NPR has suspended Uri Berliner, the senior editor who published a bombshell essay a week ago that claimed that the publicly funded outlet has “lost America’s trust” by approaching news stories with a left-wing bias.
NPR media writer David Folkenflik revealed on Tuesday that Berliner beginning on Friday was suspended for five days without pay. Folkenflik, who reviewed a copy of the letter from NPR brass, said that the company told the editor he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets — a requirement of NPR journalists.
NPR called the letter a “final warning,” saying Berliner would be fired if he violated NPR’s policy again.
Neither NPR nor Berliner immediately responded to requests for comment.
Berliner is a dues-paying member of NPR’s newsroom union, but Folkenflik reported that the editor is not appealing the punishment.
Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist who has worked at NPR for 25 years, called out journalistic blind spots around major news events, including the origins of COVID-19, the war in Gaza and the Hunter Biden laptop, in an essay published Tuesday on Bari Weiss’ online news site the Free Press.
The fallout from the essay sparked outrage from many of his colleagues. Late Monday afternoon, NPR chief news executive Edith Chapin announced to the newsroom that executive editor Eva Rodriguez would lead monthly meetings to review coverage.
The fiasco also ignited a firestorm of criticism from prominent conservatives — with former President Donald Trump demanding NPR’s federal funding be yanked — and has led to internal tumult, the New York Times reported Friday.
NPR’s new chief executive Katherine Maher defended NPR’s journalism, calling Berliner’s article “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning,” The 42-year-old exec added that the essay amounted to “a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are.”
Folkenflik said Berliner took umbrage with that, saying she had “denigrated him.” Berliner said that he supported diversifying NPR’s workforce to look more like the US population at large. Maher did not address that in a subsequent private exchange he shared with Folkenflik for the story.
The fiasco soon put the spotlight on Maher, whose own left-leaning bias came to light in a trove of woke, anti-Trump tweets she penned.
In January, when Maher was announced as NPR’s new leader, The Post revealed her penchant for parroting the progressive line on social media — including bluntly biased Twitter posts like “Donald Trump is a racist,” which she wrote in 2018.
That hyper-partisan message was scrubbed from the platform now known as X, but preserved on the site Archive.Today.
It’s unclear when Maher deleted it, or if its removal was tied to her new gig.
Other woke posts remain on Maher’s X account. In 2020, as the George Floyd riots raged, she attempted to justify the looting epidemic in Los Angeles as payback for the sins of slavery.
“I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive,” Maher wrote on May 31, 2020.
“But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.”
The next day, she lectured her 27,000 followers on “white silence.”
“White silence is complicity,” she scolded. “If you are white, today is the day to start a conversation in your community.”
The NPR job is Maher’s first position in journalism or media.
She was previously the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, after holding communications roles for the likes of HSBC, UNICEF and the World Bank.
Maher earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies from New York University, according to her LinkedIn account, and grew up in Wilton, Conn. — a town that her mother, Ceci Maher, now represents as a Democratic state senator.
