturbance in the farce, over at

• Nice
• Polite
• Republicans

NPR editor Uri Berliner decided to crash the Pity Party that is Bari Weiss’s The Free Press over what he perceived as the bolsheviks at the gate of NPR.

So NPR suspended him for 5 days for not asking for permission to contribute to another platform, and before I even started this piece, Berliner resigned:

Disparaged.

Ok, so far so good, or as Keith Olberman said,

Let’s now turn to Berliner’s essay in Bari Weiss’ burn book that started his disparaged dive into unemployment.

I always enjoy it when people credential themselves in the style of letters to the editor for Penthouse Forum (before the shamed author adds the performa, I never thought I’d be writing this…):

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.

[…] 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.

Oh, really?

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.

Now, Berliner as an editor and journalist doesn’t ask the question most journalists would ask: where did the audience go? And any political blogger will tell you that Wingnuttia made a right turn into AM Hate Radio and the specialized spaces where their brethren hang out: the chat rooms and comment sections of hard right websites (looking at you, Stormfront).

NPR did not lose conservatives because the news coverage was too liberal; they lost conservatives because the news coverage was not conservative enough.

Conservatives got a shot of adrenaline directly into their 3-sizes too-small hearts at InfoWars and the like, and an addict was born.

Enter the inviolable law of the modern age: ETTD (Everything Trump Touches Dies), including it seems our subject’s ability discern dispassionate truth from politics:

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.

Show us your work, Berliner.

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.

I see.

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

And oddly, Berliner never gets around to proving that anything Schiff said was, you know, a lie.

Berliner moves onto his second point of failure for NPR. Can you guess what it is?

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

…which leaves out the eff’ery from our obviously corrupt then-Attorney General Bill Barr, who summarized the report by omitting entire chapters including the recommendation to prosecute TFG.

Next Berliner indicts NPR for NOT covering Hunter Biden’s Laptop in the manner of which he would approve.

The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched.

His last submittal of facts into evidence about the bias of NPR was that they did not do their own research about the origins of COVID-19:

When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded.

Instead, much to Berliner’s dismay, NPR decided to go with experts like Dr. Fauci and Francis Collins the head of the National Institute of Health over, you know, some guy writing from his mother’s basement after he did his own research.

But all of this conspiracy theorizing is just the warm-up for the second act of Berliner’s screed, which is predictably White Male Grievance following the murder of George Floyd :

Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death, it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s—in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way.

It’s incredible to me that there is any journalist who thinks that there is a question about America’s racism after seeing the video of Floyd’s murder.

Via the sin of omission, the careful reader will see why Berliner objects:

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.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.

In short (in a long piece, sorry) Berliner’s grievance comes down to being a white guy of a certain age having to come to terms that the world has moved on from his brand of benevolent patriarchy.

Interesting he resigned after a woman become the CEO, innit?

Published with permission of Mock Paper Scissors