Uri Berliner is a Peabody Award-winning senior business editor who has worked at NPR for 25 years. Last week, he braved the ire of his peers and explained why NPR, long a leftist sinkhole for federal funds, has become an "openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience."

Following Berliner's damning exposé, longtime critics of NPR ramped up their scrutiny of the media outfit, recognizing not only its untrustworthy nature but also the radicalism of its new CEO, Katherine Maher.

Amidst renewed calls by former President Donald Trump and others for NPR to be defunded, South African billionaire Elon Musk — among those prickled by Maher's racially charged remarks and slurs — called Maher "a crazy racist!"

Propaganda for the 'tote bag-carrying coastal elite'

Berliner pulled out all the stops in an April 9 opinion piece for the Free Press, slamming NPR for mindlessly advancing Democratic propaganda and altogether giving up on journalistic independence.

At the outset, Berliner, the son of an LGBT activist and a child of Holocaust victims, admitted to resembling the stereotypical NPR listener — "an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag-carrying coastal elite" — and recognizing that NPR has "always had a liberal bent."

He alleged that despite its historic bias, NPR once had an "open-minded, curious culture." It has since since shed its skin and became a brazen mouthpiece for the liberal political establishment in Washington, D.C., suggested the veteran editor.

Berliner noted, for example, that NPR worked ardently to "damage or topple Trump's presidency," in part by "hitch[ing] our wagon to Trump's most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff" and amplifying the Russia collusion hoax.

When the Russia collusion narrative and the corresponding fictions that NPR helped spread were revealed to be false, Berliner indicated that the media outlet more or less pretended it never happened and moved on "with no mea culpas, no self-reflection," helping shatter trust in the media in the process.

Extra to helping kneecap a democratically elected president over blatant falsehoods manufactured by his political foes, Berliner noted that NPR also turned a blind eye to a Democratic scandal that could possibly have altered the course of the 2020 election had it been properly reported and not censored online —the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Berliner highlighted how in response to the New York Post's explosive story about the laptop, NPR's then-managing editor for news, Terence Samuel, said, "We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions."

Again, when the facts ultimately revealed NPR to be in the wrong, the organization "didn't make the hard choice of transparency."

Berliner also blasted NPR for lying about the origins of COVID-19, "even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists. But that wasn't the case."

The chief catalyst

According to the NPR veteran, "independent journalism" at his company began to take a major nosedive after former CEO John Lansing took the reins in 2019. Lansing reportedly seized upon the death of George Floyd as cause to center race and identity in everything the company did.

"When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism," Lansing allegedly noted in a company-wide article, "we can be agents of change."

"America's infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it," wrote Berliner.

In addition to transforming NPR into an identitarian activist organization, Lansing apparently helped eliminate all remaining "viewpoint diversity."

Berliner's article was not altogether hopeless. After diagnosing what was wrong with NPR, the business editor suggested that Katherine Maher, announced as the president and CEO of the company in January, might turn things around.

Maher formerly worked at the National Democratic Institute, which is primarily funded by George Soros' Open Society Foundations, took part in the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leader program, and served as CEO of Wikipedia's parent company, Wikimedia.

"Her first rule could be simple enough: don't tell people how to think," wrote Berliner.

From one radical CEO to another

Maher apparently figured that Berliner's proposed rule was worth breaking, suggesting in her April 11 response to his article that it's all right to criticize NPR — just not in a manner she doesn't like.

"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 in a response wherein she altogether avoided addressing Berliner by name. "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 intimated further that Berliner was wrong to suggest NPR was radically partisan and devoid of viewpoint diversity, writing, "It is deeply simplistic to assert that the diversity of America can be reduced to any particular set of beliefs, and faulty reasoning to infer that identity is determinative of one's thoughts or political leanings."

While Maher might find it difficult to guess at the worldview(s) embraced by her new and old underlings underlings, it's not hard to infer where she stands on the issues in light of the following posts she made on X in recent years:

• September 2020 — "Let's be clear here too: I am a white woman. I already got the leg up. ... My race is consistently an advantage."
• May 2020 — "America is addicted to white supremacy and that's the real issue."
• May 2020 — "I know that hysteric white woman voice. I was taught to do it. I've done it. It's a disturbing recognition. While I don’t recall ever using it to deliberately expose another person to immediate physical harm on my own cognizance, it's not impossible. That is whiteness."
• May 2020 - "I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. But it's hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people's ancestors as private property."
• March 2019 — "When people turn their noses up at buses, that's also often implicit racism, by devaluing services that provide essential (and already often underresouced) connective links to minority communities."
• March 2019 — "Climate change, income inequality, disproportionate representation, structural racism, and lax regulation will only become a more toxic brew in the years to come."

Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo shared an old post of Maher's to X Sunday, where she wrote, "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."

Elon Musk responded, "This person is a crazy racist!"

@realchrisrufo This person is a crazy racist!

— (@)

Among the many now calling for NPR to be defunded is former President Donald Trump, who wrote Wednesday on Truth Social, "NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM!" reported CNN.

Trump underscored that NPR is a "LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE" that should not be awarded one additional dollar of government funds.

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