Writing Thursday morning over at National Review in the Morning Jolt newsletter, senior writer Jim Geraghty went postal on taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR) over its handling of now-former senior business editor Uri Berliner’s bombshell essay for The Free Press meticulously dismantling NPR for its decades of liberal media bias.
Geraghty (correctly) stated it’s been “refreshingly honest” to see how “NPR responded to the revelations and accusations of 25-year veteran Uri Berliner” with “biased, one-sided, arrogant, and dismissive” condemnations of Berliner because “that’s exactly how NPR likes it” sinc ethey “didn’t get this way accidentally; this is what it wants to be.”
He acknowledged anyone who’s “been around long enough” has “seen this sort of journalistic story-cycle before” in which some sort of hubbub breaks out at a liberal media heavyweight, they claim to be sorrowful and have “strayed from its original mission to report the news”....and then nothing happens.
He went back through a slew of examples as way of saying “[t]here’s something a bit refreshing, if depressing, about the way NPR responded to” Berliner:
You can think back to Dan Rather and CBS News, or Eason Jordan and CNN, or Stephen Glass at the New Republic. Or, more recently, the staff panic and outrage that ousted James Bennet from the editorial page at the New York Times. Heck, you could go back to Janet Cooke and the Washington Post, or all the way back to Walter Duranty’s work for the New York Times in the Soviet Union, echoing the propaganda of Stalin.
“This time at NPR, there is no rubbing of the chin, furrowed brows, or begrudging concession that the critic has a point, and that they must do better. Nope, NPR’s management thinks they’re doing a terrific job, and they don’t see any reason to change. In their minds, the true villain of this story is Berliner,” he added with “former colleagues are similarly indignant that anybody could possibly doubt the quality of the work that they’re doing.”
After winding through NPR’s heavily slanted coverage of the coronavirus pandemic and the Hunter Biden laptop, Geraghty observed “NPR management” has clearly decided that, lacking any fear of cajoles from Republicans to defund them, they could treat Berliner’s concerns “the same way” they “treated the counterevidence for the Trump–Russia collusion narrative, or the Hunter Biden laptop, or the evidence pointing to a lab leak.”
To read Geraghty’s full story, click here.
