Bill Cotterell: What? NPR is Liberal? Say it Ain’t So …

A top reporter and editor at National Public Radio caused quite a stir on journalism blogs and some news programs by saying things that were obvious to everyone — except, maybe, to many of his fellow journalists.

Uri Berliner wrote a long essay last week for an online site called The Free Press, saying NPR has lost credibility with the American public due to a knee-jerk liberal take on major political events. Berliner, a senior business editor and reporter, has been at NPR for 25 years and — right up front — he stated his own left-of-center upbringing, education and experience in news.

He cited audience surveys indicating that in 2011, 26 percent of NPR listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent were middle of the road and 37 percent were liberal. A dozen years later, that had become 11 percent on the right, 21 percent in the middle and 67 percent liberal.

“We weren’t just losing conservatives,” Berliner wrote, “we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.”

In other words, NPR was doing just what Fox News does by tilting its coverage to please a select group of listeners.

He illustrated his point with three big stories — Russian interference in U.S. elections, Hunter Biden’s laptop and the argument over the COVID-19 virus originating in a Wuhan, China,  laboratory leak or an animal “wet market.” For the most part, Berliner said, NPR parroted the Biden administration’s side of each discussion and, when positions proved inaccurate, either ignored later revelations or essentially said “oops!” and quickly moved on.

In a bit of legwork that probably earned him the enmity of his newsroom colleagues, Berliner did a little checking on voter registration in NPR’s Washington bureau. He found 87 reporters and editors were registered Democrats, and no Republicans — not one — were covering national news.

Of course, 87-0 could be just happenstance. Surely they all would say they scrupulously separate their personal views from their daily reporting duties. But Berliner doesn’t think so.

“There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed,” he wrote. “It’s frictionless — one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”

Such apostasy earned Berliner a round of interviews on some cable TV programs, sparked a lot of social-media chatter, and his Free Press piece was quoted by online journalism sites. His quarter-century with NPR and his voting record — he writes that he voted against Donald Trump twice — lends credence to his view of NPR and, by extension, the major national media.

This isn’t some red-hatted MAGA cultist ranting about “fake news” and calling reporters “enemies of the people.” This is a reasoned voice of experience, a man who tried for years to tell his bosses that “diversity” means a range of thought, not just race and gender in the newsroom.

Berliner is like Joe Valachi or John Dean, laying bare what we already knew but didn’t expect to hear from an insider. People were fascinated but not too surprised when Valachi, a 30-year mafioso, told the secrets of organized crime on national television, and when Dean, who was Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, spilled the beans on the Watergate cover-up.

Maybe the only people who’ll be startled to learn that NPR leans leftward are Berliner’s coworkers at public radio. It’s been my experience, working in newsrooms more than 50 years, that most reporters genuinely believe they’re impartial and objective — and, when a story evokes a natural sympathy or anger, they put aside personal feelings and report straight news.

Except at outfits like Fox and a few others that cultivate a niche market of right-of-center viewpoints, journalists don’t see a world of liberals and conservatives. They see conservatives and normal people. Like a fish is not aware of water — they live in it, eat in it, breathe it, travel in it — reporters and editors tend to be unaware of their group-think assumption that striving for “social justice,” as decreed by government, is as natural as water is to a fish.

And so Berliner’s essay may raise some eyebrows at NPR but won’t cause his bosses or coworkers to examine liberal dogma — any more than some insider’s tell-all confession would cause Fox News to rethink its cheerleading for the looney-toon segments of the MAGA movement and Republican Party.

Bill Cotterell is a retired capitol reporter for United Press International and the Tallahassee Democrat. He can be reached at wrcott43@aol.com.