Uri Berliner Burned His Bridges at NPR, Then Set the House Ablaze

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

 

I imagine I’m in a distinct minority of National Review writers and readers when I confess that I actually listen to National Public Radio on a semi-regular basis. (I know of one other offender on staff, whose identity I shall guard fiercely as a matter of personal honor.) What can I say? Maybe I secretly enjoy having howlingly biased neutral-voiced progressives condescend to me. Or maybe it’s because NPR’s truly comedic plunge into rote progressive cant — from its already very liberal starting point — has been an endless source for column ideas, as well as a handy whetstone against which I can sharpen my sarcasm into a razor while stuck in traffic.

 

So it was with immense interest that I read a piece last week in Bari Weiss’s fine dissident center-left outlet the Free Press by Uri Berliner, current — as in, very much not former — senior business editor at NPR. Titled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years — Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” the essay is a damning and heartily recommended insider account of how NPR, an organization already long-famed for catering to the sensibilities and political tastes of upper-middle-class white progressives, truly ran off the rails during the Trump years (and particularly post–George Floyd) into hard ideological dogmatism.

 

When I read it, I had two reactions, one to the text and one to the subtext. The text of Berliner’s piece was of course an eloquent and sensitively written exposé of the accelerating editorial rot behind the scenes at NPR. Berliner’s argument is not about bias — NPR’s liberal tilt is structurally unavoidable given the kind of people who want to work there — as much as it is about the complete internal corruption of journalistic ethics. (To wit, his discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal is the ultimate confirmation of priors for suspicious conservatives: “I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.”)

 

The subtext of the piece, however, was clear: “Now that I’ve aired our dirty laundry, I dare you to fire me before I eventually resign.” This was, for all its eloquence, functionally a career-terminating act. The various official responses from NPR, including a defensive rebuttal from NPR’s standards & practices editor and a five-day suspension without pay for “freelancing without permission,” indicate clearly that he is now persona non grata. To be fair, Berliner either certainly expected this or should have. As Phoebe Maltz Bovy aptly asks, “How many jobs are there where you could write a big essay about your beef with your workplace and keep your job?” Berliner was clearly dismayed enough about the situation at NPR that he was prepared to leave, and since as an NPR liberal he is more genteel than Homer Simpson, he chose to burn his bridges publicly and rhetorically, rather than literally.

 

And perhaps do something else as well. For I could not help noticing one other thing about the piece as I read it last week, something that immediately leapt out to me and which has made subsequent events feel like they’re playing out entirely predictably: the final paragraph.

 

A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who’s been a leader in tech. She doesn’t have a news background, which could be an asset given where things stand. I’ll be rooting for her. It’s a tough job. Her first rule could be simple enough: don’t tell people how to think. It could even be the new North Star.

 

In a profession where journalists and pundits read these sorts of big dishy insider pieces differently than normal folks do — searching for hidden implications, listening for dog whistles, and frankly sometimes wearing tinfoil hats — that paragraph instantly sounded a blaring klaxon. “PLEASE TAKE NOTE OF THIS INCOMING BOSS WHO I WILL MENTION BY NAME AND WHO I MIGHT ADD LACKS ANY JOURNALISTIC BACKGROUND WHATSOEVER.”

 

And, mother of God, look what turned up once people like Christopher Rufo did just that. You see, it turns out that Katherine Maher is no ordinary ascendant progressive media executive. No, this woman’s social-media history reveals her to be the Kwisatz Haderach of white wokeness, presumably bred through generations of careful genetic selection to be the supernaturally perfect embodiment of Affluent White Female Liberalism. (As many have noted, she not only acts but looks like Titania McGrath.) It’s vaguely unreal: If there was a trendy progressive take floating around on Twitter and popular within media circles, then you can reliably bet she was there to voice it in the most preeningly insulting way possible.

 

I cannot possibly do justice to the comical depth and breadth of her posting history. (Matt Taibbi has a fun summary here, framed as a journey through the American holiday calendar with NPR’s incoming CEO.) This is a woman who loudly condemns her own “cis white mobility privilege,” and I’m still not sure whether she’s referring to her ability to quickly change jobs or her ability to roll out of bed in the morning. Maher is so cringe-inducingly woke that she almost reads like an intentionally cruel parody of wokeness from beyond the uncanny valley — as if she were tweeting in the progressive equivalent of blackface, her endless ultra-orthodoxy an act of desperate, sweaty-palmed minstrelsy. I prefer an empathetic take myself: Don’t hate the player, hate the game. As a rich white heterosexual woman from Connecticut in a world of brutally cutthroat media identity politics, she needs to give a truly committed performance at all times simply in order to survive.

 

Do you think Uri Berliner was unaware of any of this? Do you think he failed to do research on the background of the new CEO before he gave her a shout-out by name at the end of a piece savaging NPR’s decaying ethical culture? I don’t. He might as well have wished her luck with a capital “F.” He had to be aware of what would happen when he shot a giant signal flare into the air at the end of a piece like this: People like me would notice, and soon investigators would come a-calling. He basically scripted his own one-act play: Waiting for Rufo. As it draws to its climax, I am left with one overwhelming question: Why on earth are American taxpayers footing the bill for any of this, again?