Former NPR editor slams radio station saying it 'can't be trusted'

Former NPR business editor Uri Berliner is fed-up with his old employer. Calling bias in a bombshell opinion piece Wednesday, he says it can't be trusted. He worked there from 1999 until his resignation in April 2024, at which time he penned a separate piece titled, I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust. He was out of a job a week later.

In an editorial for the same publication he slammed NPR in the first place, the 69-year-old said the broadcaster’s claims about being impartial were all but thrown out the window - thanks to perceived propaganda-peddling during the pandemic. His comments came as NPR’s CEO and President Katherine Maher is set to appear in front of the House Oversight Subcommittee chaired by Marjorie Taylor Greene on Wednesday, facing the prospect of a loss in federal funding.

PBS’s CEO and President Paula Kerger will be there as well. Both women maintain their organizations are merely working to create a more informed public. Others claim they consistently skew reporting to favor liberal opinions - Berliner included. 'The broadcaster’s claims about considering all things and its mission of creating “a more informed public” were demolished when it unquestioningly repeated the talking points of the Biden administration and the public health establishment during Covid,' he wrote in The Free Press.

He went on to explain some of the circumstances of his ouster, which he has already blamed on Maher's negative response to his outside essay. He described how for 'most of the 25 years' he worked at NPR, he felt 'honored' to call himself a staffer, but soon became troubled by instances of bias that he said stemmed from a lack of diversity amongst other NPR journalists. 'Though I tried flagging my concerns to my bosses, it fell on deaf ears,' he wrote. 'And so, nearly a year ago, I wrote my whistleblowing piece in these pages,' he continued, recalling how he had argued 'NPR had morphed from a liberal but open-minded news organization driven by curiosity into a conduit for progressive ideology.'

He brought up how in the months since, after his essay went viral on sites like X, NPR said last May it was introducing a new 24/7 vetting process 'to ensure that all coverage receives final editorial review,' the outlet said at the time. But Berliner concluded that so-called 'backstop' was all talk - bringing up reports that emerged from NPR's website when Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated last September as proof. He noted how when Nasrallah was assassinated, his NPR obituary wrote how his terror group "provides social services".

The piece further recalled how Nasrallah studied theology and and had 'admirers' across Lebanon and the surrounding region, with no mention of Hezbollah's history of terrorism. Berliner brought up the group's role in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 299, including 220 Marines, 18 sailors, and three soldiers. He noted the strike was 'the largest loss of life in a single day for the Marine[s]', since the Battle of Iwo Jima. 'This is the kind of detail that would presumably be relevant to an American audience,' Berliner wrote - conceding that Hezbollah's terrorism was eventually noted in updated versions of the story, while questioning how such a crucial detail slipped past this new, 24/7 safety net.

He then turned to the tone of NPR's interview in January with Rachel Levine, the transgender former assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services. The piece, at the time, billed Levine as having a 'friendly, low-key personality' and being a Joni Mitchell fan who 'brings her lunch from home' - with no mention of what Berliner frames as 'the most newsworthy event of [her] tenure.' the secretary, at the time, had been working on legislation that would allow children access to surgeries designed to change their [identity], regardless of age.

'According to court documents, she pressured the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to eliminate minimum age requirements for children from the Standards of Care for transgender medical treatment, including surgery,' Berliner wrote. 'These kinds of omissions won’t help Katherine Maher’s case that NPR is impartial and transparent. He concluded that over the past ten years or so, as NPR’s journalistic strategy has narrowed in scope, 'so has its audience.' He went on to advise the station to consider not taking taxpayer dollars - allowing it to 'openly plant its progressive flag without fear, as an opposition force in the Trump era.' Back in April, he also said the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.

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