Happy Independence Day, NPR

Happy Independence Day, NPR - by Uri Berliner

The Senate just voted to cut federal funding for the news organization I worked at for 25 years. It only has itself to blame.

The Senate voted this morning to claw back $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding for NPR, PBS, and local stations. Pending final approval in the House, the federal government will, after more than half a century, no longer be in the business of supporting NPR.

The vote is a victory for Republicans who have long had National Public Radio (NPR) in their sights. But it is also a victory for those of any political stripe who believe the government has no business funding the media.

I didn’t use to count myself among them. But over 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. 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.

NPR has said President Donald Trump’s push for defunding is an attack on press freedom and the First Amendment. While defunding is a harsh rebuke to NPR, it’s not fatal. A relatively small portion of its budget—some 5 to 10 percent depending on how you do the math—comes from direct and indirect federal funding. But for small public radio stations that rely more on federal support, the repercussions could be severe. While Republicans cast the votes to defund, NPR also has itself to blame for the outcome...

It’s a self-inflicted wound, 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.

I witnessed that change firsthand in my 25 years at the network—and I tried to do something about it. I was a senior business editor at NPR when, a little more than a year ago, I published my account in The Free Press of how the network had lost touch with the country, and, like the legacy media everywhere, forfeited the trust of the public.

I explained how over time, as NPR became a boutique product for a well-heeled audience clustered around coastal cities and college towns, it shed moderate and conservative listeners.

Once fairly evenly divided between liberals, moderates, and conservatives, NPR’s news audience shifted sharply to the left. And by 2023, liberals outnumbered conservatives more than six to one. True to the tote bag cliché, NPR became an accessory for Whole Foods shoppers. Which is sad, because in another era, NPR, and public radio more broadly, developed some of the most creative and entertaining programming anywhere, from Car Talk to This American Life, Planet Money, Radiolab and A Prairie Home Companion.

Thanks in part to this ideological transformation, NPR botched major stories—and damaged its bond with the American people.

To name a couple of prominent examples: It repeatedly insisted that the lab leak theory of Covid had been debunked and it refused to cover Hunter Biden’s laptop. NPR’s reporting on the most contentious issues of the day—climate change, youth gender medicine, and the war in Gaza—leaned on moralizing.

Inside NPR, rules on the use of language reflected the direction and mindset of the organization. We were told to avoid the term biological sex, warned not to say illegal immigrant (a hurtful label). A racial punctuation hierarchy was imposed; black would be uppercase, white lowercase. NPR adopted the phrase “gender affirming care” to describe childhood medical interventions that can mean sterilization and the surgical removal of genitals. These were not merely style choices. They were tribal signals, ideological markers.

NPR could have addressed these failings. I wrote my essay because I hoped the network 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. 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.

But NPR did none of these things.

Katherine Maher, the former head of Wikipedia’s parent organization who became NPR’s CEO in March 2024, soon found herself having to justify why taxpayers should continue to fund the network. But she seemed reluctant to tackle the criticisms head-on.

Maher declined a request to appear before Congress in May 2024, to defend the organization against claims of persistent progressive bias. Instead, she chose to make her case in more congenial settings like the Carnegie Endowment and Fast Company. She has rarely addressed specific claims about network bias and focused instead on the threat of defunding to small town and rural public radio stations. She also notes, in NPR’s defense, that it receives only about 1 percent of its operating funds directly from federal tax dollars. However, an urgent plea that popped up on the NPR website said if defunding is enacted it “will be the greatest blow to the NPR Network in history.”

After Trump won and the Republicans gained control of the Senate and the House, the push to defund public broadcasting gained steam. NPR called it “textbook retaliation” and, in a legal head-scratcher, a violation of the First Amendment.

When Maher and her counterpart at the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Paula Kerger, were summoned to testify at a DOGE House subcommittee hearing on March 26, Maher did the case for public funding no favors. In her opening statement, Maher said she welcomed “the opportunity to discuss the essential role of public media in delivering unbiased, nonpartisan, fact-based reporting to Americans.”

But then she struggled to answer basic questions about both NPR—and herself. It was clear Maher was out of her depth and her performance would damage NPR further.

In another exchange, Representative Michael Cloud, another Texas Republican, asked Maher about NPR’s insistence that the Covid lab leak was a debunked conspiracy theory. Maher sought to make the case that NPR’s coverage had evolved, and that it was now informing its audience about the growing support for the lab leak theory from independent researchers and intelligence agencies, including the CIA. “We acknowledge that the new CIA evidence is worthy of coverage and have covered it.”

But when I looked through NPR’s archives, I couldn’t find the coverage she cited. And when I asked the NPR communications team to locate the coverage for me, they didn’t respond to my inquiries. Nor has Maher replied to my request for an interview for this article.

Cloud also asked Maher about my essay in The Free Press. She told Cloud she wished she “had the opportunity” to speak with me after the publication of my piece in April 2024.

Maher added, “I would have loved to have had him engage and come back to us with some suggestions as to what we could do editorially in order to address what he perceived as bias.”

But we could have had that talk. I would have welcomed it.

This is what actually happened.

In my essay, in which I said NPR had lost its curious spirit, I wrote very little about the new CEO.

I didn’t report that in a 2021 Atlantic Council interview Maher called the First Amendment “the number one challenge” in her time at Wikimedia because it made it “tricky” to root out disinformation. A remarkable statement from someone hired to run one of the nation’s leading news organizations.

I didn’t mention her social media history: Maher wearing a Covid mask and donning a Biden cap, Maher tweeting that America is addicted to white supremacy, that Donald Trump is a “deranged racist sociopath,” scolding Hillary Clinton for using the phrase “boy and girl” because it erases “language for non-binary people.”

I simply acknowledged that NPR had a new CEO and welcomed her to the network saying: “It’s a tough job” and “I’ll be rooting for her.”

Her response?

I was suspended without pay for five days and Maher posted a statement on NPR’s website calling my words “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.” To further her point, and without citing a shred of evidence or offering one example, Maher stated that I questioned the professional integrity of my colleagues “based on little more than the recognition of their identity.” I have never questioned anyone’s integrity based on their identity, nor would I.

On April 17, I resigned.

That same day Maher appeared at the Carnegie Endowment and told the moderator, in response to a question about my essay, that she didn’t sit in the newsroom. “We have our guidelines. Our editorial policies are made public, and that is all completely independent of the CEO.”

And then she followed up, adding: “I let the journalists be our journalists and the editors be our editors because that is what they do and there is a very strong line between us.”

And yet, the “very strong line” that Maher described is exactly the line she crossed when she posted her disparaging statement about me—one of her own journalists—just five days before. The CEO’s statement remains on the NPR website to this day.

Maher’s most serious and dubious claim is the one that began her Congressional testimony, her core message about NPR and public media delivering “unbiased” reporting. NPR’s progressivism is obvious to any fair-minded person who listens or reads long enough. If you want more than my perspective, there’s also this, this, and this—ll data-driven assessments of NPR’s coverage that come to the same conclusion. If there’s one reason why the Senate just voted to defund NPR, it’s the failure of Maher, or anyone in NPR’s leadership, to acknowledge this basic fact.

In the first week of November 2022, after a spate of particularly egregious coverage, including a piece entertaining the merits of dumping soup on masterworks in the name of fighting climate change and another suggesting that worries about crime were racist, I emailed a top NPR news executive and said we were headed for trouble.

“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,” I wrote.

I predicted that if the GOP swept the upcoming 2022 midterms, NPR would be headed for defunding and “and unfortunately, we will have given them the ammunition that they need.”

My timing was off by a few years.

Could NPR, which is more steeped in ideology than PBS, have done something to keep the federal axe at bay? It’s impossible to say, but what’s clear is that NPR did just about everything possible to assure its own decapitation.

Now NPR will be like any other media organization, 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.

My hope is that this will be a wake-up call, returning NPR to its roots where a curious spirit endeared it to generations of listeners.

But don’t count on it.

Happy Independence Day, NPR. You earned it.