It had to happen. Once again, is anybody surprised?

Not me.

When I posted just two days ago about NPR senior editor Uri Berliner’s scolding of the radio network’s blatant left-wing bias on the online news site The Free Press, I wondered how long it would take for the station’s leadership to retaliate.

As it turned out, it took just about 48 hours.

NPR CEO Katherine Maher suspended Berliner for five days without pay for his derogatory critique. She told him the suspension was a “final warning” and that Berliner would be booted out of the newsroom if he violated NPR’s policy about working with outside news organizations again.

Clearly, the writing was on the wall. Berliner was persona non grata at NPR. After 25 years as an award-winning reporter and editor at the station, Berliner was no longer welcome in the NPR newsroom.

Predictably, Berliner’s NPR leftist colleagues fell into lockstep with Maher and her vindictive reaction, saying they didn’t want to work with him any longer.

How dare he criticize NPR for its left-wing biases? If Berliner sticks around, we will make his life miserable. That was most certainly the implied punishment in his suspension.

Berliner decided not to stick around. Instead, he resigned, walking away on his own terms.

“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don’t support calls to defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cited in my Free Press essay,” Berliner wrote in a statement published on X.

For those who might not be aware, here is what Berliner had to say in his recent “Free Press” essay.

In his article entitled, “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” Berliner wrote that among editorial staff at NPR’s Washington, DC, headquarters, he counted 87 registered Democrats and no Republicans.

“When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile,” Berliner wrote. “It was worse. They reacted with profound indifference.

“I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues,” he wrote. “But the messages were of the ‘oh wow, that’s weird’ variety as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.

“An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America,” Berliner wrote. “A calculated emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation has fed the absence of viewpoint diversity.”

As I pointed out in my previous post, a recent Pew Research Survey found that 70% of NPR’s audience is consistently or primarily liberal, 21% Mixed, and just 9% consistently or mostly conservative.

NPR’s website says its 1,000 member stations pull in 28.7 million weekly on-air listeners and adds that 98.5% of the U.S. population lives within the listening area of a station carrying NPR programming.

Clearly, NPR’s barefaced propagandizing has an enormous impact on listeners and how they shape their opinions about a broad array of subjects, including domestic political affairs, the presidential campaign, Congress, the Supreme Court, the economy, foreign affairs, and the Biden family’s questionable foreign business transactions.

Among other journalistic transgressions, Berliner accused his NPR bosses of allowing their pro-Democrat political leanings to seep into editorial judgments, including its decision during the 2020 presidential election to ignore the Hunter Biden laptop story. The story first appeared in the New York Post and revealed emails that exposed Hunter Biden’s dubious business dealings overseas and their connections to Joe Biden.

Berliner also criticized NPR for its endorsement of a discredited letter written by 51 former top intelligence officials opposed to President Trump that claimed the laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Berliner said NPR continued to push that story even after independent investigators and the FBI later confirmed that the emails and the computer’s contents were authentic, confirming The Post’s reporting.

Reaction to Berliner’s ouster at NPR was swift on The Hill.

Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn said she was outraged by Berliner’s suspension and that she would propose new legislation that would cut National Public Radio’s (NPR) federal funding.

Blackburn said she is weighing a variety of legislative options to take on federal funding that goes to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which provides funding to NPR in the form of grants. Specifically, she is looking to prevent NPR from benefiting from public taxpayer funds because of the network’s left-wing bias.

“The mainstream media have become obsessed with doing the Left’s bidding and taking down strong conservatives — and NPR has led the pack,” Blackburn said in a statement. “It makes no sense that the American people are forced to fund a propagandist left-wing outlet that refuses to represent the voices of half the country. NPR should not receive our tax dollars.”

According to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s website, CPB is “fully funded by the federal government,” and it provides funding in the form of grants to both NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The grants to NPR are used for its international bureaus and distribution infrastructure, which provides content to all public radio stations.

“I love NPR and feel it’s a national trust,” Berliner said in an interview. “We have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they’re capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners.”

Berliner added that he made several attempts to relay his concerns before choosing to publish an essay in The Free Press, but NPR’s leadership ignored them.

Once again, is anybody surprised?

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