NPR Editor Resigns, Criticized Outlet’s Liberal Bias

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Uri Berliner, NPR’s senior business editor, who set off a firestorm when he criticized the outlet’s liberal leanings in an essay, has resigned.

Berliner, who had recently been suspended from NPR for five days without pay after his essay was published at The Free Press, announced his resignation on X, formerly known as Twitter Wednesday.

“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,” Berliner said.

Berliner, who had spent 25 years at NPR said the outlet was a “great American institution” and rejected calls to defund it.

The essay, published on April 9, criticized the network for losing the nation’s trust with its progressive worldview.

NPR said it suspended Berliner because he did not secure their approval before publishing the essay. Berliner’s suspension was considered a final warning, and he would be fired if he violated company policy again, NPR said.

Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR, has also come under scrutiny after social media posts she made critical of former President Donald Trump were unearthed. Maher joined NPR in January.

In the wake of Berliner’s essay, The New York Times published revelations about Maher’s controversial posts.

In one of the now-deleted posts from 2018, Maher called Trump a racist. A tweet from Nov. 2020 showed her wearing a hat with the logo for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

She also posted having a dream about going on a road trip with “Kamala,” presumably Vice President Kamala Harris, “sampling and comparing nuts and baklava from roadside stands.”

“Woke up very hungry,” she wrote.

Berliner, commenting to NPR‘s David Folkenflik, said Maher’s posts showed she is not the best person for her job.

“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, and this seems to be the opposite of that,” he said before his resignation.

Several NPR journalists told Folkenflik that they are no longer willing to work with Berliner as they do not believe he will keep their conversations private.

Maher was chief executive of the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports Wikipedia, when she wrote many of the posts.

In a statement, NPR spokeswoman Isabel Lara said Maher’s post were when she “was not working in journalism at the time and was exercising her First Amendment right to express herself like any other American citizen.” Maher pushed back at Berliner’s claims in a memo to NPR staffers, stating that “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.”