It’s no fantastic tragedy that an editor at NPR was simply suspended for airing out his employer’s ugly laundry, but the episode is a good case study in how biased, crooked, and degenerate our business news media remain.
Uri Berliner, a long-time business editor at the system, was fired for five days without earn following his extensive commentary on NPR’s lack of intellectual diversity last week, when NPR’s media correspondent David Folkenflik revealed on Tuesday that he had been given a pay suspension for five days.
“With declining scores, sad levels of trust, and an audience that has become less different over time, the path for NPR is not appealing, ” Berliner wrote for The Free Press in his press start. “Two lines seem obvious. We may keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could begin over, with the basic building blocks of media. We could face up to where we’ve gone bad. ”
He said there was an “unspoken discussion ” at NPR, which is now little more than a company of social justice interest parties, that dictated the network’s media coverage. “It’s frictionless, ” he said, “one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line. ”
The trivial and obvious observation was that NPR’s obsession with skin color and sexual identity, as well as its obvious editorial judgment of Donald Trump and anyone who may consider casting a ballot for him as an unjustifiable despicable person, have weakened its reputation and thus its audience.
Berliner cited NPR’s dwindling market share, with an emphasis on the persistently low listening among negroes and Latinos, despite all of the business ’s dedication to “diversity. And he claimed that he had previously made personal inquiries to executives about his concerns unresolved. Subsequent reports indicated a lack of enthusiasm among Berliner’s colleagues for his public criticism, and he was ultimately reprimanded for, according to Folkenflik, having “failed to secure [NPR’s ] approval for outside work for other news outlets. In other words, they were claiming to punish him for contributing to another publication rather than for insubordination. )
Many people in this field of work are persuaded by a strange neurosis that suggests there is something noble and virtue in publicly dishonoring your bosses and coworkers in order to win over their superiors for whatever reason. Berliner certainly had a bad time second-guessing his superiors and coworkers, who surely deserve that and more ( like Chinese water torture ). Under normal circumstances, he would just as surely deserve the consequence for doing it.
NPR is not a typical location, just like the rest of the corporate media. It’s a depraved place where sex and race determine a person’s worth. And unfortunately for Berliner, he is not only a straight, white male ( bottom of the food chain at NPR ), he is also manifestly disinterested in sex and race, placing him at sewage-level valuation among NPR executives. ( Read more on this phenomenon in my 2020 book Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People. )
As Berliner wrote in his piece for The Free Press, then-CEO of NPR John Lansing declared to the company in 2020, the year of our George Floyd, that “diversity ” would be the network’s “North Star. ”
“Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace, ” wrote Berliner. “Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions ), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We received training on unconscious bias. A growing DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion ] staff offered regular meetings imploring us to ‘start talking about race. ’ Monthly dialogues were offered for ‘women of color ’ and ‘men of color. ’ Nonbinary people of color were included, too. ”
In essence, Berliner was no longer interested in NPR’s “North Star, ” so NPR is no longer interested in Berliner. In contrast, consider a different network employee who publicly complained that her employers were n’t doing enough to promote diversity. Who would anticipate her pay suspension without being paid? On the contrary, she would predictably receive a promotion and public letters of remorse, plus promises to “do better ” from her employers.
That’s the way DEI and “social justice ” work. If Berliner was n’t sure of that before, he’s well-informed now.
