New NPR CEO responds to editor’s claims it ‘lost America’s trust’

The new CEO of National Public Radio (NPR) has slammed a senior editor’s claim that the station has “lost America’s trust,” calling comments in an editorial “disrespectful” and “hurtful.”

Katherine Maher explained in message On Friday, editor Uli Berliner challenged employees on two points: criticizing the quality and integrity of the editorial process and criticizing “who we are.” He announced that he had thrown it.

“Asking questions about whether we are fulfilling our mission should always be fair game. Journalism, after all, is nothing if not hard questions,” she wrote. “It is extremely disrespectful, hurtful, and humiliating to question whether our people are faithfully fulfilling their mission based on their perceived identity.”

Berliner, who has worked at NPR for more than 20 years, said: An editorial has been published Earlier this week, he argued in The Free Press that people who listen to or read news reports are only getting “a distilled worldview of a tiny fraction of the U.S. population.”

He also said that news organizations criticized for being left-leaning “lack a diversity of perspectives” and that “there is a lack of tacit guidance about the stories we should pursue and how we should frame them.” He also claimed that there was an agreement.

“There’s a frictionless flow of story after story about racism, transphobia, the signs of the climate apocalypse, the evils of Israel, the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line. ” wrote the editor.

In a letter Friday, Maher pushed back on his views, saying it is “naive” to claim that America’s diversity can be “reduced to a particular set of beliefs.”

She added that it is a “faulty inference” to assume that identity “determines a person’s ideology or political leanings.”

“Each of our colleagues is here because we are excellent, skilled professionals who are passionate about our work. We are stronger when we work together and we bring the best out of each other. It’s respectful,” Maher said. “We best fulfill our mission when we look and sound like the countries we serve.”

The opinion piece also sparked backlash from others in NPR’s leadership.

Former President Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the White House, had a different reaction. In a post on Truth Social following the editorial, he called on the government to stop funding NPR, which he believes is biased.