I told myself I was going to stay out of this thread, but I have another three hours yet on my flight to NAB and haven't run out of battery yet on my phone, so:
I don't work for NPR. I work for an "NPR station," which is to say I work for a local nonprofit that buys programming from NPR and other sources. Our editorial guidelines are determined locally. Nobody in DC (or St. Paul or LA or London) tells us what to cover or how. Sometimes we like the national product that comes from NPR. Sometimes we're frustrated by it, too.
(I am also speaking only for myself here.)
We are one of more than 200 local newsrooms in the public radio system, plus a couple hundred other NPR members that do little or no local news. There's a constant give and take between the network and all of us member stations about a lot of issues that go beyond just news content. It's about whether and how NPR directly distributed its own content (and fundraises off of it) versus distribution through the member stations that pay for most of the cost of producing it, for instance.
I wouldn't want to be NPR CEO. I don't think that person gets to spend most of his or her time focusing on content these days.
Which brings me around to the Berliner piece. I don't know him at all. I think I've heard his name once or twice. There are a lot of people at NPR (even after cutbacks) with a lot of opinions about how it does its job, and he's... one of them.
And that's the thing: this article of his did what I suspect he intended it would. It tapped into a vein of criticism that's not at all new or original, but which allows those who are already inclined to be critical of NPR to feed their confirmation biases. If you're the sort of person who throws around "woke" pejoratively, Uri is right there to tell you everything you believe about NPR is true.
It's entirely possible that much of what he's saying IS true. Again, I don't work there. I hear the same product through my headphones that any audience member hears over the air, at the same time they do. I just happen to get a rundown an hour or two earlier telling me vaguely what will be coming.
Here's what I AM saying: I think Berliner's article represents the opinion and observation of one person looking at one leg joint of an enormous elephant. I think an honest assessment of everything that is "NPR" must take in more viewpoints than just this one, especially if it just happens to confirm exactly what you already thought about the network and the product.
The things I will gladly defend about NPR most of the time are the size and scope of its international coverage, with reporters on the ground in lots of places the commercial networks abandoned years ago, if they ever covered them at all. (Africa, especially.)
I'll defend and support the quality and depth of its arts coverage, which is very, very good almost all of the time.
I'll point to just how solid its hourly newscasts are. If you have three minutes and want to get up to date on what's happening right now, the NPR hourlies are as good as it gets, tightly written and packed with good sound from around the country and world.
I'm not always as impressed by the politics coverage, which falls into a lot of the same traps as commercial news sources - there's a lot of horse-race and often not enough policy context, though at least they try hard.
And here's where Uri and I part ways: I appreciate and admire the commitment NPR has made at the network level to present a lot of diverse voices and to do so in as respectful a way as possible. Our local newsroom follows the same general policy here as the network: try to listen to voices that have often been marginalized, and treat them on the air the way we'd want to be treated in a story about us. That means listening to what people do - and don't - want to be called, and avoiding pejorative descriptions. We would not use "hordes" or "illegals" on our air, for instance.
Any well-meaning effort can go too far, of course. We've pulled back on using "Latinx," for instance.
Back to Uri: the other big point of disagreement I have with him is that his piece seems to brush past the way in which the world around us has changed in recent years. When I started here 20 years ago, there was much more consensus on what facts were and whether they could be discussed civilly. That's no longer the case.
It used to be that our daily talk show could easily book politicians in either major party. That's no longer the case. There's a whole separate reality system in which much of one party operates now that's increasingly unmoored from fact. It would be irresponsible journalism not to call that out. It also means people like Rep. Claudia Tenney, who represents a decent chunk of our listening area, will never appear on our air for an interview by THEIR choice, not ours. She's much happier to go unchallenged on a Newsmax or Fox News. We can't force her to answer our questions, nor can we stop her from using us as a convenient enemy to goose her fundraising and voters.
Finding "balance" in today's environment is far more challenging than it used to be. Berliner's take is that it's because NPR has changed. I think that's far too narrow. I think it's because the world around NPR and local public radio has changed.
There were no "Journalist, Tree, Rope: Assembly Required" t-shirts at political rallies when I got into the business. Now they're a routine merch item at the rallies of one specific candidate and political party. Journalists are human beings who operate in the real world. They're not going to refrain from noticing that or reacting to it. That's another thing Berliner chooses to overlook: if he's right that the majority of journalists belong to one party rather than the other, it's at least to some extent a process of self-selection.
Beyond the fact that we generally don't like to be around people whose shirts say they want us dead (who would?), the qualities that make a good public radio journalist are also often at odds with the overt beliefs of one of our two major political parties right now. Curiosity about the world, a desire to hear from voices that have often been marginalized, an understanding that the world is usually nuanced and rarely black-and-white, engagement with the arts - these are all things one major party's presidential candidate openly mocks every time he's on stage. (I know this is a very long and worst answer, but it's BECAUSE these things are complicated. If NPR feels "snobby" or "elitist," I would contend that it's because it's trying to understand and explain a complicated world that requires complex examination sometimes.)
More Berliner blinders, then: he also elides the reality that there's now a very large and vibrant media ecosystem that is laser-focused on telling those on the right precisely what they want to hear at any given moment. Was Hunter Biden's laptop given too short shrift by NPR? I suppose it's possible. But it's also indubitably true that it was given incredibly extensive coverage on FNC/Newsmax/talk radio. There's one reality where it is the top story for years, and another where it isn't, and it's getting harder and harder to see where those two realities still overlap.
I'm not sure what it is Berliner WANTS, exactly. I don't think an NPR that pivots toward more Hunter Biden laptop coverage ends up serving anybody. It's never going to go far enough toward any one political axis to attract the kind of audience that's already getting exactly what it wants from America's Real Voice (or, at the other end of the circle, The Young Turks), and if it did, what would it be providing that isn't already duplicated somewhere else?
Nor would I want to see NPR pull back from the diversity of its coverage. For all the internal strife that's driven too many good Black hosts out, the lineup of voices coming through my headphones these days sounds a lot more like more of America than it did 20 years ago. Same with our local voices at my station, and we know we can still do better.
Berliner seems bothered by that, and I have no doubt he's finding a large and lucrative audience for that viewpoint. Just keep in mind that it's one viewpoint from a huge organization where hundreds of people are doing their best, day in and day out, to figure out how to cover a very unusual new world in a way that's both fair and honest. If you're drawn specifically to Berliner's take on it because it confirms what you already wanted to believe, that's exactly where a good journalist would start questioning those established beliefs and testing them against the facts.
I don't know what Berliner's endgame here is. If he's hoping NPR will react to him so he can become a victim and get a cushy job somewhere he's more comfortable ideologically, it wouldn't surprise me. We've seen that happen plenty of times. But I don't know him and I would prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt. He's hardly the only one seeing a quickly changing world around him and reacting sharply. I'm not sure his piece really amounts to much more than that.
