NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner has resigned a day after NPR announced it had suspended him as a formal punishment for the scathing critique he penned about his employer. NPR had said Berliner received the formal rebuke because he had not received the required approval to write for another news outlet. Berliner posted his brief resignation letter, addressed to CEO Katherine Maher, on X. It reads:
"I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don't support calls to defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But 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."
"People at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview," he wrote at the Free Press on Substack. As a result, coverage is skewed, and NPR's once-diverse audience is "cramped into a smaller, progressive silo," he argues. At the National Review, Jeffrey Blehar found the subtext of the piece to be clear: "'Now that I've aired our dirty laundry, I dare you to fire me before I eventually resign.' This was, for all its eloquence, functionally a career-terminating act," he wrote in advance of Berliner's announcement.
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But Blehar takes particular note of Berliner's decision to call out Maher in the final paragraph. "He had to be aware of what would happen when he shot a giant signal flare into the air at the end of a piece like this: People like me would notice, and soon investigators would come a-calling." Indeed, Berliner's essay has ramped up criticism of Maher, who just stepped into the role last month, and whose past social media posts are being called "hyper-partisan" and "woke." (More NPR stories.)
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