It’s no great tragedy that an editor at NPR was just suspended for airing out his employer’s dirty laundry, but the episode is a helpful case study in how prejudiced, corrupt, and degenerate our corporate news media remain.
NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik announced Tuesday that Uri Berliner, a longtime business editor at the network, was suspended for five days without pay following his tour de force last week, during which Berliner extensively detailed the detrimental lack of ideological diversity at NPR.
“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 wrote for The Free Press in his media kickoff. “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.”
He said there was an “unspoken consensus” at NPR, which is now little more than a conglomerate of social justice interest groups, that dictated the network’s news coverage. “It’s frictionless,” he said, “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.”
The innocuous and plain observation was that NPR has diminished its reputation and thereby its audience with its obsessive preoccupation with skin color and sexual identity, as well as its undeniable editorial
