The NPR Reply to the Maher Reprimand: Why journalists should not appear on NewsNation programs like the Berliner’s reprimand

Berliner’s appearance on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation program last Tuesday was not included in the rebuke by NPR. (NPR’s chief communications officer told Berliner to focus on his own experience and not share proprietary information.) The NPR letter also did not cite his remarks to the New York Times, which ran its article mid-afternoon Thursday, shortly before the reprimand was sent. Berliner didn’t seek approval before talking to the Times.

Rufo is posting old social media posts from NPR’s new leader. In two examples, she called Trump a racist and also seemed to minimize the effects of rioting in 2020. Rufo is using those to rally public pressure for Maher’s ouster, as he did for former Harvard University President Claudine Gay.

In a statement Monday about the messages she had posted, Maher praised the integrity of NPR’s journalists and underscored the independence of their reporting.

“We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” NPR’s chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff . “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.”

Maher vs. New York Times: What do journalists really think about news and how to run the business? A former NPR host and presenter on Monday

In an interview with me later on Monday, Berliner said the social media posts demonstrated Maher was all but incapable of being the person best poised to direct the organization.

Berliner said that they were looking for a leader who could unify and bring in more people and have a broader perspective on what America is about. This seems to be different from that.

He said he tried to get the attention of the news leaders at NPR before he wrote his essay.

Berliner has singled out coverage of several issues dominating the 2020s for criticism, including trans rights, the Israel-Hamas war and COVID. Berliner says he sees the same problems at other news organizations, but argues NPR, as a mission-driven institution, has a greater obligation to fairness.

The Free Press is a site that has become a haven for journalists who believe that mainstream media outlets have become too liberal. In addition to his essay, Berliner appeared in an episode of its podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss.

NPR said that Berliner had made public his proprietary audience demographic information, which it considers confidential. He said that the figures were basically marketing material. If they were really good, they would have sent them out to the world.

Some of the Morning Edition host’s colleagues concur with Berliner’s concerns that coverage can be too idealistic, and that it can be hard for some people to like it.

The training and mentorship is the way to go, says Martin, a veteran reporter who has worked for ABC and The Wall Street Journal. It is not by blowing the place up, by garbageing your colleagues, in full view of people who don’t care about it.

Danielle said last week that newsrooms run on trust. “If you violate everyone’s trust by going to another outlet and sh—ing on your colleagues (while doing a bad job journalistically, for that matter), I don’t know how you do your job now.”

Questions over news judgment and confidentiality are being posed by other newsrooms. On Monday, New York Times Executive Editor Joseph Kahn announced to his staff that the newspaper’s inquiry into who leaked internal dissent over a planned episode of its podcast The Daily to another news outlet proved inconclusive. The December report about sexual assault being used as part of the Hamas attack on Israel was to be the focus of the episode. Audio staffers aired doubts over how well the reporting stood up to scrutiny.

“We work together with trust and collegiality everyday on everything we produce, and I have every expectation that this incident will prove to be a singular exception to an important rule,” Kahn wrote to Times staffers.

At NPR, some of Berliner’s colleagues have weighed in online against his claim that the network has focused on diversifying its workforce without a concomitant commitment to diversity of viewpoint. The pursuit of diversity within NPR’s workforce was referred to as its “North Star,” a moral imperative, and business strategy by recently retired chief executive John Lansing.

In his essay, Berliner tagged the strategy as a failure, citing the drop in NPR’s broadcast audiences and its struggle to attract more Black and Latino listeners in particular.

Bringing Up the Challenge of Berliner: Addressing the “Huge Issues of NPR,” in the 2024 Paper by Maher and Chapin

“During most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding,” Berliner writes. “In recent years, however, that has changed.”

“Minorities do not always think the same, and do not always report the same,” she wrote in a comment. Good reporters and editors should know that by now. It’s embarrassing to me as a reporter at NPR that a senior editor here missed that point in 2024.”

Some colleagues drafted a letter to Maher and NPR’s chief news executive, Edith Chapin, seeking greater clarity on NPR’s standards for its coverage and the behavior of its journalists – clearly pointed at Berliner.

On Friday, CEO Maher stood up for the network’s mission and the journalism, taking issue with Berliner’s critique, though never mentioning him by name. Among her chief issues: she said Berliner’s essay offered “a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are.”

We’ll ask ourselves a few questions in each month, including if we captured the diversity of this country, and in a way that helped readers understand themselves and their communities. Chapin wrote in the memo. Did we give coverage that helped them understand the neighbors with whom they don’t share much in common?

In a text for this story, Chapin said such sessions had been discussed since Lansing unified the news and programming divisions under her acting leadership last year.

The Donald Trump Challenge to the Newsroom: How We’re Done with [Republican] Progress and the Way We Are: A Brief Critique of a Statement from the NPR Newsroom

(Disclosure: Like Berliner, I am part of NPR’s Business Desk. He has edited many of my past stories. But he did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Donald Trump, and the activist Christopher Rufo are just two of the conservative and partisan Republicans that have latched onto Berliner’s commentary.

Some have advocated for the elimination of federal funding for NPR, which makes up less than one percent of the organization’s budget.

In a brief interview, he condemned a statement Maher issued Friday in which she suggested that he had questioned “whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity.” She said that was disrespectful, offensive, and degrading.

Earlier in the day, Berliner forwarded to NPR editors and other colleagues a note saying he had “never questioned” their integrity and had been trying to raise these issues within the newsroom for more than seven years.

What followed was an email he had sent to newsroom leaders after Trump’s 2016 win. He wrote that he couldn’t align himself with a tribe for the sake of journalism. It’s not possible for us to be in a way that blinds us to the views of tens of millions of our fellow citizens.

Yet some colleagues privately said Berliner’s critique carried some truth. There are reviews of the network’s coverage for fairness and diversity every month.

She said in a text message earlier this week that that initiative had been discussed long before Berliner’s essay, but “Now seemed [the] time to deliver if we were going to do it.”