What do you do when you claim to be a neutral venue, but one of your own outs you as completely partisan?
Here’s your answer, via Joe DePaolo’s article at (equally leftward) mediaite.com:
NPR has suspended a veteran editor who accused the outlet of having “lost America’s trust” with consistently left-leaning “advocacy” content the editor called “devastating” to its journalism.
Longtime NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik reported Tuesday that Uri Berliner — NPR’s senior business editor who slammed the outlet in a recent column — has been suspended for five days without pay.
“It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed,” Berliner wrote. “We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding. In recent years, however, that has changed. … An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America. That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.”
Now why would Mr. Berliner have said this? Could it be that by actual count, NPR’s staff has a total of 87 Democrats…and no Republicans?
Or that, regarding its newly appointed CEO, Katharine Maher, the article tells us that “Right-leaning pundits on social media have uncovered posts from Maher in which she — among other things — appeared to downplay rioting during social justice protests”?
(Why does it matter whether the people who uncovered this information – which is unchallenged by mediaite – are, in its view, “right-leaning pundits”? You try to figure it out, I can’t).
In any event, Uri Berliner is suspended without pay. And what kind of reception do you think he’ll get from the 87-0 crowd when he comes back/how much longer do you think he’ll last there?
That’s one we won’t have to figure out. We’ll find out soon enough.
