3 Smart Responses to the Mess at NPR
NPR's Steve Inskeep wrote, "Uri Berliner gave a perfect example of the kind of journalism he says he’s against."
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On April 9, NPR editor Uri Berliner wrote a piece at Bari Weiss’ Substack The Free Press titled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” For the past week or so, I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about it.
In it, Berliner, a senior business editor and reporter, argues that NPR lost conservative listeners in recent years, making vague accusations about biased coverage and an unsupported claim that the organization “tell[s] people how to think” — something that would have benefitted from even a single example.
As one Democratic House staffer noted on X (fka Twitter), few of Berliner’s claims held up to scrutiny. Whether claims about NPR supposedly ignoring “Russiagate” stories that made Democrats look bad (they didn’t), claims about NPR not covering Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 (they did), or claims about NPR brushing off the “lab leak” theory of the COVID-19 origin (they didn’t) — these simply didn’t hold up to light scrutiny.
I’ve struggled to put together anything worth sending out on this subject because I don’t have any insider information about NPR. Luckily, others with more insight have written on the topic, so I’m going to direct you to their work on the subject.
Long-time NPR journalist Alicia Montgomery wrote a lengthy, thorough breakdown of some of the real problems at NPR for Slate, where she now works.
“The Real Story Behind NPR’s Current Problems” (Slate, Alicia Montgomery, 4/16/24)
(bolded emphasis mine)
Uri’s account of the deliberate effort to undermine Trump up to and after his election is also bewilderingly incomplete, inaccurate, and skewed. For most of 2016, many NPR journalists warned newsroom leadership that we weren’t taking Trump and the possibility of his winning seriously enough. But top editors dismissed the chance of a Trump win repeatedly, declaring that Americans would be revolted by this or that outrageous thing he’d said or done. I remember one editorial meeting where a white newsroom leader said that Trump’s strong poll numbers wouldn’t survive his being exposed as a racist. When a journalist of color asked whether his numbers could be rising because of his racism, the comment was met with silence. In another meeting, I and a couple of other editorial leaders were encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton. Another colleague asked what to do if one candidate just lied more than the other. Another silent response.
I left NPR in the early fall of 2016, but when I came back to work on Morning Edition about a year later, I saw NO trace of the anti-Trump editorial machine that Uri references. On the contrary, people were at pains to find a way to cover Trump’s voters and his administration fairly. We went full-bore on “diner guy in a trucker hat” coverage and adopted the “alt-right” label to describe people who could accurately be called racists. The network had a reflexive need to stay on good terms with people in power, and journalists who had contacts within the administration were encouraged to pursue those bookings.
Former NPR host Joshua Johnson wrote a really thoughtful, passionate response to Berliner’s piece, which I hope you’ll check out, published at his
newsletter.“Uri Berliner dragged NPR. What now?” (The Night Light, Joshua Johnson, 4/10/24)
Uri Berliner didn’t just attack NPR. He attacked a community. His article denigrated a nationwide chosen family, bonded by their love of learning, their civic duty and their belief in doing good. Perhaps he joined this community for the right reasons but, having stayed in it for so long, he forgot why he showed up.
His screed laments NPR’s current condition, from his perspective, but it makes no suggestions of how to fix it. He lays out how he’s raised his concerns internally, but says nothing about any stories or projects he pitched to actually improve things. 25 years at NPR should’ve given him some insights on how to make things better, but none emerge. Then again, if all you want is to see him vomit in the street, solutions would kill the vibe. And now the stench of it will drive people further away, including some who may have truly legitimate complaints about NPR.
I’m no apologist for this or any network; I believe every news organization has a hellacious amount of work to do in meeting this moment. Nor am I blind to the complaints about tone and bias. Since leaving 1A I’ve gotten lots of online comments lamenting the program’s current tone. I haven’t listened in a while, but my former listeners tell me that it felt more balanced and incisive when I was the host. Whether they’re right or not, I don’t know. Regardless, we should always examine our work, hunt for areas of improvement and be humble in the face of reasonable critiques.
But denounce it? Destroy it? You’ll have to get through me first. I’m not the only kid who needed to feel like he belonged. I’m not the first person to wonder if he was cursed to be an outsider: the only Black kid among my White friends, the only gay kid among my straight friends, the youngest kid among older friends, the oddly erudite kid who couldn’t really jell with almost anyone. Deeply pensive, wildly creative, preternaturally passionate… I cannot be the only one who felt like a hybrid too strange to live.
And then Robert Siegel spoke to me, without knowing my name. He may have saved my life.
I trust NPR, but if anything would make me not trust it, it would be that its journalism is edited by people like Uri Berliner. The ultimate way to break my trust would be to have people in its headquarters who’ve grown so entitled and comfortable, who are so embittered and cynical, so blinded by their own malaise and so blind to the opportunities before them, that they’ll publicly shame their team for… well, for not much. I hope the catharsis was worth it, now that he set his house on fire.
The real shame of it is that Mr. Berliner may actually be raising some legitimate points about NPR’s biases. Every human being has biases, so the idea that NPR is truly unbiased is fanciful. The key is recognizing your points of view so that you can work around them as needed. But what’s the point of having that conversation with someone who’s proven himself not to be an honest broker? His article demonstrates that if he doesn’t get his way, he’ll give up and shame you publicly. And that was done with no clear path forward to getting what he says he wants.
Current NPR host Steve Inskeep highlighted the problem of Berliner’s many factual errors, writing that “Berliner gave a perfect example of the kind of journalism he says he’s against.”
“How my NPR colleague failed at ‘viewpoint diversity’” (Differ We Must, Steve Inskeep, 4/16/24)
I was in San Antonio last weekend for a book festival, and took an early-morning run along the city’s River Walk. The paths go beside the water and below the streets, which cross the river on Art Deco bridges. A city looks different from underneath; you feel its layers of history.
Up at street level the book festival was underway, and in a tent filled with people I talked about Differ We Must, my biography of Lincoln as seen through his encounters with people who disagree with him. Moderator Dan Goodgame, editor of Texas Monthly, took the occasion to ask about an item in the news. NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner had written an article criticizing the people who work with him. His article alleged that his colleagues are unanimously progressive and publish progressive stories without any debate—a failure of “viewpoint diversity.” What did I make of that?
Having been asked, I answered: my colleague’s article was filled with errors and omissions. And having given my opinion in public, it’s fair that I should show my work in this space, where I often discuss NPR and journalism more broadly. Nothing I say here is personal; it’s about the journalism. I’ve already told Uri much of what I am telling you, and I have taken his responses seriously. He told me he loves NPR and wants to make it better.
If Uri wanted to start a discussion about journalism at NPR, he succeeded, though maybe not in the way he intended. His colleagues have had a rich dialogue about his mistakes. The errors do make NPR look bad, because it’s embarrassing that an NPR journalist would make so many. NPR correspondent Eyder Peralta wrote on Facebook, “There are a few bits of truth in this… but it mostly suffers from the same thing it accuses NPR of doing. It is myopic and uses a selective reading to serve the author’s world views.”
The errors are so numerous that his defenders—and he has some!—have taken to admitting them, then adding words to the effect of: I hope this doesn’t obscure his “larger point”!
If Uri’s “larger point” is that journalists should seek wider perspectives, and not just write stories that confirm their prior opinions, his article is useful as an example of what to avoid.
It's funny, I just got done reading Alicia Montgomery's piece (which I thought was great) right before you sent this out. One quote in particular I thought summed up the problem with NPR and all these legacy media institutions: "NPR culture encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planting a flag there, and calling it objectivity." Time and time and time again, we see bad actors exploit this loophole to muddy the waters. These organizations are so paralyzed at the thought of being called biased that they are more concerned about it then drawing a conclusion that may be unfavorable to conservatives--and they're still accused of bias anyway!
Spectrum News had a story about a local fire department that had a higher-than-average representation of women on its staff, and was celebrating its first all-woman paramedic team. This progress in diversity, equity and inclusion was treated as an undeniably good thing and nobody was brought on to argue counterpoint.
Can you call that bias? You can, but I'd say it's just an example of how any healthy society works, that we have debates, but eventually certain questions are settled and we move on. You can do a news report on climate change now without feeling obligated to book a climate denier for "balance" because we already had that debate and it's over, and now we're moving on to debating what to do about it.
One of Berliner's complaints was that NPR treated the existence of institutional racism as a question beyond dispute, that they weren't booking contrary voices to argue that institutional racism did not, in fact, exist. If that's true, then good for them, I'll take it as a sign of progress that we've moved on from "Does racism exist?" to "What should we do about racism?"