NPR editor Uri Berliner resigns after bombshell expose reveals network’s pervasive left-wing bias

NPR correspondent Uri Berliner, who was suspended without pay after calling out the radio broadcaster’s rampant liberal bias, resigned on Wednesday — and took a parting shot at the network’s controversial CEO.

“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years,” Berliner wrote on his X social media account on Wednesday. “I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism.”

Berliner added that he “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.”

Berliner was referring to Katherine Maher, the chief executive at NPR who has come under fire for a series of “woke” social media posts in which she criticized Hillary Clinton for using the term “boy” and “girl” because it was “erasing language for non-binary people.”

Maher also appeared to justify looting In 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests, saying it was “hard to be mad” about the destruction. In 2018, she wrote a post denouncing then-President Donald Trump as a “racist” before deleting it.

On Tuesday, NPR spokeswoman Isabel Lara said in a statement that Maher “was not working in journalism at the time and was exercising her First Amendment right to express herself like any other American citizen.”

Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist, called out journalistic blind spots around major news events, including the origins of COVID-19, the war in Gaza and the Hunter Biden laptop, in an essay published last Tuesday on Bari Weiss’ online news site the Free Press.

In Berliner’s essay — titled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust” — Berliner said that among editorial staff at NPR’s Washington, DC, headquarters, he counted 87 registered Democrats and no Republicans.

He wrote that he presented these findings to his colleagues at a May 2021 all-hands editorial staff meeting.

“When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile,” Berliner wrote. “It was worse. It was met with profound indifference.”

Maher, who took up the role as CEO of NPR in late March, responded to Berliner’s essay by claiming that the veteran journalist was being “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning” to his colleagues.

She accused Berliner of “questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity … based on little more than the recognition of their identity.”

A report this week by NPR correspondent David Folkenflik said Berliner took umbrage at that, saying she had “denigrated him.” Berliner also said he had a private exchange with Maher in which he supported diversifying NPR’s workforce to look more like the US population at large — a point that she failed to address in the exchange, according to Berliner.

Elsewhere, Berliner called out his bosses at NPR for their refusal to seriously cover the laptop story — which was exclusively broken by The Post.

The laptop contained emails showing that the son of President Biden was engaged in influence-peddling overseas — though NPR and other media outlets declined to aggressively cover the story in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.

According to Berliner, senior editors at NPR feared that devoting airtime to the story would help Trump’s re-election chances just weeks before voters cast their ballots.

Berliner wrote that NPR had deteriorated into “an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience.”

“The laptop was newsworthy,” Berliner wrote. “But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched.”

Berliner also accused NPR of giving disproportionately more attention to allegations that Trump was colluding with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential election — only to devote far less resources to Robert Mueller’s findings that there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges.

After the contents of the laptop proved to be authentic, NPR “could have fessed up to our misjudgment,” Berliner wrote.

“But, like Russia collusion [allegations against Trump that were debunked], we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.”

Berliner also called out NPR for pushing other left-leaning causes, such as subjecting staffers to “unconscious bias training sessions” in the wake of the May 2020 death of George Floyd.

Employees were ordered to “start talking about race,” he said.

NPR journalists were also told to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” that were based on racial and ethnic identity, including “Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color” (MGIPOC), “NPR Noir” (black employees at NPR) and “Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media.”

According to Berliner, if an NPR journalist’s language “differs from the diktats of those groups,” a “DEI Accountability Committee” would settle the dispute.