NPR Suspended Uri Berliner? Is That All?

According to the New York Post,

NPR suspended Uri Berliner, the senior editor who published a bombshell essay a week ago that claimed that the publicly funded outlet has “lost America’s trust” by reporting the news with a left-wing bias.

NPR media writer David Folkenflik revealed on Tuesday that Berliner was sidelined for five days without pay beginning last Friday. Folkenflik, who reviewed a copy of the letter from NPR brass, said the company told the editor he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets — a requirement for NPR journalists.

NPR called the letter a “final warning,” saying Berliner would be fired if he violated NPR’s policy again.

This strikes me as remarkably lenient treatment. Corporate policies across the board prohibit employees from contacting the press without authorization from whatever department is responsible for press relations. For much of my career, I was involved in policy writing, and I still more or less carry in my head boilerplate for a wide range of policies. Here is something typical from King County, WA:

• King County staff should not communicate with the press about county business without prior authorization.
• If you are contacted by reporters, let them know you may not be the best person to represent the county on this issue and they should check with your department’s Public Information Officer.
• Media contact can range from a neighborhood blog to CNN. Your department’s Public Information Officer is here to help in these situations.

In the past, I usually included additional language in a proposed policy along the line of "employees who violate these guidelines are subject to discipline, up to and including termination." But once, I put this in a draft, and the vice president who reviewed it said there really wasn't a need to say this; employees simply need to be told this is the policy. In other cases, corporate policy-writing guidelines simply state that policies are to be expressed in positive terms, for instance, "Employees refer all contacts with the press to the Public Affairs Department". The King County policy seems to lean in this positive direction.

I knew a guy who was so proud of what his IT department had done to make working with his company easier that he very naively contacted a local TV station to tell them they should do a story on it. The TV station -- it probably didn't help that the company was an advertiser -- simply called the company PR department to ask if this had been authorized. My friend was walked out the door within the hour. That's how seriously corporations take contacting the press without authorization.

So what did Uri Berliner do? Early this month, he forwarded a manuscript to a web site, The Free Press, with the title I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.

That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.

This strikes me as little different from an engineer at Boeing, say, while still employed by the company, sending something like this to the New York Times:

A quality spirit no longer exists at Boeing, and now predictably, our planes are crashing, door panels are blowing out in flight, and we don't care about the flying public.

This wouldn't be a problem for a schlock outfit, but for Boeing, a company with a world reputation, it's devastating for its products and its business model.

Like my friend from IT, he'd be out the door before lunch, and with more reason. In fact, let's give our hypothetical Boeing engineer credit for being rational and having situational awareness: he's got to be aware that he'll be fired for doing this. So this would likely be in a last-straw, had-it-up-to-here situation where he's flipping them off as he's headed out the door -- and since they're firing him, he's going to get unemployment. Likely as well, he's also figured it's time to try something new past aeronautical engineering, and he's already set up for a new career.

I just don't think this is Uri Berliner. But let's look at his relationship with NPR a little more closely. Here's how Berliner characterized himself in the Free Press piece:

You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.

I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.

Which is to say he's also self-absorbed and entitled -- and oblivious. When I worked in IT, I had a pretty good feeling for the job market, and I knew that if I got fired, which I sometimes did, it wouldn't be too hard to land another job, which is a big reason I went into IT in the first place. But what's the job market in legacy media newsrooms? Here's CNN this past January:

The news industry is enduring a brutal start to the new year, with outlets large and small across the country hemorrhaging reporting staff as legacy business models that kept much of the industry afloat for decades collapse in plain sight.

The rapid contraction, coming even as the presidential election cycle heats up and public attention and revenues historically mount, has been on full display this month, with the first few weeks of 2024 ushering in a spate of painful layoffs at news organizations from coast-to-coast.

The Los Angeles Times slashed its newsroom by more than 20% earlier this week; TIME cut dozens of staffers; and Business Insider said it would trim its workforce by 8%. Meanwhile, hundreds of staffers at Condé Nast, Forbes, The New York Daily News, and others staged historic walkouts to protest planned cuts at the outlets.

So if Uri gets fired, the chances of him finding a new job in the industry are pretty bleak. So what was on his mind when he sent his piece to The Free Press? It's hard to say. He had to have been aware he was violating company policy -- the vice president who reviewed my policy draft said we take that, and the penalties, for granted when we publish policies. My guess is that he knew, as a longtime NPR emnployee, that there wouldn't be much of an actual penalty; in his case, five-day vacation.

So what was he trying to accomplish? He hardly changed any minds at NPR.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

He hardly moved the needle with the public at large -- in his essay at the link, he said,

Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find . . . the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

Well, duh. But what's puzzling is that Berliner's differences with NPR's staff and their editorial policies are, as far as I can tell, miniscule. His disclaimer at the start about being raised by a lesbian peace activist mother makes this plain. So what problem is he trying to solve? Jeffrey Blehar at the National Review asks the same set of questions:

The subtext of the piece, however, was clear: “Now that I’ve aired our dirty laundry, I dare you to fire me before I eventually resign.” This was, for all its eloquence, functionally a career-terminating act. The various official responses from NPR, including a defensive rebuttal from NPR’s standards & practices editor and a five-day suspension without pay for “freelancing without permission,” indicate clearly that he is now persona non grata. To be fair, Berliner either certainly expected this or should have. As Phoebe Maltz Bovy aptly asks, “How many jobs are there where you could write a big essay about your beef with your workplace and keep your job?”

But this doesn't answer the question of what Berliner, a 68-year-old senior editor in a shrinking industry, was planning to do if he was fired. Maybe retire -- who knows? Blehar thinks he objected to the hiring of Katherine Maher as the new NPR CEO, but let's face it, what else did he expect? Legacy media is legacy media, he made a full career in it and knew every one of the rules for survival -- and he did in fact survive for an entire career.

I think I would put it to pure narcissism, the feeling he was entitled to his 15 minutes of fame by making a big show of faux integrity.