In True Journalistic Fashion, NPR Can’t Take What It Dishes Out
https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/17/in-true-journalistic-fashion-npr-cant-take-what-it-dishes-out/
Has there ever been a more hypocritically thin-skinned occupation than journalism?
Day after day these relatively uneducated writers piously dish out opprobrium on those they don’t like and then respond like whiny spoiled brats when anyone dares to criticize them.
The latest example of this involves Uri Berliner, a senior editor at National Public Radio who we learned on Tuesday was suspended without pay for having the temerity to complain that this taxpayer-supported enterprise had become hopelessly agenda-driven.
Berliner has worked at NPR for a quarter century and describes himself as a Sarah Lawrence College-educated child of a “lesbian peace activist mother” whose Spotify “listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.”
In other words, he’s a solid liberal. So, it’s worth listening to what he has to say.
“It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent,” he writes, “but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed.”
That culture no longer exists, he says, a transformation that started in earnest in 2016.
“What began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency,” he writes. He goes on to describe how the network’s ideological blinders caused it to swallow the Russia-hoax story whole, mishandle the COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop stories, and how woke dogma infects everything NPR covers.
There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless — one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.
Incredibly, journalists were even “required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system.”
Berliner makes it clear that he went public with his complaints only after getting nowhere internally. One top executive warned him “to be careful” how he talks about “diversity of thought.”
Now, instead of praising Berliner for his honesty, for bringing transparency to NPR, and for applying the same standards to NPR that it insists everyone else follow, and rather than using his expose as an opportunity to make changes, Katherine Maher – NPR’s new and now famously leftist CEO – screeched like the child who’s been told no for the first time.
She complained that Berliner’s article was “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning,” and amounted to “a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are.” On Tuesday, the news broke that NPR had suspended Berliner for five days without pay, most likely the first step to his dismissal.
Of course, this problem is far wider and deeper than NPR. What Berliner describes has happened to all mainstream news outlets that, while pretending to present facts, are always grinding their ideological axes. And, like Berliner, some old-school journalists have publicly denounced the trend.
Late last year, for example, former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennett penned an article titled “When the New York Times Lost Its Way,” which recounted how he was fired for publishing an op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton that the woke Times staff didn’t like.
Two years ago, former USA Today deputy editorial page editor Dave Mastio was demoted for a tweet that said: “People who are pregnant are also women.”
“I compounded my sin against this new orthodoxy by calling the idea that men can get pregnant an ‘opinion,’” he wrote in an essay for the New York Post after leaving the paper.
“At USA Today,” Mastio revealed, “members of the newsroom ‘diversity’ committee are allowed to edit ‘problematic’ opinion content. Members of this intolerant ‘diversity’ committee root around in unpublished articles and try to spike those that run afoul of their agenda.”
On and on the media malpractice goes.
But if you call out any of this, the truth-to-power journalists will scream that you’re a trans-hating, Trump-loving, privileged racist as they run to their safe spaces to hide.
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