The MRC Cheers An NPR Martyr, Part 1

NPR employee Uri Berliner ran to a right-wing website to bash his employer for alleged liberal bias. That didn't go over well in his workplace, but the Media Research Center -- which has been bashing NPR for years -- absolutely loved it.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 7/31/2024

When an NPR employee spouted right-wing talking points at a right-wing website, Tim Graham was quick to play concern troll in an April 9 post:

There’s a blockbuster article at Bari Weiss’s website The Free Press today, headlined “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” Will the writer still be at NPR after this article makes the rounds?

It’s Uri Berliner, a Senior Business Editor for the “public” radio giant. He begins by establishing that he’s a standard NPR-type liberal, but he’s concerned about the current tilt of NPR’s audience: 

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals. 

Berliner thinks NPR used to be more balanced (we’ll agree to disagree), but it all went awry with Trump, and collusion: 

[...]

Berliner also found this never-admit-error tendency with the Hunter Biden laptop (a “pure distraction”) and the Covid lab-leak theory, which had too much “Wuhan flu” energy. One colleague on NPR’s Science Desk “compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again.”

[...]

Berliner thought NPR didn’t have enough fairness and balance of viewpoints. “Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.”

By contrast, Graham has never accused Fox News of having a “never-admit-error tendency” — even as it was forced to do exactly that with its $787 million settlement with Dominion for repeatedly lying to its viewers about election fraud, deception he gave Fox News a pass on — nor has he sought out the voter registrations of Fox News employees (which he should know since so many former MRC employees work there). And he and Berliner are certainly not going to examine the effect of anti-NPR propaganda by the MRC and other right-wing organizations on creating a politically polarized audience there. Graham concluded:

Berliner is holding out hope now that Lansing stepped down as CEO and NPR selected Katharine Maher (not a journalist) as the new CEO. Most of us have no optimism about a Chris Latching move toward fairness. 

We don’t recall Graham ever complaining that longtime Fox News chief Roger Files was not a journalist — he built his career as a right-wing political operative — nor has he demanded that Fox News ever make a move “toward fairness.” Fox News right-wing bias is what he wants NPR and CNN to be, after all.

As this bogus concern-trolling became a full-blown right-wing narrative, Graham followed up the following day:

Joseph Wolfsohn Foxnews.com explored what NPR senior editor Uri Berliner wrote about Israel in his bombshell expose at The Free Press, run by former New York Times editorial writer Bari Weiss. This may be the biggest insider story since Bernard Goldberg wrote about CBS News in his book Bias. But in this case, Berliner is still inside NPR....at least, for now.

First, he mentioned Israel on a list: “There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. 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. It’s almost like an assembly line.”

[...]

Berliner’s page at NPR.org shows he helped with a 2022 story on how Adidas cut Trump-backing rapper Kanye West loose after anti-Semitic outbursts. But since October 7, NPR’s been more aggressive in promoting the Council on American-Islamic Relations (and their claims of exploding Islamophobia) than the Anti-Defamation League, and both are firmly on the Left. 

Graham citing a story about Kanye West’s anti-Semitism is ironic because the MRC was extremely slow to criticize his anti-Semitic turn after years of praising him for spouting conservatively correct narratives. Needless to say, Graham is never going to demand that Wulfsohn turn the same critical eye to his own employer (and the former MRCers who now work there) instead of a designated right-wing enemy. He also didn’t explain why media outlets should deny the existence of Islamophobia.

Nicholas Fondacaro helped to ramp up the victimhood of Berliner in another April 10 post:

25-year NPR veteran Uri Berliner recently came forward to call out his employer and colleagues for being liberally biased in a way that was harming the credibility of their reporting. And in a Tuesday night appearance on NewsNation’s Cuomo, host Chris Cuomo shared his concern that NPR would target him and “kick [him] to the curb.” But Berliner said he was getting a lot of support from colleagues, including from surprising sources.

“On that issue of media trust, there was a bombshell today, a whistleblower in effect on bias in the media,” Cuomo announced at the top of the show. “Among his claims: NPR was stacked with like-minded people who appealed to an ever-narrow, progressive worldview catering to a select audience and losing its audience as a result.”

Cuomo agreed with Berliner’s assessment that “political diversity” was not something newsrooms prioritized, adding that it was one of the reasons he chose to join NewsNation:

[...]

On how NPR had gotten so liberally biased, Cuomo wondered: “Are you saying that’s the truth or are you saying it’s something that has evolved? What do you want people to feel about NPR and what you feel about the media in general?”

Berliner felt that NPR had “a liberal orientation” at first but “evolved” to be a place of “much narrower kind of niche thinking, a group think that’s really clustered around various selective progressive views.” He added that “they don’t allow enough air and enough spaciousness to consider all kinds of perspectives.”

Neither Fondacaro nor Cuomo would ever dare to so aggressively criticize the right-wing bias of Fox News. That’s the tell that this is nothing more than partisan concern-trolling. Indeed, the MRC pretends that Cuomo’s employer has no bias at all.

Graham summarized his concern-trolling narrative in his April 12 column:

Is National Public Radio fair and balanced? Do they care what you think?

NPR has a “Public Editor” to monitor listener complaints and concerns, but as we all know, the majority of their listeners are going to complain they’re not “progressive” enough. In 2021, Public Editor Kelly McBride appeared on Brian Stelter’s CNN podcast to praise NPR’s decision to allow their journalists to go to (leftist) public protests so they can “bring their full humanity to work with them.”

When Stelter asked about NPR’s critics, McBride dismissed any conservative complaints about a leftist tilt because they are not “genuinely interested in improving NPR.” McBride claimed her job was to coach NPR “to achieve its own internally stated goals. It doesn’t help to be magnifying disingenuous criticism.” To balance NPR is to harm NPR?

Graham has never criticized Fox News for never having a public editor, nor has it demanded that it listen to critics of its right-wing bias. He also whined about NPR media critic David Folkenflik (as he is wont to do):

Folkenflik has been an NPR media reporter since 2004, and he has never interviewed me or anyone else at the Media Research Center for one of his reports on media performance, including in his multitude of hostile stories on Fox News. 

If Graham wants to play that game, it’s worth noting that he has never interviewed ConWebWatch about our criticism of his employer, nor has he ever invited us to appear on his three-times-a-week podcast. If he wants an open discussion about the media, he has to show he wants one. Given that the MRC’s TV hits these days are almost exclusively on right-wing channels where people with differing views are forbidden from taking part, there’s no reason to believe Graham has any interest whatsoever in doing anything but spout right-wing talking points, which add nothing to any discussion of the media.

He also complained that CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy — whom the MRC also irrationally hates — accurately pointed out that “Fox News quickly pounced” on the story and that Berliner’s article is “nothing short but a massive gift to the right,” whose top priority is “vilifying the news media,” responding with only the lame whataboutism that Darcy “vilifies Fox News as fake news and argues it should be deplatformed by cable companies.”

This is why the criticism of Graham and the MRC fail — they refuse to apply the standards they demand that NPR follow to its fellow right-wing media, and they don’t respect the opinions of other media critics that don’t advance their preferred narratives.

The concern-trolling continued when an MRC contributor appeared on a right-wing podcast on April 12:

MRC contributing writer Stephanie Hamill was a guest on “The Kimberly Guilfoyle Show” on Rumble with host Kimberly Guilfoyle on Thursday to discuss the latest trending news, including the latest scandal at NPR.

Uri Berliner, Senior Business Editor for the public radio giant, has come out publicly accusing the broadcaster of left-wing bias, basically confirming what we already knew.

Guilfoyle is a longtime Fox News employee, so Hamill would never issue a complaint about all the right-wing bias on that channel.

Tim Graham unsurprisingly devoted his April 12 podcast to the manufactured controversy:

This week, National Public Radio senior editor Uri Berliner sent shock waves through their staff by going public with an article on The Free Press website about how they lost the public’s trust due to an explicit animus against Donald Trump. Since Trump entered politics, the public radio network’s audience has become even more dominated by very liberal Americans.

But it didn’t start with Trump. NewsBusters can tell you NPR has demonstrated a leftist bent from the beginning. NPR legal reporter Nina Totenberg destroyed the Douglas Ginsburg nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, then tried again with Clarence Thomas in 1991. This animus against conservatives didn’t kick in suddenly in 2015.

[...]

NPR executives tried to claim that “inclusion” of differing views is an NPR value — but anyone who listens to NPR on a regular basis quickly figures out that this is a taxpayer-funded liberal sandbox. There’s no real room for conservative views. When Republicans appear, NPR staffers are on the attack.

CNN’s Oliver Darcy complained that Uri Berliner’s article demanding more viewpoint diversity on NPR was a “massive gift to the Right.” On a daily basis, taxpayer-funded NPR is nothing short of a massive gift to the Left, pumping out progressive propaganda to over 1,000 stations.  Because it has “public” in its branding, too many Americans still think it’s fair and balanced and a service to everyone, which only signals they’re not paying enough attention to the product.

Fox News long claimed to be “fair and balanced,” but Graham would never call that branding dishonest. He roped the new CEO of NPR into things in an April 13 post:

New NPR CEO Katherine Maher tried to rally the troops on Friday with a memo to staff that vaguely attacked NPR senior editor Uri Berliner’s expose of the taxpayer-funded network’s viewpoint diversity. She never actually mentioned Berliner, or seemed to engage with his overall argument.

Instead, she vaguely expressed insult at Berliner noting the existence of a pile of identity groups among the employees: “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.”

[...]

In the end, Maher just supports more internal talk, not an engagement with “the enemy,” the conservatives who are shut out. She announced they were “establishing quarterly NPR Network-wide editorial planning and review meetings, as a complement to our other channels for Member station engagement.”

By contrast, Graham and the MRC see us as “the enemy” for merely critiquing its work, and it absolutely refuses to engage with us, muting or blocking us on Twitter/X and declining to invite us to take part in any public discussions. Instead, Graham played gotcha with Maher by digging old tweets made well before she was employed by NPR. (Graham also touched on this in his April 15 podcast.)

The MRC published an April 15 column by Larry Elder taking a partisan whack at NPR, which was followed by another post by Graham touting Fox News attacking NPR again:

On Sunday’s MediaBuzz show on the Fox News Channel, host Howard Kurtz brought on ex-NPR reporter Juan Williams to recall his own in-house experience with the radical left inside NPR. Kurtz also noted most of the “mainstream” media have skipped any mention of the hubbub over NPR senior editor Uri Berliner’s expose. 

KURTZ: You know, The New York Times waited the two days and then a did a sort of ‘NPR in Turmoil’ piece but didn’t get into any of the specifics. Nothing in The Washington Post, nothing at Politico, nothing on air at CNN or MSNBC. Doesn’t that prove Berliner’s point? If this had been a senior Fox person speaking out, I think it would have been covered nine seconds later!

WILLIAMS: Oh, I don’t think there’s any question, I can tell you that. 

The liberal dissidents inside Fox News turn to anti-Fox authors like Brian Stelter or Michael Wolff instead of going public, and remain anonymous until they can dish to the next Fox-hater who comes along. 

But, again, neither Graham nor Kurtz would ever hold Fox News to the same standards of objectivity it demands of NPR — and it would attack any “dissident” as disloyal to Fox’s right-wing agenda, refusing to give that person the victimhood treatment they’re currently heaping on Berliner.

The fact that Kurtz does not hold his employer to those same standards is the reason he remains employed by Fox News. It’s the same reason Graham and his fellow MRC co-workers continue to appear on the channel, where their views are never challenged and no opposing viewpoint is allowed to take part.

Berliner becomes a martyr

When Berliner faced the consequences of his actions from his employer, Tim Graham pounced on it in an April 16 post:

In his latest company-man report, NPR media reporter David Folkenflik revealed that NPR senior editor Uri Berliner was suspended without pay for five days (beginning Friday) for deciding his years of internal advocacy for more fairness and balance in NPR’s coverage had been fruitless, so he went public. 

Folkenflik disclosed that Berliner, as a senior editor for Business, had edited many of his stories, and shared with him the formal rebuke from management:

[...]

So that means the article for The Free Press and his interview on their podcast is what’s being punished, and specifically for reporting the fact that 67 percent of NPR’s current audience identifies as liberal or very liberal.

Graham spent his April 17 column nitpicking an NPR host who caught Berliner in a error:

National Public Radio senior editor Uri Berliner has been suspended for his unauthorized critique of the insular liberal bias of his network. NPR star and Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep took to his Substack blog to slam Berliner’s article as “filled with errors and omissions.”

“His colleagues have had a rich dialogue about his mistakes,” Inskeep crowed, and dropped the bomb that it was “an article that discredited itself.”

For example, Inskeep declared an error in that Berliner found in D.C. voter records that NPR had 87 registered Democrats and no registered Republicans. When he was asked about Berliner at the San Antonio Book Festival, he says he told them “I am a prominent member of the newsroom in Washington. If Uri told the truth, then I could only be a registered Democrat. I held up my voter registration showing I am registered with ‘no party’. Some in the crowd gasped. Uri had misled them.”

Berliner didn’t address if anyone was registered as “no party.” He did write there were zero Republicans. Did Inskeep refute that? No. Several NPR veterans harrumphed they registered as “no party,” just as left-wing journalists will tell pollsters they are “independents.”

Inskeep wrote, “While it’s widely believed that most mainstream journalists are Democrats, I’ve had colleagues that I was pretty sure are conservative (I don’t ask).” That rebuts Berliner how?

That was information that Berliner deliberately chose to exclude in his article because he wanted to feed the right-wing (and MRC) narrative that NPR is a bunch of Democratic partisans. Graham concluded by huffing:

But the most ridiculous line in Inskeep’s critique is claiming Berliner advocates “viewpoint diversity,” but he didn’t embrace it in his article, which spurred all his “errors and omissions.” If NPR is so committed to viewpoint diversity, would Inskeep agree to debate Berliner on air at NPR for an hour or two? Probably not. NPR hasn’t said one word on air about Berliner’s complaint.

That’s another bit of hypocrisy from Graham. He would never ask a non-right-wing media observer to be a guest on his thrice-weekly podcast, and the TV hits by him and his fellow MRC employees these days happen only on right-wing channels were there is no risk of anyone with a differing view taking part — which ramped up when John Avlon wiped the floor with Graham during a 2016 CNN appearance.

Berliner resigned from NPR later that day, apparently choosing to make himself a martyr instead of working things out with his employer. And Graham was quickly on that as well:

Shortly before 11 am on Wednesday, NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner resigned at about the time his suspension without pay was going to end.

The most important part was where he took on woke new NPR CEO Katherine Maher: “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my essay at The Free Press.”

Maher’s pom-pom memo to NPR staff (posted publicly on NPR.org) claimed Berliner (who wasn’t named) was attacking NPR staff not for what they report, but “who they are.”

[...]

While many of us thought Berliner’s days were numbered when his essay was posted, it would be a test of NPR’s intolerance to see if Berliner could remain. He could not. 

Of course, nobody forced Berliner to resign — he did that of his own volition. Graham leaned into calling Berliner a “martyr” and blamed NPR for somehow forcing him to resign (though he offered no evidence this was the case):

“Martyr” is too strong a word, but it is an exhibit of their complete unwillingness to listen to a critique on fairness and balance and groupthink and wokeness. It begs for a congressional hearing with Berliner and with Maher, maybe shoulder to shoulder. 

[...]

Berliner voted against Trump twice. But voting for Democrats isn’t enough in this taxpayer-funded sandbox for leftists. You have to be in sync with all the leftist lingo and the interest groups that push it, from GLAAD to CAIR. 

There’s more hypocrisy here too. Graham was silent when Fox News fired politics editor Chris Stirewalt after the 2020 election because he led the team that made the call that Donald Trump had lost in Arizona — a view Fox News management opposed because it infuriated Trump and disappointed viewers invested in pro-Trump narratives, even though the call was proven correct. (Still, the MRC’s Curtis Houck made sure to cite Stirewalt’s Fox News pedigree in trying to bolster the supposed viewpoint diversity of his new employer, NewsNation.)

Graham rehashed all this in his April 17 podcast:

After stirring up a hornet’s nest at NPR about a leftist tilt, senior editor Uri Berliner resigned Wednesday, but that doesn’t mean NPR types can refute his argument on their seemingly inevitable insularity and intolerance. New CEO Katherine Maher insulted Berliner as attacking staffers for “who they are,” when he was criticizing them for engaging in identity politics first, not journalism.

Berliner announced “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my essay at the Free Press.” Maher’s tweets show she supports race-based reparations, rioting, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She believes “America is addicted to white supremacy.” She talks about “cis white mobility privilege” without smirking. She won’t have children because “the planet is literally burning.”

At NPR, these tweets are not disqualifying — they’re qualifying. Berliner warns against journalists identifying with a “tribe” — race, gender, religion, or sexual preference. Maher embraces racial tribalism, beginning with a pledge to overcome her own white privilege.

Graham made no mention of Stirewalt, who was fired for putting the truth ahead of a political narrative.