Though most Americans have long known of the progressive bias of National Public Radio (NPR), the recent bombshell critique was still illuminating.
Twenty-five-year NPR journalist and now senior business editor Uri Berliner blasted NPR’s outrageous bias in his lengthy essay, “I’ve worked at NPR for 25 years. Here’s How we Lost America’s Trust."
The essay exposed NPR bias, but importantly brought responses by NPR and other mainstream media exposing a dangerous lack of self-awareness. Despite Berliner’s evidence of NPR bias and personal experience, the left responded with nothing but denials and attacks on Berliner.
The National Public Radio headquarters stands April 15, 2013, on North Capitol Street in Washington.
Columnist and founder of the Washington Times, Tim Murtaugh, brilliantly summarized Berliner’s main points “Mr. Uri Berliner described NPR as a place where racial and other types of diversity matter a great deal, but hearing from differing viewpoints does not. After seeing how the newsroom handled itself after Donald Trump’s political rise, he examined the voter registration of his fellow editors in NPR’s Washington headquarters: ... Eighty-seven registered Democrats and no Republicans. None. He described how NPR became obsessed with interviewing Trump opponents, like California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, who appeared on their airwaves at least 25 times to lie about the 2016 Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia ... Mr. Berliner lamented the infamous NPR response to the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was, ‘We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.’ ... Then there was COVID-19 coverage, which included the debate over where the virus had originated ... NPR sided with natural origin and dismissed the lab leak theory as a ‘racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory’ that had been ‘debunked by scientists’”
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Berliner’s essay took NPR’s leadership to task for showing apathy in the face of media malpractice when the false reporting helped further the views of the left. According to Berliner, “What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection."
Berliner claimed that after the shock of the 2016 Trump election, NPR “veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.” That comes with the admission Berliner voted against Trump both times and was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother and “fit the NPR mold.”
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He wrote that “Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace” at NPR and that the “race, gender, and ethnicity” of interview subjects be tracked, yet NPR had no concern for the diversity of conservative viewpoints.
NPR Editor in Chief Edith Chapin proved Berliner’s point with her bizarre response to the essay. Failing to explain the lack of any Republican at NPR, Chapin claimed, “We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories. ... It’s why we track sources — so we can expand the diversity of perspectives in our reporting."
Despite a recent Harris Poll showing only 30% of NPR listeners find the source trustworthy, Chapin gaslighted with “Let’s not forget that the reason we remain one of the most trusted news organizations in the country is that we respect people’s ability to form their own judgments.”
NPR’s response was disappointing, but attacks from other left-leaning mainstream media outlets against Berliner were beyond despicable. CNN quickly published the following opinion twisting the fault for media liberal bias: “by 2023, Trump and the MAGA Media machine had spent years waging a brutal war on truth and the media organizations that espouse it. That war, unquestionably, is responsible for many Republicans losing trust in newsrooms. ...(Berliner’s) piece has been nothing short of a massive gift to the right, which has made vilifying the news media its top priority in recent years. If Berliner had hoped that his essay would generate a conversation that would increase trust from conservatives, he was sorely mistaken."
As a number of Democratic political commentators have made clear in recent weeks, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign will be focusing not on his abysmal record, but the alleged existential “Threat to Democracy” of his opponent Donald Trump.
The idea of blaming Trump for NPR media bias is laughable considering how far back from Trump’s election the bias can be tracked. Polls show that for almost two decades, under half of America has had even a fair amount of trust in the mainstream media.
In 2016, before Trump took office, the level of trust was at the historic low of only 32%, while the next year after Trump took office it was at 41% and then 45% in 2017. Trump didn’t create media distrust but he did capitalize on it.
At NPR in 2010, liberal media personality Juan Williams was fired for what most Americans considered a benign but un-woke opinion with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News about the post 9-11 world: “Look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.” Juan also asserted that Muslims should not be scapegoated.
On the ides of March, Judge Scott McAfee published his decision on the motion to disqualify Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis.
It’s time for the mainstream media to develop at least a modicum of self-awareness of their obvious liberal bias before all trust is irretrievably broken beyond repair.
Bill Connor, a retired Army Infantry colonel, author and Orangeburg attorney, has deployed multiple times to the Middle East. Connor was the senior U.S. military adviser to Afghan forces in Helmand Province, where he received the Bronze Star. A Citadel graduate with a JD from USC, he is also a Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Army War College, earning his of strategic studies. He is the author of the book “Articles from War.”