The editor of NPR resigned due to his blast at the new CEO
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Berliner is a member of NPR’s business desk, as am I, and he has helped to edit many of my stories. He didn’t see it until it was posted on the internet, and he had no part in the preparation of the article.
Rufo is posting a parade of old social media posts from Maher, who took over NPR last month. In two examples, she called Trump a racist and also seemed to minimize the effects of rioting in 2020. Rufo is using those to rally public pressure for Maher’s ouster, as he did for former Harvard University President Claudine Gay.
She praised the integrity of NPR’s journalists and underscored the independence of their reporting in a statement Monday.
“I love NPR and feel it’s a national trust,” Berliner says. We have great journalists here. This would be more interesting and fulfilling if they did great journalism and gave up their opinions.
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Berliner told me that the social media postings showed that Maher wasn’t the best person to head the organization.
Berliner said they are looking for a leader with a broader perspective on what America is about and who would unify and bring more people into the tent. This appears to be the opposite of that.
He said that he tried repeatedly to make his concerns over NPR’s coverage known to news leaders and to Maher’s predecessor as chief executive before publishing his essay.
The Free Press, an online site embraced by journalists who believe that the mainstream media has become too liberal, published Berliner’s piece last Tuesday. In it, he argued that NPR’s coverage has increasingly reflected a rigid progressive ideology. He argued that the network hasn’t presented diversity of viewpoints in NPR shows, online coverage or podcasts because of the network’s quest for greater diversity in its workforce.
The Free Press is a site that has become a haven for journalists who believe that mainstream media outlets have become too liberal. In addition to his essay, Berliner appeared in an episode of its podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss.
In rebuking Berliner, NPR said he had also publicly released proprietary information about audience demographics, which it considers confidential. Those figures were basically marketing material. If they had been good, they would have sent them out.
Morning Edition host Michel Martin told me some colleagues at the network share Berliner’s concerns that coverage is frequently presented through an ideological or idealistic prism that can alienate listeners.
“The way to address that is through training and mentorship,” says Martin, herself a veteran of nearly two decades at the network who has also reported for The Wall Street Journal and ABC News. “It’s not by blowing the place up, by trashing your colleagues, in full view of people who don’t really care about it anyway.”
” Newsrooms run on trust,” Danielle Kurtzleben, political correspondent for National Public Radio, said last week. “If you violate everyone’s trust by going to another outlet and sh—ing on your colleagues (while doing a bad job journalistically, for that matter), I don’t know how you do your job now.”
Other newsrooms are also grappling with questions over news judgment and confidentiality. On Monday, New York Times Executive Editor Joseph Kahn announced to his staff that the newspaper’s inquiry into who leaked internal dissent over a planned episode of its podcast The Daily to another news outlet proved inconclusive. A report on the use of sexual assault as part of the attack on Israel in October was to be the focus of the episode. Audio staffers weren’t sure how the report stood up to scrutiny.
The Times’s head of communication wrote to staff that the incident would be a singular exception to an important rule.
At NPR, some of Berliner’s colleagues have weighed in online against his claim that the network has focused on diversifying its workforce without a concomitant commitment to diversity of viewpoint. Recently retired chief executive John Lansing has referred to this pursuit of diversity within NPR’s workforce as its “North Star,” a moral imperative and chief business strategy.
Berliner wrote that NPR’s strategy was a failure due to the Drop in NPR’s broadcast audiences and its struggle to attract more Latino and Black viewers.
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“During most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. Berliner writes that they were not ” knee-jerk, activist or scolding.” “In recent years, however, that has changed.”
Ethnicity does not all think the same and do not report the same. Good reporters and editors should know that by now. It’s terrible that a senior editor missed that point, it’s embarrassing to me as a reporter.
Several colleagues wrote a letter to NPR’s chief news executive and the host of the show asking for more clarity on NPR’s standards for its coverage and behavior of its journalists.
On Friday, CEO Maher stood up for the network’s mission and the journalism, taking issue with Berliner’s critique, though never mentioning him by name. Among her chief issues: she said Berliner’s essay offered “a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are.”
We’ll ask ourselves if we captured the diversity of this country – racial, ethnic, religious, economic, political geographic, etc – in a way that helped readers and Listeners recognize themselves and their communities. Chapin wrote in the memo. Did we give them coverage that made them understand the neighbors with whom they share little in common?
Since last year when the news and programming divisions were unified by Lansing, such sessions have been discussed, according to the text.
On the Integrity and Fairness of the Newsroom: NPR’s David Folkenflik Critique of a Statement by Maher, Trump, and Rufo
The story was written and reported by NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. NPR’s policy is that no NPR corporate official or news executive reviews reports before they are posted on its website.
Conservative and Republican critics of the network include former President Donald Trump and the activist Christopher Rufo.
The elimination of federal funding for NPR less than one percent of its $300 million annual budget has been used by others.
In a brief interview, he condemned a statement Maher issued Friday in which she suggested that he had questioned “whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity.” She said that was “derogatory, offensive, and degrading.”
Earlier in the day, Berliner forwarded to NPR editors and other colleagues a note saying he had “never questioned” their integrity and had been trying to raise these issues within the newsroom for more than seven years.
What followed was an email he had sent to newsroom leaders after Trump’s 2016 win. He wrote then that we can’t align ourselves with a tribe because of our journalism. So we don’t exist in a cocoon that blinds us to the views and experience of tens of millions of our fellow citizens.”
Yet some colleagues privately said Berliner’s critique carried some truth. Chapin also announced monthly reviews of the network’s coverage for fairness and diversity – including diversity of viewpoint.
She said in a text message that now was the time to deliver and that there had been discussion of the initiative long before the essay.
