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NPR Suspends Uri Berliner for Five Days Without Pay
This is the 25-year NPR veteran who wrote a piece on The Free Press about NPR’s monolithic point of view, and its stunning lack of newsroom diversity (something like 86 Democrats/0 Republicans at its HQ) as well as citing specific examples of its failure to cover major news stories fairly over the past fifteen or so years.
I guess they are really mad at him. The Chief News Executive of NPR stated, in their response, that
“We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” she wrote. “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.”
She added, “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.”
A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network’s chief content officer, would have no further comment.
Well, she may not have further comment. But apparently NPR, in an effort to support those “vigorous discussions,” has dropped the other shoe.
What a surprise.
(I do also wonder, these days, whether Catherine Herridge has ever reflected on the bad old days at Fox News, and whether she might not have done better to stick it out there, rather than moving to CBS where she thought she’d have more freedom to report the “truth.”)
Published in General
You misspelled CBS, the correct spelling is SeeBS.
Cut that cord. Defund them.
To her credit Herridge has never disparaged FNC and that network continues to represent her in her current legal problems. She left in 2019 when her contract was up. That she praised her new employer at the time is hardly surprising.
As for Berliner, none of that is surprising, either. Journalists are some of the most thin skinned people I know. What gets praise in other industries as being “brave,” i.e. a whistleblower willing to air his company’s dirty laundry in public, is considered betrayal.
Will never happen. The GOP will never do it.
So much for Journalistic Ethics.
It is a hoot, because this is exactly the sort of bias they could be happy to report upon outside their own homes.
Such utter hypocrisy.
Yes, but will MAGA?
That it might be hypocritical is not the same as violating the code of Journalistic Ethics.
Regarding Herridge, good for her and for FOX, although I’m with She in that from my vantage point, her going from FOXNews to CBS made no sense.
Perhaps not. But reprisals against this guy for speaking words they don’t like is uncomfortably close to their regular panjandrums (carefully chosen word) in which they shout that Trump is an authoritarian/dictator who will shut down any speech that contravenes his own beliefs.
As someone once said (I can’t be bothered to go back and find one, but approximate examples abound):
Sauce for the goose, etc.
None of us are privy to her contract negotiations. Fox was handing out big contracts to their primetime opinion hosts at the time and they may not have wanted to give her what CBS was offering. Herridge need not be a fool.
I didn’t call her a fool. And although she didn’t diss Fox all that much when she left, what she did say was:
Frankly (and this is just me speaking) I’d rather leave storytelling to some of us on Ricochet. “Storytelling,” as a matter of news reporting and the advancement of a political narrative, is what got us Dan Blather and the Killian files.
As for facts? They do indeed matter. Right now, I’m going with the facts.
And I look at that no differently than any free agent talent saying nice things about their new employer. It’s akin to a pitcher joining a new MLB club and talking nice before he finds out the owner is a psychopath, the manager is held captive to the GM’s Sabermetrics nerds and the team’s big slugger has been trying to hide the fact that he tore his labrum six months ago while snowboarding. You never truly understand what you’re getting yourself into until you’re on the inside.
And while I’m on the baseball analogy, that’s Berliner’s problem as well. He broke the code of the clubhouse.
I would say that’s absolutely true.
But, wow, it makes it impossible to ever again imagine that they entertain different points of view on the issues of the day.
Obviously, they believe that the singular Democratic Party viewpoint is what their market wants from them. And they certainly have a right to sell only ham sandwiches.
But it is interesting that apparently Berliner never got that menu formally from management. From what I read in his statement, he seemed to think NPR was trying to be a normal news agency.
I bet he won’t stay much longer. Employers can fire or discipline anyone they want as long as they stipulate their expectations at the time of hiring. In general, employers can’t make up rules as they go along and fire people who were working under different “conditions of hire” (my sister worked in the unemployment compensation field :) ).
It would be interesting to read NPR’s contract terms and to find out what he thought his job was. :) :) :)
https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp
Gather, update and correct information throughout the life of a news story.
Pretty sure what Uri talked about violates all these things.
So when he held them accountable, they attacked him.
I see that as an ethical violation.
Punishing someone for pointing out an ethical violation, is by its nature, unethical because it make further ethical corrections less likely to happen.
They used to have a presenter named Daniel Schorr who would give measured, reflective opinions on current topics. He show would come on during my drive home from work.
I once heard him asked about a topic and he began to opine in his wise manner that it was bad. Surprisingly, it was opposite to the expected narrative. The questioner jumped in with a follow up question that was explicitly framed to lead Mr Schorr in the other direction. He got it instantly, flipped his position with as much as subtlety as he could, and went on to expound on the good things.
It was obvious that:
1. He wasn’t prepared.
2. He could reel off soundbites that sounded profound without preparation.
3. He could argue both sides with equal sincerity and “wisdom.”
I see Daniel Schorr passed away in 2010. I don’t remember when this broadcast occurred, but I haven’t made that commute in 20 years. NPR’s bias goes back farther than 15 years.
Edit: Shore should be “Schorr.”
Sounds like many Never-Trump types regarding their supposedly conservative positions.
And this:
He never lost his job or even apologized for what he did to Goldwater in 1964.
Good point.
In the 1990s, I would wake up to KQED and Morning Edition. There was a particularly combative interviewer/reporter that I sort of liked. He was combative with everyone, so I couldn’t tell what his personal views were, though liberal is a safe guess. IIRC, and I probably don’t, his name was Steve. It was about that time that some people in CA were saying that NPR had gone right-wing. At that time, I thought their reporting was fair. My complaint was about what they thought was worth air time. They simply ignored things that didn’t fit their narrative.
Considering that the authors of the first CNN piece cited above include the “former chief economist for Hillary Clinton’s transition team,”and the executive director of a national organization “dedicated to winning paid family leave for everyone in the United States;” and the author of the third piece is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, it’s hard to see how either of these pieces (both of which CNN says do not necessarily represent its own views, but are merely those of their respective authors), make any sort of relevant case here.
The second piece, “Trump’s Budget to Include Paid Family Leave,” is the only piece of actual CNN reportage and is (somewhat surprisingly), quite fairly represented.
I don’t hold much brief for CNN as a news organization myself, but I think the increasingly regular tactic of taking headlines from “opinion” pieces and then presenting those that show opposing viewpoints as examples of supposedly incoherent and mendacious left-wing messaging is a nasty trick.
There’s plenty to object to and talk about WRT the media without falling for such cheap maneuvers ourselves.
I think I should address that in a separate and more specific post. Not just the ethics of good journalism, but the return of partisan media now that the internet has leveled the distribution playing field.
Edith needs to get out more.
Yet it’s the same ol’ media outlets that get pushed by Google when you attempt to look for information on breaking news. There are other sources out there but they are effectively suppressed. Thus there were a lot of people seriously uninformed about Hunter’s laptop because the hivemind cowered behind a letter from fifty one former intelligence officials.
Yeah. I’m not so wild about the sports analogy myself, but whatever.
On the other end of the stick, there are times when a person is toddling along quite well in the clubhouse, and wakes up one day to discover that there’s a new manager in town and all previous bets are off.
Apparently this happened at NPR fairly recently (January 2024).
Here she is:
I can see why she’d feel threatened by someone who wasn’t playing nice in her kitchen, and would find someone questioning the organization’s integrity “profoundly disrespectful” of what she thinks is the “aspirational mission” of NPR to “illuminate the very sense of what it means to have a shared public identity as fellow Americans in this sprawling and enduringly complex nation.”
That he would indulge in “criticism of our people on the basis of who we are,” was–apparently–a bridge too far for this woman who is all too willing to throw white, cis, able-bodied men and women under the bus, and to celebrate the destruction caused by people who’ve never been owned by another human being when they destroy the property, lives, and persons of people who’ve never owned another human being, whenever it suits her.
Just like this woman, I’m white too. But while she thinks that–because of her whiteness–her own hair “doesn’t automatically carry [the] freight of…everyone else’s encoded assumptions and biases,” I’ve been a red head for most of my life. So I’m totally familiar with that sort of prejudice. At the hair level, if not the race level. LOL.
It’s tougher than you think. NPR itself could (and should) do without its Fed subsidy entirely; it’s not very much of their budget. So cutting the money wouldn’t kill them off. They have a relatively popular brand name among liberals; I’ve long claimed that forever-ailing PBS would have been better off rebranding themselves as “NPR Television”.
A lot of Corporation for Public Broadcasting support of radio goes directly to stations in rural areas to fund technical operations and engineering. The locals tend to support that. They like having nearby colleges broadcasting the Sunday concert hour. They aren’t thinking about NPR’s cutting-edge commentary on abortion pill access in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Sure, cut the money. It won’t make much difference. What I’d like to cut is purely symbolic, but would wound them deeply: cut the legitimacy of calling it “National” or “Public”. Let them be called “Proudly Progressive Radio” if they want, if they pay their own way. If they can support themselves through listener donations and local subsidies, fine. But on no account can they claim they have a mandate from the American public, that we support their editorial issues, or that they in any way stand for us. That’s the source of their claimed authority.
Cool.
What about the timing, which CNN and others are definitely responsible for?
That’s an accounting trick. Their direct grant is a small percentage of their budget. But the member stations get hundreds of millions of dollars in direct grants, and immediately pay most (maybe all?) of it back to NPR as ‘dues’.
Defunding NPR means also defunding the station grants. The broadcast licenses can be sold off.
I agree. It’s not the money itself. It’s the [improper] imprimatur of legitimacy that comes with “National” and “Public.”
I’ve long found it interesting that people with whom I’m conversing specify “NPR” as their source for information or an assertion, rather than “radio” that they would cite for any other information, as though they considered NPR categorically different from any other radio.