NPR suspended Uri Berliner, the senior business editor who broke ranks and published an essay arguing that the nonprofit radio network had allowed liberal bias to influence its coverage.
Mr. Berliner was suspended by the network for five days, beginning Friday, for violating the network’s policy against performing work outside the organization without prior permission.
Mr. Berliner acknowledged his suspension in an interview with NPR on Monday, providing one of the network’s reporters with a copy of the written reprimand. Presenting the warning, NPR said Mr. Berliner had failed to clear his work at outside stores, adding that he would be fired if he violated the policy again.
Mr. Berliner’s essay was published last week in The Free Press, a popular Substack publication.
He declined to comment on the suspension. NPR said it did not comment on personnel matters.
The revelation of Mr. Berliner’s punishment is the latest aftershock to rock NPR since he published his essay. Employees at the public radio network were taken aback by Mr. Berliner’s public condemnation of the broadcaster, and several said they no longer trusted him because of his remarks. Mr. Berliner told The New York Times last week that he did not contact the network before publishing his essay.
After the publication of Mr. Berliner’s essay, NPR’s new chief executive, Kathryn Maher, came under renewed scrutiny as conservative activists resurfaced a series of social media posts criticizing former President Donald J. Trump and espoused progressive causes. One of the activists, Christopher Ruffo, has pressured media organizations to cover controversies involving influential people, such as the plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard.
NPR said Monday that Ms. Maher’s social media posts were written long before she was appointed chief executive of NPR and that she was not working in the news industry at the time. NPR also said that while it managed the business side of the nonprofit, it was not involved in its editorial process. Ms Maher said in a statement that “in America everyone has a right to free speech as a private individual.”
Several NPR staffers urged the network’s leaders to more strongly repudiate Mr. Berliner’s claims in his essay. Edith Chapin, NPR’s top editor, said in a statement last week that directors “strongly disagree with Uri’s assessment of the quality of our journalism,” adding that the network was “proud to stand behind” his work .
Some employees have begun to speak out. Tony Cavin, NPR’s director of standards and practices, disputed many of Mr. Berliner’s claims in an interview with the Times on Tuesday, saying that Mr. Berliner’s essay mischaracterized NPR’s coverage of critical stories.
Mr Cavin said NPR’s coverage of Covid-19, one of the lines of reporting criticized by Mr Berliner, was consistent with reporting by other mainstream news organizations at the time. The cover-up, he said, attributed the origin of the virus to a market in Wuhan, China. He also defended NPR’s coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 US election, another area Mr. Berliner focused on, noting that Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the matter, had concluded that Russian state actors had attempts to influence elections.
Mr. Cavin also pointed out that NPR had no way of verifying the first articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop after the story broke, but it went ahead with subsequent stories that looked into the situation. Mr. Berliner wrote that NPR had “turned a blind eye” to the story about Mr. Biden’s laptop.
“To think that we were somehow driven by politics is both wrong and unfair,” Mr Cavin said.
