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Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Journalist Uri Berliner resigns from NPR as bias claims against outlet intensify

“But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched.”

• April 17, 2024

Uri Berliner, a veteran news editor who covers the unseen economy desk at NPR, has resigned days after accusing the masthead of bias in its news coverage.

“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years,” Mr Berliner wrote on his X account on Wednesday.

The journalist insisted 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.”

The explosive report —“I’ve Been at NPR for 25 years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust” — detailed instances of alleged bias in the news organisation and asserted there were 87 registered Democrats in the NPR newsroom with zero Republican representation, which he said reflected in the outlet’s nonchalance to extensively report incriminating findings found on the laptop of U.S. President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter in the run-up to the 2020 elections.

“When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile,” Mr Berliner wrote in the lengthy essay.  “It was worse. It was met with profound indifference.”

“The laptop was newsworthy,” the veteran editor wrote. “But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched.”

According to Mr Berliner, NPR paid more attention and expended resources to cover stories that vilified former U.S. President Donald Trump, including allegations that he formed an unholy alliance with the Russian government to win the 2016 polls.

He said that even when such allegations were found to be false, NPR did not maintain the initial energy used in disseminating the falsehood to debunk them, causing him to doubt the “transparency” of the outlet.

He said even when such allegations were found to be false, NPR did not use the same efforts and resources to debunk the falsehood, as were initially used in disseminating them.

“But, like Russia collusion [allegations against Trump that were debunked], we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency,” the New York Post cited Mr Berliner as writing in his essay.

The essay, published in Free Press last Tuesday, earned Mr Berliner knocks from NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who said Mr Berliner was “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning” to the entire NPR editorial staff.

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