Editor’s note: This piece by Uri Berliner, senior business editor and reporter at NPR, is refreshingly candid about how the newsroom has lost its way because it has. All of corporate media has. I started this news site back in late 2008 for a reason. That reason has stood the test of time. Simply put news consumers do not want to be told what to think, period. News consumers are news consumers for a variety of reasons chief among them they want to know the truth about what’s going on in their world. The sooner more Uri’s fess up the sooner we’ll all get back to being one nation again. Here’s to hoping Uri’s piece serves as a wake-up call to all of the other journalist’s who know what he’s saying is true and begin speaking up. — h
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by Uri Berliner at The Free Press
You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.
I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.
So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.
It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.
In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.
If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.
But it hasn’t.
For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.
Back in 2011,…
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