On Wednesday’s broadcast of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik acknowledged that NPR suspended newly-departed Senior Business Editor Uri Berliner because he went public about concerns he’s been raising within the organization about its coverage for years now.
The segment began with co-host Mary Louise Kelly saying that NPR has a “longstanding” policy of covering itself the same way they would cover any other news organization and that “no NPR corporate official or news exec. helped prepare this segment.”
Folkenflik said, “I’ve worked closely with him. I’m on the Business Desk, too. And his views aren’t entirely a surprise to me. He tried to raise concern to newsroom leaders since pretty much just after then-President-Elect Donald Trump won the presidency back in November of 2016. Last, week he made them public, in an essay, as well as a nearly hour-long podcast on The Free Press, a site that has become a haven for journalists who believe the mainstream press has become too liberal.”
He added NPR suspended Berliner because “as you and I do in our code of conduct for employees, we have to get permission for all outside appearances in other press outlets and Berliner acknowledges he failed to do that. And it also cited part of the ethics handbook for his distribution of certain statistics about our demographic data that wasn’t authorized to get out.”
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