Oh for heaven’s sake. National Public Radio’s cronies in Woke Journalism Land are stunned that Uri Berliner, a senior business editor who worked at NPR for 25 years, wrote in an essay published on Substack that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.” Seldom has the “Die Hard” clip above from the Ethics Alarms archive been more appropriate.

Here’s the Ethics Alarms NPR tag, which mostly catalogues the examples of NPR bias and unethical journalism Ethics Alarms has covered, and I’m sure it is still a drop in the metaphorical bucket. NPR was an Ethics Dunce recipient—again— just a few months ago.

NPR is extremely biased; its bias is flagrant and undeniable and has seeped into it programing on virtually every topic for decades. The only thing shocking about an NPR editor publicly admitting this is that anyone who was marinated in the organization’s dishonest and untrustworthy culture would be capable of telling the truth.

Here’s the New York Times on the NPR story; the Grey Lady was, you’ll recall, shocked…shocked! when one of its own former editors published a similar confessional about that paper’s toxic progressive bias in 2023:

Mr. Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist, castigated NPR for what he said was a litany of journalistic missteps around coverage of several major news events, including the origins of Covid-19 and the war in Gaza. He also said the internal culture at NPR had placed race and identity as “paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”Mr. Berliner’s essay has ignited a firestorm of criticism of NPR on social media, especially among conservatives who have long accused the network of political bias in its reporting.

Conservatives pounce! As always, I would ask why progressives and Democrats don’t have similar principled objections to a tax-payer funded news organization pimping for one side of the ideological divide, except that it’s a stupid question. They don’t object because they love having the news media as unethical allies, because it helps them take over the government, the society and the culture, and that’s good, see, because they know best.

NPR’s response to Berliner’s whistle, I guess predictably, focused absurdly on the DEI successes in the organization, which doesn’t address Berliner’s point at all. “In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR’s leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino,” NPR crows, in a story that isn’t about color and gender. “The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?” recently retired NPR CEO Lansing is quoted as saying in response to Berliner’s piece. “I’d welcome the argument against that.”

Here’s one: it doesn’t matter what NPR’s staff looks like as much as how it thinks and reports. Berliner revealed—as if it needs revealing—that NPR is controlled by leftist groupthink and lacks viewpoint diversity. The response of the organization illustrated that it is thoroughly infected with the delusion that the color, ethnicity and gender mix of its staff makes its product better. In effect, NPR is saying, “How can you say we’re not excellent journalists? Four out of 10 staffers are people of color!”

The general rebuttal from NPR was, to summarize, “Diversity, diversity diversity, diversity! Diversity. Diversity diversity. So there.” Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote, “As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry’s long-standing lack of diversity,” Alfonso says. “These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done.”

Berliner called foul on Alfonso’s characterization of his critique. “I never criticized NPR’s priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not ‘denigrated’ NPR’s newsroom diversity goals,” Berliner said. “That’s wrong.”

But NPR’s response just proved Berliner’s revelations, the substance of which which in fact had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt already. NPR’s reflex reaction to criticism of woke-biased journalism was to accuse the critic of bigotry.

Gee. What a surprise.

Added: A few EA readers nominated Berliner for an Ethics Hero salute. I originally wrote here that he’s ” contributed to NPR’s biased culture and coverage for 25 years, and now, when he has left and is collecting his pension, he suddenly tells the truth.” That was my mistake: he’s still there, who knows how long, but still, he hasn’t quit, and he’s not collecting any pension.

I would call him a whistleblower; I also might call him disloyal and deserving to be fired. Had he made these complaints to management before going public?