NPR Editor-in-Chief Edith Chapin hit back at the scathing op-ed from a veteran NPR editor who wrote about how the outlet “lost America’s trust” and has said his colleagues “secretly agree.”
In response to The Free Press article from NPR Senior Business Editor Uri Berliner, titled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” Chapin wrote in a memo to employees, “I and my colleagues on the leadership team strongly disagree with Uri’s assessment of the quality of our journalism and the integrity of our newsroom processes.”
“We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” Chapin added. “We believe that inclusion-among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage-is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world.”
However, Chapin noted that “none of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole.”
Speaking to NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo, Berliner defended his op-ed — where he wrote that NPR no longer has an audience that “reflects America” — pointing to a lack of “viewpoint diversity,” and said he’s gotten “a lot of support from colleagues, and many of them unexpected, who say they agree with me.”
“Some of them say this confidentially,” he added, noting that he wrote it because “we’ve been too reluctant, too frightened to, too timid to deal with these things.”
“And I think that this is, this is the right opportunity to bring it all out in the open,” Berliner continued.
In the piece, Berliner wrote how his network had “lost its way,” pointing to various examples, including coverage of transgender issues and the refusal to use terms like “biological sex.”
“It’s frictionless — one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies,” Berliner said, adding that all appeared to be covered and framed in the same fashion. After George Floyd’s death, he said the message came down from the top of the network, “America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given.”
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“In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.),” Berliner wrote.
“The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives,” he added.