The Real Reason NPR Squashed Uri Berliner

NPR business editor Uri Berliner earned a five-day suspension without pay from his bosses this week for having violated the network’s policy prohibiting unauthorized work for other outlets. Warned that if he did it again, he could be fired, Berliner made the next move and resigned.

There's no doubt that Berliner is guilty. He acknowledges that he did not clear the writing of his essay in the Free Press, “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” which napalms NPR’s reputation and the news standards of his NPR colleagues. The piece enjoyed an extended run on X, where everybody who hates NPR and everybody who worships it queued up to debate it.

But as is often the case when employers punish their workers, Berliner’s transgression was not as much about what he did (write an outside piece without permission) but what he said. Let’s not kid ourselves. He was docked a week’s pay for his message, not his conduct. If Berliner had, say, written a poem for the New Yorker, or reviewed a book for the Washington Post without first getting a sign-off from NPR, he might have gotten congratulations from his bosses or at the very worst, a polite scolding for not following the rules. Berliner’s real “crime” is that he trashed his own institution in public, and did it loudly, and when you do that in most places of employment, a sharp reprimand is sure to follow.

Editors have, of course, been contending with increasingly contentious staffers over the past decades who take their grievances public. Social media has proved a powerful amplifier of their beefs.

Some observers might think the Berliner reprimand shows that fed up bosses are finally starting to crack down on rowdy employees. But that’s too generous of an interpretation. Berliner could have dumped bilge on NPR and still gotten a clean getaway if he had indemnified himself by bringing a posse of similar malcontents with him, as this previous column demonstrates.

When Chuck Todd ripped NBC News for having hired Ronna McDaniel as a paid commentator, he took his case to an NBC News show, Meet the Press, indicating that he had buy-in from other NBCers. Indeed he did, as they vocally seconded his protest of the hiring.

Another way to bring your posse with you is to launch your rebellion on your outlet’s internal Slack account. Newsroom staffers are natural complainers and fault-finders. That’s one of the reasons they chose the profession in the first place. If you assemble a newsroom of journalists, you can confidently predict an altercation unless you’ve got a lion tamer on retainer. It also benefits a protester to bring to the revolt an identarian complaint that includes race, sexual orientation, religion or gender. Bosses get wiggy when forced to parse an identity-based complaint. Unfortunately for Berliner, he couldn’t take that route.

We have learned in recent years that when staffers start shouting at the bosses on Slack or in a petition, the bosses squirm. It happened at POLITICO after bosses gave Ben Shapiro an assignment; it happened at the New York Times after it published Sen. Tom Cotton’s op-ed urging President Donald Trump to send troops to quell 2020 riots; and it happened at the Washington Post, after it suspended reporter Felicia Sonmez for tweeting about the late Kobe Bryant. Coordinated Slack and social media posts on X give staffers new-found leverage in their tussles with management. How can you beat down a newsroom when everybody holding down a desk is shouting, “I am Spartacus”? It’s impractical to crucify your entire staff.

If Berliner had dropped his bomb after organizing like-minded colleagues at NPR to support him — or even enlisted a gaggle after publishing the broadside against his network — he would have remained untouchable. Bosses everywhere are good at admonishing individuals. But they wilt against numbers.

Perhaps Berliner didn’t assemble a posse because support for his anti-NPR views, so publicly visible and voluble on the outside, is not common inside the broadcaster, even though Berliner told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo that he has “a lot of support” inside the newsroom. It’s likely that Berliner thought the best way to achieve maximum impact for his anti-NPR diatribe would be to intentionally draw an official rebuke from the network and thereby become a martyr and then resign in protest. It doesn’t require a Ph.D. in game theory to see that Berliner, who was born in 1956 and now qualifies for Medicare, got what he wanted. Surely a book contract and speaking engagements will follow.

Most of Berliner’s complaints about how progressive groupthink has tarnished NPR track well under scrutiny. What does not is his observation that only “in recent years” has the network stopped resembling “America at large.” Even a casual NPR listener knows that what Berliner says about NPR has been true for at least 40 years, and surely for the 25 years he has worked there. NPR knows its listeners’ preconceptions well, and has indulged them for a long time. What took Berliner so long to discover the self-evident?

Steve Oney, whose history of NPR, On Air, comes out next year, says in an interview that the network has never been good at managing its own press.

“They think they’re small time when in fact they’re big time,’ he says, and it shows whenever the network finds itself in the news. Oney goes on to cite the departures of Bob Edwards two decades ago, when he left NPR after his demotion from anchor, and Juan Williams in 2010, who was let go on charges of veering from analysis into opinion, as prime examples of that flat-footedness. He also compares the current dustup to one in the 1970s, when consultants were brought in from Antioch College to assist the network in shaping its coverage in a direction consistent with today’s social justice proponents. The staff successfully rebelled in a Berliner-like manner, he says.

“In the end they gave one guy a three-day suspension,” Oney says, and a new chief, Frank Mankiewicz was brought in to professionalize the network toward the mainstream and away from its collegiate-quality coverage.

While bosses can be timid and ham-fisted about personnel matters, they’re not uniformly stupid.

A two-year-old piece in The Fine Print reports that the New York Times nullified the employees’ Slack advantage by making some channels read-only and otherwise limited online interaction, shifting potential dissent to company-run sessions where it can be more easily shut down. The paper is still fighting a rear-guard action, as Times insiders appear to have leaked confidential information about the coverage of the Gaza war to the Intercept earlier this year. After a Times brass investigation, the leakers were not found, indicating that anonymous blows against management might be even more effective than Slack rallies, signed petitions and barrages published in the Free Press.

The mimetic desire to imitate your peers, which appears to be innate, seems to be spreading formal conflict at modern newsrooms. It has long been this column’s opinion that every reader is a press critic. With the Berliner example, we might be learning that every journalist is a critic of his own shop and is ready to sound off on it. The newsroom rebellion has shifted into a higher gear.

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Three decades ago, I published this rant against NPR in Washington City Paper, which was widely reprinted in other alternative newspapers. It proves Berliner was very late to his own story. Send NPR memes to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter and Threads accounts were once fans of Pacifica Radio, which never pussyfooted about its politics. My defunct RSS doesn’t own a radio.