Journalists Juan Manuel Cao, from América TeVe, and Lourdes Ubieta, working for Radio Libre, reacted indignantly to the saga carried out by the communicator Uri Berliner, who in an opinion column listed a long list of behaviors that would frame NPR as a “progressive” or “liberal” medium.
According to Cao, “more than scandalized, I’m surprised because based on the statements and resignation of this journalist (Berliner) I started looking for information and I came across a statement from the director of NPR, where she seems to feel uncomfortable with the First Amendment, which is what guarantees freedom of expression. press and freedom of expression.
“What I was saying is that because of the First Amendment you can’t control what your workers say, and you can’t check if they are fake news or not. “That tells us how this person runs a radio station that we all pay for,” he commented.
Indeed, in a speech before the Atlantic Council, Katherine Maher, then director of the Wikimedia Foundation and today head of NPR, said that she took a “very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated actions “through conversations with the government.” ” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 elections on the Wikipedia platform, which he was in charge at the time.
In that same forum, Maher said that, in relation to fighting disinformation, “the number one challenge we see here is, of course, the First Amendment in United States”. These free speech protections, Maher continued, make it “a little complicated” to suppress “bad information” and “influence peddlers who have created a true market economy around them.”
In Cao’s opinion, “this is an unfortunate statement that tells us why this media outlet (NPR) has that editorial policy.”
After the publication of his column in The Free Press, the journalist Berliner resigned from his position after citing the network’s executive director’s response to his essay, which called it “deeply disrespectful, hurtful and degrading.”
“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years (…) But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am belittled by a new CEO, whose divisive views confirm the same problems at NPR that I cite in my essay,” Berliner wrote in an email to Maher.
Prior to his resignation, Berliner was suspended for five days without pay, on grounds that he had worked outside of NPR without its permission and shared “proprietary information.”
“Very valiant”
For her part, journalist Lourdes Ubieta considered Berliner “very brave” for having “denounced what we have been seeing in various media outlets in the United States, which is a marked ideological bias.”
For Ubieta, the case is more serious “because it is an ideological bias in a public channel that all taxpayers pay for. The private media have their criteria and, in a certain way, they can say what they want from the point of view of opinion.”
He added that “this clearly puts on the table that the ideological bias prevailing in this country It is not a myth, but a reality.”
The communicator emphasized that NPR “dismissed and did not want to talk about the Hunter Biden computer case, as Berliner explained. She also talks about the gender agenda, about how you have to address the interviewees, and about how they try to justify an inclusive agenda.”
From Ubieta’s point of view, “all this is the pattern of the liberal agenda that is repeated, and is nothing more than another evidence of what has been denounced by what we observe daily in some media.”
Berliner’s column
The opinion article that generated the controversy addresses the so-called ‘Russiagate’ against former President Donald Trump, the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the coverage of the origins of COVID-19, among other topics, which, in opinion of Berliner, would show a progressive perspective.
Berliner, for example, acknowledged that “I voted strongly against Trump twice, but I felt we were obligated to cover him fairly. But what began as tough, direct coverage of a belligerent, truth-troubled president veered toward efforts to damage or overthrow the Trump presidency.”
To which he added: “But when the Mueller report (investigating prosecutor in the case) found no credible evidence of collusion (by Trump with Russia to interfere in the 2016 elections), NPR’s coverage was notably scarce. ‘Russiagate’ quietly disappeared from our programming”.
Regarding the suspicions that exist against President Biden’s son, the communicator explained that “NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing news editor at the time explained the thinking: ‘We don’t want to waste our time on stories that aren’t really stories.’”
Later, he said that “the laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. His content revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and his possible implications for his father. The laptop was newsworthy.”
Regarding the coronavirus that locked up millions of people in the world, Berliner highlighted the two positions on its origin, one that stated that “it came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China” and the other attached to the hypothesis “ that the virus escaped from a laboratory.”
“The lab leak theory received harsh treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci (White House medical advisor) and former NIH chief Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were his most notable critics.
“And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of the Natural Origin Teameven declaring that the laboratory leak had been refuted by scientists,” he said.
Berliner also mentions that the vast majority of the radio station’s staff is Democrat, including those in management positions, and that certain concepts “became so important” that journalists were ordered to ask “everyone interviewed about their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and they had to enter it into a centralized tracking system.”
Berliner’s article concludes with this thought: “What is remarkable is the extent to which people at all levels at NPR have comfortably united around the progressive worldview. And this, I think, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.”
