This comes after Uri Berliner, a senior business editor for NPR, publicly criticized his employer’s progressive bias.
NPR has defended its journalism after a senior editor criticized its progressive bias.
“We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” NPR’s Chief News Executive Edith Chapin 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.”
This comes after Uri Berliner, a senior business editor for NPR, admitted in The Free Press that the news organization has gone too far in its bias by turning its journalists into activists who tell its audience what to think.
He cited NPR’s promotion of the Russian collusion conspiracy theory to shed a negative light on former President Donald Trump, it’s turning a blind eye to the Hunter Biden laptop report, its refusal to acknowledge the theory that a Wuhan lab leak was a possible source of COVID, and its emphasis on “bizarre” stories about systematic racism as major issues that signaled to him there is a problem.
Mr. Berliner said that the NPR of today, as opposed to the one he started working at 25 years ago, reflects “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”
Ms. Chapin said that NPR’s work isn’t above “scrutiny or critique.”
“We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole,” Ms. Chapin wrote.
NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik said the story “ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media.”
“Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X,” Mr. Folkenflik said.
In April 2023, NPR left the X platform after it labeled the news organization as “state-affiliated media.”
Then, CEO John Lansing said in response, “At this point, I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter. I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”
However, as Mr. Berliner states in his article, much of NPR’s audience is questioning whether NPR can be trusted again.