Senior NPR editor claims public broadcaster lacks ‘viewpoint diversity’

NPR’s editor-in-chief, Edith Chapin, responded in a staff memo that she ‘strongly disagreed’ with Uri Berliner’s assessment. Photograph: Charles Dharapak/AP

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.