A voice from inside National Public Radio (NPR) is chastising the network for not presenting a well-rounded point of view of the country in its reporting and features.
A lack of political diversity among staff and C-suite mandates has created a niche format that appeals mainly to far liberal-leaning listeners and only presents one side of important national and international stories. So says Uri Berliner, a senior business editor, and a 25-year NPR veteran. In a scathing op-ed for The Free Press, Berliner says the network has “lost America’s trust.”
“It’s true, NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding,” Berliner writes. “In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”
It wasn’t always this way, he insists.
Berliner says for decades since its inception in the 1970s, millions of Americans tuned into NPR for “reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon” and to be exposed “to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own.”
In 2011, while NPR’s audience “tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large,” he explains. “Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.”
In 2023, “Only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal,” he continues. “We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.”
The reason, according to Berliner, “An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America… That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.”
He highlights events in the last decade, and the way they were covered by NPR, to support his views. The 2016 election of Donald Trump began the “rise in advocacy” at the public media network, which in part is funded by the government.
“But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency,” he recalls.
He says NPR focused on the rumors of Trump’s relationship with Russia, even interviewing Trump antagonist Representative Adam Schiff 25 times about the alleged ties to Vladimir Putin. When the Mueller Report found no credible evidence to the claims, “NPR’s coverage was notably sparse.”
The Hunter Biden laptop scandal and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic were other national stories that NPR skewed its coverage on, he says.
However, he says that to “truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR… you need to start with former CEO John Lansing.”
Lansing’s profile increased following the death of George Floyd when he declared that systemic racism was the cause of Floyd’s death. Lansing went on a mission to increase diversity in the network and required reporters to expand its source pool to wider groups.
“Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were 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 explains.
However, even with a new internal focus on inclusion and diversity, NPR’s audience was not expanding.
“Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America,” he says. “It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.”
Berliner also says the workforce at NPR is overwhelmingly left-leaning, which was shrugged off by colleagues.
Berliner says he wrote to Lansing in November 2022 requesting a meeting about the lack of viewpoint diversity. A scheduled meeting was postponed and never rescheduled. Lansing left NPR at the end of 2023.
“With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not promising,” Berliner argues. “Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we’ve gone wrong.”
NPR’s chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner’s assessment, according to a NPR news story written my the network’s Media Correspondent David Folkenflik. “We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” she wrote. “We believe 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.”
