Uri Berliner of NPR fired: NAJ graphic
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Another American media outlet is rocked by a self-inflicted scandal.
It’s not clear what National Public Radio’s business editor Uri Berliner was thinking when he decided to bash his employer as “liberal” on a Substack newsletter run by a known conservative flame thrower, Bari Weiss, who was herself fired from the New York Times and called the newspaper “liberal” for it.
Perhaps she promised him fame and fortune in Substack land, or a chance to cover politics instead of the economy and business. It was not his job to edit political stories or comment on politics. So where does his expertise come from to attack the rest of the staff as “liberal?”
When I first saw someone share this opinion column on Facebook, I tried to read it. But the disconnect from reality was so palpable I dismissed it as the ravings of someone who had lost his mind to long-Covid or something.
But then the story was covered by the New York Times and the Washington Post, and Berliner was fired for not getting clearance to publish a free-lance op-ed without permission.
He could have been fired for simply not understanding what has been going on in political journalism for the past decade or more, but again, it was not his job to cover politics. Maybe that’s what he wanted. Now he’s free to write commentary about politics on Substack, and go after traffic from Trump fans. But he will most likely be disappointed, since it’s patently obvious that Trump fans do not read at all.
Maybe he could become a guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast the War Room, although it’s not clear how he will get paid. Maybe a conservative publisher will give him a book deal? Again, it will not sell. Nobody reads much anymore, but no one would go wrong accusing Trump fans of not reading or buying books. It’s not even clear they can read much beyond X tweets or Facebook comments.
Berliner’s flawed analysis accused NPR of mishandling three major stories: The allegations of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia in 2016, the origins of the coronavirus, and the authenticity and relevance of Hunter Biden’s laptop. On the face of it, I found this criticism dead wrong on all fronts. There is much to criticize about NPR’s coverage drift in recent years, but these stories were not the problem.
First of all, he claims that the report of special counsel Robert Mueller investigating Trump campaign collaboration with Russia in 2016 “found no credible evidence of collusion,” which is a far cry from the facts.
Here is what we reported at the time.
In stark contrast to the fearless federal prosecutor President Donald J. Trump has worried about for the past two years and a majority of the American people have expected to hear from when Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued his investigative report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, the nearly full but redacted report released by Attorney General William Barr on Thursday lets Trump off the legal hook for conspiracy in spite of a mountain of evidence of collusion, and punts a decision on obstruction of justice to Congress in spite of enough evidence to convince the most skeptical grand jury in Virginia of the president’s guilt.
While the Mueller report details many facts we have known for months about multiple contacts between Trump campaign officials with Russian actors trying to influence the election and curry favor with Trump, about the only thing it concludes definitely is that Russia interfered in the election.
“… the Special Counsel’s investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election principally through two operations. First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working on the Clinton Campaign and then released stolen documents,” the report concludes.
“The investigation also identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign,” the report states. “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
The problem was that Trump’s new attorney general, William Barr — who replaced Jeff Sessions of Alabama who was himself involved in colluding with Russia during the campaign — downplayed the report and took no action against Trump, clearly responding to pressure from then-president Trump to dismiss the investigation.
“NPR’s coverage was notably sparse,” Berliner claims. “Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.”
Of course it did. That’s what happens to old stories that are mishandled by political hacks like Bill Barr. What was the news outlet to do? The investigation was covered, and so was Barr’s mishandling of it. Other stories came along and had to be covered.
Berliner also seems to think NPR should have spent more air time covering Hunter Biden’s laptop, a story that was all over right-wing media like Fox News, News Max and Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News. It was a “nothing burger” of a story and the news staff was right to downplay it.
Berliner also seems to think more time should have spent covering the sensational and wrong conspiracy theory on the origin of the coronavirus, the so-called Lab Leak theory. If it is the job of a news organization to find the truth, NPR should have spent less time covering the lab leak story being pushed by Trump and his right wing buddies, and more time covering the actual science of where the virus originated, in the outhouse of a meat market in Wuhan, China.
Here is the definitive story never covered in-depth by NPR.
Now, let’s talk about real reasons many people no longer listen to NPR, including me.
First a little background.
I was a daily listener of NPR for many years, until recently, since 1981 when a political science professor at the University of Alabama mentioned it in class and said it was a great way to get the news in the morning and afternoon “without all those distracting pictures” on television. Her name was Barbara Chotiner, and she was no liberal. In fact, she had studied Soviet politics during the Cold War at Columbia University and often cited Henry Kissinger as well as Zbigniew Brzezinski.
For years I listened to WUAL, the public radio station in Tuscaloosa, and not just for the news. I liked to study with the classical music in the background, and later would use that as background for writing news stories myself. I also liked the jazz at night.
In recent years, it has come to be nearly impossible for news outlets to be totally unbiased and cover both sides equally, since let’s face facts. How can you be fair to Trump’s MAGA Republicans when everything they utter that comes out of their mouths is a blatant falsehood?
I found that NPR and other broadcast news outlets did the best job they had ever done in the months after the 2020 election when Trump was calling the results into question, and after Jan. 6, 2021, when everybody was factually reporting that Trump’s claims about a “stolen election” were false and that the attack on the Capitol was the result of a seditious conspiracy and an insurrection and even a coup attempt.
But then once President Joe Biden was sworn in, there was an attempt by every mainstream news outlet to find ways to go back to being “fair and balanced” and to criticize Biden just as they had criticized Trump when he was in office. For months a day did not go by when someone was covering the story that Biden was “too old” to run for reelection.
That is the nature of news, it seems, to criticize whoever is in power, whether they are doing a good job or not.
The beginning of the end of my interest in listening to news on NPR came when they just could not stop covering the U.S. military pullout of Afghanistan, a story that faded in most news outlets after a couple of weeks. It seemed NPR had invested in correspondents in Kabul and could not let it go. For months they spent an inordinate amount of air time still covering this, criticizing Biden for it, even though the planned pullout was simply enforcement of a plan that had been approved by Trump before he left office. It was the right thing to do, and the story should have faded from coverage.
Then NPR hired Ayesha Rascoe whose high pitched, mousy voice began to show up on many of the shows I had listened to over the years, including Weekend Edition.
Berliner’s essay labeled her as a “DEI hire” who has “never read a book in her life.” I don’t know about that, but I know that for many years in the early days of broadcast news, on air personalities often went through voice training to sound like they were from the Mid-West.
I don’t know how Rascoe, a Black woman, got her job or what her qualifications were for it. But my problem has nothing to do with her race. It’s just that every word that comes out of her mouth sounds like she is talking to 4-year-old children in kindergarten. I don’t think educated adults who had listened to NPR for decades appreciate being talked down to like they are children. I certainly don’t like it, and turn it off every time I hear her voice.
My position is that National Public Radio should be “educational radio” like public television. But I don’t think anyone expects kindergarten children to listen to national political news on NPR.
Then, for many years, since it began taking funding from the likes of the Koch Brothers, NPR had become more like the “fair and balanced” mainstream media that gave too much air time to Trump and other right-wing, conservative politicians in 2015 and 2016.
Since Biden was sworn in, all the major broadcast and cable news networks have been doing the same thing. I don’t watch CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday anymore either for similar reasons, and I don’t think I’m alone.
Berliner seems to think the way to be a better news organization is to kowtow even more to the radical right. He claims the radio station lost “conservative” listeners over the past few years, ostensibly because the editors did not chase every bit of sensational MAGA clickbait.
But that has very little to do with how they cover stories. Like many news outlets, including many of the now defunct, out of business newspapers, everybody lost those viewers when Trump came along. His fans were more likely to listen to his YouTube channel than any mainstream news outlet anyway, until he was booted from Twitter and YouTube after Jan. 6, 2021 for inciting an insurrection with false claims of a stolen election.
People were so burned out on Trump news and the Coved pandemic in the Spring of 2021 that every news outlet lost circulation and ratings dropped once Biden took over in the White House and Coved vaccines became available. People took a break from the news and started traveling again. Maybe Berliner should have covered this story, and he would have known what he was talking about.
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