NPR editor who penned scathing piece criticizing the public broadcaster resigns

Uri Berliner, a National Public Radio senior editor who wrote a scathing online essay accusing the public radio network of harboring a liberal bias, said Wednesday he had resigned from the outlet.

Uri Berliner, a National Public Radio senior editor who wrote a scathing online essay accusing the public radio network of harboring a liberal bias, said Wednesday he had resigned from the outlet. “I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years,” Berliner wrote in a resignation letter to NPR chief executive Katherine Maher, which he posted to his X account. An NPR spokesperson declined to comment. Berliner’s resignation came after he was suspended for five days without pay over his 3,500-word piece in the anti-establishment publication The Free Press. In the essay, Berliner claimed NPR had failed to properly cover allegations Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the runup to the 2016 election, the controversial Covid-19 lab-leak theory and New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Berliner used his complaints about how those individual stories were covered by his colleagues to draw a sweeping conclusion that NPR had lost “viewpoint diversity,” and started “telling listeners how to think.” NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin quickly pushed back against Berliner’s characterization of the outlet, telling staff in a memo that network management “strongly disagree with Uri’s assessment of the quality of our journalism and the integrity of our newsroom processes.”