Journalists Denounce Liberal Bias in their own Organizations

What happened: Uri Berliner, NPR’s senior business editor, said the organization has lost the “trust” of Americans due to overt left-wing bias. The 25-year employee called for more “viewpoint diversity” among staff in an article for the Free Press.

Ideological bubble: “There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed,” Berliner wrote.

• Criticism: Berliner offers somewhat of a mea culpa, reflecting on NPR’s fixation on the now-debunked Russiagate story and its quick dismissal of the COVID lab-leak theory. He credits the death of George Floyd as a major turning point in the newsroom’s hard-left turn.

The audience: By 2023, NPR’s audience had shifted from somewhat left-leaning to 67 percent liberal and 11 percent conservative.

Why it matters: Polling shows dismally low trust in the media among Americans, especially conservatives. But the backlash isn’t just from the outside — seasoned journalists, conservative and liberal, are calling out the decline in fair, honest news coverage.

• In 2019: After leaving CBS News the year prior, journalist Lara Logan complained of a widespread “departure” from objective reporting to left-wing narratives during Donald Trump’s presidency.

• In 2020: Free Press founder Bari Weiss left the New York Times opinion section, describing an office environment that silenced opposing views. Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of the Intercept, resigned from the left-leaning publication because he felt it suppressed criticism of President Joe Biden in line with “liberal orthodoxy.”

• In recent months: Two former New York Times opinion editors wrote lengthy personal essays about the paper’s ideological bias. They resigned in 2020 over backlash to an op-ed calling for military force against Black Lives Matter rioters, which employees said should never have been published.