NPR senior editor Uri Berliner resigned from the company on Wednesday after he was suspended for speaking out against the taxpayer-funded outlet’s transformation into a liberal echo chamber.
Berliner’s resignation announcement noted the way that NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, reacted to his critique of the network, as well as Maher’s "divisive views."
"I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don’t support calls to defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism," Berliner wrote on X, formerly Twitter. "But 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 Free Press essay."
On April 9, Berliner wrote an op-ed for the Free Press titled, "I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust," in which he lamented how the outlet developed a "devastating" bias over the years.
"It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding," Berliner wrote. "In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population."
Maher pushed back on Berliner’s criticism in a memo, calling it "disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning."
"Asking a question about whether we're living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions," Maher wrote. "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."
Maher, meanwhile, is battling criticism for her left-wing activism and inflammatory opinions—such as excusing rioting and looting in 2020—which she consistently aired on social media prior to joining NPR.
Maher shrugged off widespread looting and property damage during the 2020 riots, saying it was "hard to be mad" about the destruction in a May 2020 post. "White silence is complicity. If you are white, today is the day to start a conversation in your community," she wrote one day later.
In another post, Maher invoked her "cis white mobility privilege" as a reason to help the country get rid of the "spectre of tyranny" following the death of George Floyd.
"Lots of jokes about leaving the US, and I get it. But as someone with cis white mobility privilege, I’m thinking I’m staying and investing in ridding ourselves of this spectre of tyranny," Maher wrote in July 2020.
NPR did not return a request for comment.
Maher is slated to speak at an event called "Disinformation, Journalism, and Technology: A Conversation with Katherine Maher" with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Wednesday. There, she plans to speak about how "malicious falsehoods can be damaging" to democracies and the role journalists have in telling the "truth."