News of the World

[DerVVulfman]

Senior NPR Editor Admits RussiaGate Was a ‘Swing and a Miss’,Expresses Regret over Hitching Wagon to Schiff

Senior NPR business editor Uri Berliner admitted in an explosive op-ed published Tuesday that the public radio station’s RussiaGate reporting was a bust, and that it did not fess up to that after no “Russian collusion” was found between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Furthermore, Berliner admitted that then-California Senate candidate Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) became the news outlet’s “guiding hand” in this fruitless endeavor, and expressed regret in hitching its wagon to him. Schiff was the main pusher of the Russia collusion hoax in Congress and had repeatedly insisted there was “circumstantial evidence” of collusion.

That was mere days ago.  And now....

TOP NPR EDITOR URI BERLINER SUSPENDED
SAYS WOKE CEO IS OPPOSITE OF WHAT NETWORK NEEDS

NPR suspended a top editor who ripped the network last week over its left-leaning bias – but the journalist doubled down on Tuesday, saying its new, controversial CEO is the “opposite” of what the embattled radio outlet needs.

Uri Berliner – who published a bombshell essay last week claiming NPR has “lost America’s trust” by reporting the news with a left-wing slant – was sidelined for five days without pay beginning last Friday after his article ignited a firestorm.

Nevertheless, Berliner in a Tuesday interview ripped NPR CEO Katherine Maher over a trove of past posts unearthed on X. Those included calling Donald Trump “racist” in 2018 and blasting Hillary Clinton for using the terms “boy” and “girl,” saying she was “erasing language for non-binary people.”

“We’re looking for a leader right now who’s going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about,” Berliner told NPR media scribe David Folkenflik Tuesday. “And this seems to be the opposite of that.”

Folkenflik, who reviewed a copy of the suspension letter from NPR brass, said the company told Berliner he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets — a requirement for NPR journalists.

NPR called the letter a “final warning,” saying Berliner would be fired if he violated its policy again. Berliner is a dues-paying member of NPR’s newsroom union, but Folkenflik reported that the editor is not appealing the punishment.

Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist who has worked at NPR for 25 years, called out journalistic blind spots around major news events, including the origins of COVID-19, the war in Gaza and the Hunter Biden laptop, in an essay published last Tuesday on Bari Weiss’ online news site the Free Press.

Last week, Maher defended NPR’s journalism, calling Berliner’s article “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning,” The 42-year-old exec added that the essay amounted to “a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are.”

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The fiasco has also put the spotlight on NPR CEO Maher, whose own left-leaning bias came to light in a trove of ultra woke tweets she penned on X over the years.

In January, when Maher was announced as NPR’s new leader, The Post revealed her penchant for parroting the progressive line on social media — including since-deleted Twitter posts like “Donald Trump is a racist,” which she wrote in 2018. She also called HBO’s Bill Maher a “racist bigot” in tweet that year.

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Berliner’s essay sparked outrage from the network’s left-leaning colleagues. Late Monday afternoon, NPR chief news executive Edith Chapin announced to the newsroom that executive editor Eva Rodriguez would lead monthly meetings to review coverage.

Berliner said that among editorial staff at NPR’s Washington, DC, headquarters, he counted 87 registered Democrats and no Republicans. He wrote that he presented these findings to his colleagues at a May 2021 all-hands editorial staff meeting.

“When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile,” Berliner wrote. “It was worse. It was met with profound indifference.”