NPR whistleblower Uri Berliner, who penned a bombshell expose on the woke one-sidedness of the “public” radio network’s news product, knocked new NPR CEO Katherine Maher for failing to show for Wednesday’s House hearing on the leftist bias of her new employer. She claimed she had a Board of Directors meeting all day.
Instead, Maher submitted written testimony NPR is “bringing trusted, reliable, independent news and information of the highest editorial standards” to tens of millions of listeners. Eli Lake at The Free Press, which ran Berliner’s piece, talked to Berliner about the no-show.
“Why isn’t she there? Is she the right person for the job at this time?” he asked, adding that her written statement “sounds like a pledge drive.” This question could be turned around on Berliner, who surely was invited to testify by the House Republicans.
Berliner also called BS on Maher’s claim that she doesn’t interfere in NPR’s editorial content. “She said she was on the other side of the firewall that separates the newsroom from the CEO,” he told The Free Press in a phone interview. “However, when my story came out, after I had already been suspended for five days without pay, she told editorial staffers in a public statement on the NPR website they had been hurt, demeaned, and disrespected by what I wrote. That’s knocking down the firewall right there.”
He added, “She doesn’t address how NPR’s audience has shifted dramatically over time, from roughly reflecting America to a much narrower progressive slice of the country.” He insisted “NPR needs real leadership now…The board will need to decide whether Katherine Maher is the right person for the job.”
Clearly, they decided Katherine Maher matched NPR’s wokeness nicely, with the donations to election-denying Stacey Abrams and the tweets in defense of looting, which perfectly matched NPR’s vibe.
Fox News media reporter Joseph Wulfsohn reported on Berliner’s comments last weekend at the Dissident Dialogues festival in New York [photo credit: Fox News]. Berliner revealed that one of the “big factors” that motivated him to go public about NPR’s groupthink was Maher’s arrival in March. He hoped the new CEO could “turn a new leaf” for the outlet.
“As I said in my essay, we’re welcoming a CEO, I’ll be rooting for her because I thought, okay, maybe this is the time to bring this up. We’ve got new leadership. Maybe this is the time we could really tackle these things,” Berliner said.
Berliner then pivoted to the memo Maher penned to staff publicly rebuking him: “Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”
“Supposedly there’s what’s called a firewall in the newsroom,” Berliner said. “There’s the newsroom, the editorial team, and there are people who run the business, the CEO. And I think basically in one of her first acts, if not her first act, she crossed over that firewall to criticize me as a journalist. And that I found especially troubling given her views on the First Amendment, free expression.”
Meanwhile, this is the kind of contempt NPR reporters show for their critics: Brian Mann is the guy who I testified failed to cover Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020 in favor of a story titled “Experts Say Attack On Hunter Biden’s Addiction Deepens Stigma For Millions.”
NPR is facing a ton of criticism rn from people who either aren’t actually listening to our reporting or who are just making #%#@ up. Which makes it harder to focus on real questions and critical feedback about our journalism. https://t.co/EOVKMb4ugk
— Brian Mann (@BrianMannADK) May 7, 2024