Veteran editor Uri Berliner has resigned from NPR, days after the outlet suspended him without pay for writing an essay exposing pervasive left-wing groupthink at the public radio network where he worked for more than two decades.
“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don’t support calls to defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism,” he said on X. “But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.”
Berliner published a bombshell Free Press article on April 9, in which he detailed the “absence of viewpoint diversity” in NPR’s newsroom. After the article was published Berliner was placed on leave for violating NPR’s prohibition against employees writing for other outlets.
In the days after Berliner’s essay was published, NPR’s recently appointed CEO Katherine Maher came under fire for past social-media posts which suggest a deep progressive bias — in some posts, Maher accused former president Donald Trump of being a racist and minimized the Summer of Rage riots following George Floyd’s death.
“We’re looking for a leader right now who’s going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about,” Berliner told NPR News media correspondent David Folkenflik this week. “And this seems to be the opposite of that.”
NPR’s newsroom revolted against Berliner after he wrote the scathing Free Press article. NPR’s Chief Content Officer Edith Chapin refuted Berliner’s article in an email to staff, in which she said she was “proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories.” The network’s political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben suggested that Berliner was no longer welcome in the newsroom, posting on X that, “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.”