The senior National Public Radio editor who was suspended without pay after he pointed out the network’s extreme, left-wing bias has made a stunning new announcement.
On Wednesday Uri Berliner resigned from the network after 25 years at his job.
His resignation comes on the tail of being suspended for daring to point out the obvious: NPR is now a bastion of extreme, left-wing rhetoric and bias.
Captioning the X post, “My resignation letter to NPR CEO [Katherine Maher],” Berliner attached his note to his now former boss.
His resignation letter said, “I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don’t support calls to defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.”
My resignation letter to NPR CEO @krmaher pic.twitter.com/0hafVbcZAK
— Uri Berliner (@uberliner) April 17, 2024
The saga started last week when Berliner wrote an op-ed for The Free Press that called NPR out for doing away with real journalism and replacing it with left-wing bias and cheerleading for the Democratic Party.
“We could face up to where we’ve gone wrong. News organizations don’t go in for that kind of reckoning. But there’s a good reason for NPR to be the first: we’re the ones with the word ‘public’ in our name.” @uriberliner‘s hope for a U.S. media institution. https://t.co/EclQJO838a pic.twitter.com/CvFfSoL3xx
— The Free Press (@TheFP) April 9, 2024
In his April 9 editorial, Berliner pointed out that the network has lost its audience among Republicans and moderates — even as its listenership among the far-left has grown — all because the station’s bias has driven away its once diverse fans.
Berliner noted that in 2011, “Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.”
Yet by 2023, much had changed in that metric, and NPR’s audience skewed even farther to the left.
“By 2023, the picture was completely different: 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 wrote.
Berliner cited several examples of how NPR has turned its back on real journalism and replaced that with fealty to the left’s narrative, which has driven so many listeners away.
He cited as examples of how journalistic inquiry has been shunned by NPR its refusal to cover Hunter Biden’s laptop, its obsession with combating claims that the COVID virus might have come from a lab leak, and the network’s coddling of the Black Lives Matter narrative that maintains that the country is hopelessly mired in white racism.
After his editorial became viral — and was seen to vindicate NPR critics — Berliner was suspended for speaking truth to power.
Seemingly proving Berliner correct, newly hired NPR CEO Katherine Maher handed Berliner a suspension without pay. She claimed that he did not get permission to write for a competing news outlet. But most assume she suspended him for daring to out the network’s extreme, left-wing bias.
As to that new CEO, many social media users took the time to look up Katherine Maher’s past comments, and the result of that research showed dozens of extreme, far-left proclamations on race relations, Donald Trump, and more.
NPR’s suspension of Berliner has renewed calls by Republicans for NPR to be stripped of its federal funding.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
