Uri Berliner, a former senior editor at NPR and the journalist who publicly challenged the network’s editorial direction last year, responded to the Senate’s vote to eliminate federal funding for public broadcasting with a striking farewell: “Happy Independence Day, NPR. You earned it.”
In a July 17 essay published by The Free Press, Berliner reflected on the vote to remove $1.1 billion in federal support for NPR, PBS, and other public media outlets. He argued the decision reflects an institutional failure within NPR itself.
“It’s a self-inflicted wound,” he wrote, “a product of how NPR embraced a fringe progressivism that cost it any legitimate claim to stand as an impartial provider of news, much less one deserving of government support.”
Berliner, who spent 25 years at the network, said he once supported federal funding but changed his mind as NPR’s editorial culture shifted.
“[O]ver the past year, under the leadership of a divisive new CEO, instead of taking criticisms of its coverage to heart, NPR instead doubled down on agenda-driven journalism,” he said. “So, as someone who had spent most of his career at the network, I didn’t support defunding. I instead suggested that NPR could build back credibility by voluntarily giving up federal support. Obviously that didn’t happen.”
He described how NPR’s audience had become sharply tilted. By 2023, liberals outnumbered conservatives more than six to one.
“True to the tote bag cliché, NPR became an accessory for Whole Foods shoppers,” he said.
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Berliner also pointed to missed stories and misjudged narratives — like NPR’s early dismissal of the COVID lab-leak theory and its refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop — as examples of the network’s increasingly one-sided approach.
Berliner attributed much of the decline to editorial choices that signaled ideological conformity.
“Inside NPR, rules on the use of language reflected the direction and mindset of the organization,” he recalled. “We were told to avoid the term biological sex, warned not to say illegal immigrant.”
Even punctuation was politicized: “A racial punctuation hierarchy was imposed; black would be uppercase, white lowercase.”
He said that these editorial shifts were not simply stylistic: “They were tribal signals, ideological markers.”
Berliner maintained that the organization had ample opportunity to course-correct, and that he wrote his letter last year in the hopes that the outlet “might rediscover the values on which its success had been built.”
“NPR could have regained some equilibrium, reclaimed a smidgen of independence, by copping to this reality even a little,” he said. “It could have taken some visible steps back to the journalism gold standard of neutral impartiality. And it could have done all this prior to Trump’s reelection, so it wouldn’t look like NPR was caving to pressure from his administration.”
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Berliner traced NPR’s trajectory back to November 2022, when he emailed a senior editor after what he described as “a spate of particularly egregious coverage.”
“The lack of viewpoint diversity and the unwillingness of top editors to push back against one-sided, opinionated journalism is causing great harm to NPR,” he wrote at the time.
Although he misjudged the political timeline, predicting a GOP-led defunding effort in 2022, Berliner sees the Senate’s recent decision as the inevitable consequence of NPR’s internal choices.
“NPR did just about everything possible to assure its own decapitation,” he said.
While the network remains free to operate under First Amendment protections, it must now do so without the public funding that once distinguished it.
“Now NPR will be like any other media organization,” he said, “free to be as partisan as it chooses, stripped of its unique claim to taxpayer support, still protected by the First Amendment, but subject to the same financial and competitive pressures as everyone else.”
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Author: Rachel Quackenbush
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