NPR’S LURCH TO THE LEFT:

This past week, a longtime NPR journalist, Uri Berliner, blew the lid off with an article headlined “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.”

Appearing on the Free Press online Substack, the piece has gone viral, as noted in a front-page Washington Times story last Thursday.
Mr. Berliner seems to be the kind of well-intended liberal who believes, despite thousands of years of evidence, that people are basically good and that we just need more government to fix everything.

He says right off the bat that he is “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.”

In other words, he isn’t some MAGA Republican wringing his hands at the outrageous liberal bias that infects most of the press — and NPR in spades.

As of this writing, he is still working for NPR, but I would guess his days are numbered there, and he knew that when he wrote his remarkably candid essay.

* * * * * * * *

The “message from the top,” Mr. Berliner recalls, was that “America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.”

NPR’s staff was subjected to charges of White privilege and forced to undergo diversity training.

“Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace,” Mr. Berliner says. “Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to ‘start talking about race.’”

Affinity groups sprouted, including those representing LGBTQ employees. NPR staffers faithfully pushed transgenderism and were told to “avoid the term biological sex.”

There’s more, but you get the idea. The irony is that Mr. Berliner’s article is superbly written, first-class journalism.

I blame “late-stage capitalism” for NPR-post-2016 decline:

Related: ‘White Silence is Complicity:’ NPR’s New CEO Sounded More Like an Activist Than a Journalist in 2020 Tweets. Katherine Maher said ‘it’s hard to be mad’ about riots that caused up to $2 billion in damage.

UPDATE: New NPR CEO Dubbed Bill Maher ‘Racist Bigot.’

“The future NPR CEO had some choice words for the liberal comedian at the time, although she omitted any facts to back them up,” Christian Toto writes. “Why would the new NPR CEO ever say such a thing? As Bill Maher repeatedly warns, he hasn’t shifted to the Right over the past decade. Many modern liberals shifted to the extreme Left while he stood his ground. For that, he’s been savaged by his fellow progressives.”

WELL, GOOD: Breaking Barriers: CPAP Alternative Matches Efficacy in Clinical Trials. “People with hypertension and obstructive sleep apnea were no less likely to see their blood pressure drop over six months if they used a mandibular advancement device (MAD), which is inserted onto the teeth similar to a bite guard. compared to a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) device, according to research featured at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session. . . . MADs are designed to help keep the airway open by repositioning the lower jaw and moving the tongue forward. Previous studies have shown that CPAP devices outperform MADs in terms of apnea-hypopnea index, the standard metric used to measure sleep apnea severity. However, there is evidence that MADs may be better tolerated than CPAP, which some people find too uncomfortable or cumbersome for sustained use.”

TWO NPRS IN ONE!

Shot: Another Boeing whistleblower says he faced retaliation for reporting ‘shortcuts.’

—NPR, Friday.

Chaser: NPR’s New CEO Scolds 25-Year Veteran For Exposé Outing Network’s Bias.

National Public Radio (NPR) CEO and president Katherine Maher lashed out at senior Editor Uri Berliner over a scathing op-ed he wrote for The Free Press — in which he claimed that NPR had displayed political bias on a number of occasions and, in doing so, had “lost America’s trust.”

Maher, who stepped into her role at NPR just three weeks ago, claimed that Berliner’s assessment — made after 25 years with the outlet — was “deeply simplistic” as well as “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”

Without mentioning Berliner by name — or giving any specifics with regard to his comments — Maher simply claimed that NPR was devoted to providing information to the public, and that the outlet’s “service to this aspirational mission was called in question this week.”

“Asking a question about whether we’re living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions,” Maher continued. “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.”

Maher certainly seems obsessed with “identity:”

Of course, she does have other issues on her mind as well:

UPDATE: Funny, I thought a future public radio executive would be a lot more concerned about the intermingling of church and state:

MORE: NPR CEO AWFL Doubles Down on the Intense Regime Bias at the State Media Company; In Past Tweets, She Declared Trump a “Racist.”