A debate about media bias has broken out at National Public Radio after a longtime employee published a scathing letter accusing the broadcaster of a “distilled worldview of a very small segment of the US population” and “telling people how to think”, prompting an impassioned defense of the station from its editor-in-chief.
In the letter published on Free Press, NPR’s senior business editor Uri Berliner claimed Americans no longer trust NPR – which is partly publicly funded – because of its lack of “viewpoint diversity” and its embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Berliner wrote that “an open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America”. He acknowledged that NPR’s audience had always tilted left, but was now no longer able to make any claim to ideological neutrality.
In the piece on Free Press, a site run by Bari Weiss, a former opinion editor at the New York Times, Berliner noted that in 2011 the public broadcaster’s audience identified as 26% conservative, 23% as middle of the road and 37% liberal. Last year it identified as 11% very or somewhat conservative, 21% as middle of the road, and 67% very or somewhat liberal.
“We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals,” Berliner wrote, and described a new listener stereotype: “EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite.”
This would not be a problem, he said, if the radio broadcaster was an “openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience”, but for a public broadcaster, “which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model”.
“I’ve become a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love,” he wrote.
The letter, which mirrors a recent critique of the New York Times by former editor James Bennet in the Economist and aspects of a recent lecture by the paper’s publisher, AG Sulzberger, has provoked a fierce backlash from NPR editorial staff.
NPR’s editor-in-chief, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff that she “strongly disagreed” with Berliner’s assessment, stood behind the outlet’s “exceptional work” and said she believed that “inclusion – among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage – is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world”.
Chapin added that the radio broadcasters’ work was not above scrutiny or critique. “We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole, fostering a culture of conversation that breaks down the silos that we sometimes end up retreating to,” she said.
Chapin was appointed editor last year after a period of turbulence at NPR over what it acknowledged were clashes between its news and programming divisions over “priorities, resources and need to innovate”.
“We all aim every day to serve our audience with information and moments of joy that are useful and relevant,” Chapin said at the time.
Berliner identified the station’s coverage of the Covid-19 lab leak theory, Hunter Biden’s laptop and allegations that Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election as all examples of how “politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work”.
He also identified DEI and use of language advanced by affiliated groups as evidence that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview”. Berliner said that when he brought up his survey of newsroom political voter registration at a 2021 all-staff meeting, showing there were no Republicans, he claimed he was met with “profound indifference”.
“The messages were of the ‘Oh wow, that’s weird’ variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star,” he wrote.
Berliner later told the NewsNation host Chris Cuomo that he was not surprised by the negative response he had received from NPR editorial management, saying, “they’re certainly entitled to their perspective.”
But, he added, “I’ve had a lot of support from colleagues, and many of them unexpected, who say they agree with me. Some of them say this confidentially, but I think there’s been a lot of response saying, look, these are things that need to be addressed.”
In her letter to staff, Chapin wrote that NPR’s efforts to expand the diversity of perspectives and subjects now included tracking sources. “We have these internal debates, enforce strong editorial standards, and engage in processes that measure our work precisely because we recognize that nobody has the ‘view from nowhere.’”
