I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.

The Free Press ^ | April 9, 2024 | Uri Berliner

[Red Badger]

Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.

I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.

So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

But it hasn’t.

For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

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. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.

That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.

What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.

Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.

In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, 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.

When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.

Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin—supporting the hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.

The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.

But that wasn’t the case.

When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded.

Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential scientific paper known as “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Its authors wrote they didn’t believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die. And understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his colleagues, “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.”

Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that “the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.”

When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.

[Yo-Yo]

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s I'd listen to NPR's Morning Edition while getting ready for work, then listen to Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy in the afternoons.

NPR was left-leaning back then, and I listened to it to get the Left perspective on the days' news. Then I'd listen to Rush and/or G. Gordon and get a Right-leaning perspective. on those same stories.

I worked in Broadcast and I worked for 16 years at the local University-owned NPR and PBS affiliate stations until 2011. Yes, the staff were mostly Left-leaning, but you'd be surprised how many 'conservatives' like me also worked there, mostly in the technical trades.

But starting around 2009 or so, after the financial crisis of 2008 that was cooked up to get Obama elected, the purging of conservatives began, and I was a victim in 2011, getting laid off due to "budget cuts." As the Obama Administration had misstep after misstep, NPR and PBS became cheerleaders for our nation's first "President of Color" and the reporting reflected that viewpoint, and stifled any others. Not even Bill Clinton got that sort of support from NPR during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Bill's impeachment.

Today I can't even listen to NPR for five minutes without losing my temper. Today's NPR has become hard-Left ideologues who cannot tolerate any other point of view, even in the context of debate. They have long ago abandoned even the illusion of providing both sides of a story. One side is presented, and the other side is vocally dismissed as wrong, racist, sexist, homophobic, and unacceptably intolerant.

The really sad part is that the further Left NPR and PBS leaned, the lower their revenues sank, and they couldn't even take the blinkers off long enough to see the correlation.

So today, I say:

[rlmorel]

They always had those people who seemed to speak with a nasally-twanged faux-British accent.

I grew to hate that. I have always enjoyed jazz, particularly the old masters like Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins, and I got to the point I could reliably identify who it was on hearing one or two notes.

When I developed an ingrained dislike of that snotty voice, I could pick it out immediately in only one or two words and change the station.

LOL, I didn’t listen to William F. Buckley until later in life, and my first thought was “OMG, he sounds like one of them!”

Until I actually listened to what he said, and hypothesized that his accent could only be one of the reasons the Left hated him so much! They probably thought he was co-opting their snotty audience!

[Fury]

My favorite example of NPR going cray cray is 1A, a show produced by WAMU out of Washington, DC and fills an NPR talk time slot for many NPR stations.

When it was first hosted by Joshua Johnson, he made a concerted attempt to get multiple sides of an issue to the table. Commendable.

Then he left to go to MSNBC (big mistake) and eventually Jenn White became the host. Not nearly the number of differing viewpoints. The Friday News Roundup especially the Domestic Hour are just painful to listen to. Sometimes Friday host Todd Zwillich is snarky and Arthur Delaney from Huff Post brings it all back to President Trump for so many news stories.

Like I said painful to listen to. I used to donate but have not in years because of 1A losing their courage have on the show folks with differing viewpoints.

Compare that to The Politics Hour with Kojo Nnamdi which comes up right after 1A on Fridays. Yes, Nnamdi is a liberal. But he and co-host Tom Sherwood ask the tough questions of *everyone* that goes on that show.

[Skywise]

“ But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.”

And then proceeds to provide example after example of who is really “truth-impaired”

“Are we the baddies?”

[JimRed]

“It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story.”

And another thing to outright lie, which is NPR‘s stock in trade.

[Red Badger]

You can’t be sure these days......................

[Rummyfan]

’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.

Good Lord, that's a quad-fecta. What a stereotypical lib.

[aquila48]

And she doesn’t even mention them pushing the fraud of “CLIMATE EMERGENCY”!

[Jim Noble]

I have had a lot of COVID experience as well as a ringside seat to a lot of the censorship, “nudging”, and policy formation which still goes on today.

One of the most striking things has been how any major figure who publishes a mild dissent (back to school sooner, less masking, six feet meaningless, etc) INVARIABLY mentions within the first three sentences how they always were opposed to Trump, are still opposed to Trump, and (of course) their questioning of some dogma or “guidance” isn’t meant to support Trump in any way, since Trump is antiscience and is wrong about everything.

The role of opposition, and more than opposition, to President Trump by essentially all public figures dealing with COVID has not been fully explored for the essential role it played in policy making.

[Big Red Badger]

Hated Trump
.
Covered for Hunter and The Big Guy
.
Covid Cover-Up....
.
Yuppers
That’s NPR

[Fury]

Sounds like reason number one to not trust NPR.

What's your point? Because his name seems "not American"?

[posterchild]

I listen to my state’s affiliate as i drive my children to school. It is easier to provide rebuttal to nutty ideas and bias if we hear it together. I used to rely on help from Rush but unfortunately that is no longer an option.

[Newtoidaho]

NPR: Nothing but Propaganda Radio.

Whatever they say, the opposite is true.

[Fury]

Berliner is essentially daring NPR to fire or otherwise discipline him. Will be interesting to see what they do.

[Big Red Badger]

Didn’t they have ‘TeleTubbies?’

[Puppage]

American Pravda

[jjotto]

WFB was schooled early on in Mexico, then France and the UK, returning to the US when WW2 broke out. He did indeed go to snooty private schools.

[Vermont Lt]

Playing wordle is considered leftist?

[fwdude]

Did you ever catch the Diane Rehm Show? One of the most irritating leftists ever on that station.

I remember catching an interview she had with Thomas Sowell decades ago. He destroyed her points, but that didn't stop your arrogant attitude.

[rlmorel]

That I knew...I always felt like he used his accent as a bit of a cudgel against his opponents to disarm them, except the ones who knew better tried be on guard for the ideological traps he set for them!