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National Public Radio (NPR) has been unmasked as a left-wing progressive broadcast outlet by its then-senior business editor Uri Berliner in a critical essay that he wrote, which was published by Free Press. For writing truthfully about NPR’s ideological bias in his essay entitled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” Mr. Berliner was sharply rebuked by NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher and then suspended for five days without pay. Mr. Berliner decided to resign his position on April 17th, just days after the suspension, which he communicated in an e-mail he wrote to Ms. Maher. Mr. Berliner explained that “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.”

Mr. Berliner’s essay was scathing to be sure. However, what he wrote represented the sincere reflections of a seasoned journalist about NPR’s descent that he witnessed into the muck of ideological group think.

“An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America,” Mr. Berliner wrote in his essay. “That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.”

Mr. Berliner provided several examples of NPR’s leftist bias. He cited its “efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency” by promulgating false rumors promoted by Mr. Trump’s “most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff” that “the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election.” However, “when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse.”  NPR simply moved on “with no mea culpas, no self-reflection.”

Another example that Mr. Berliner’s essay mentioned was NPR’s ignoring of the Hunter Biden laptop revelations reported by the New York Post shortly before the 2020 presidential election. NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking, as quoted by Mr. Berliner: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

Far from being a distraction, Mr. Berliner wrote, “The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.”

Similarly, NPR skewed its coverage of the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic to discount the real possibility that the original virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China that was experimenting with lethal viruses. “Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work,” Mr. Berliner observed.

More recently, NPR’s “reporting” on the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza has been decidedly pro-Palestinian. Mr. Berliner criticized NPR for “highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.”

In short, the 25-year NPR veteran found a disturbing trend at the national public radio broadcasting network that he once was proud to serve. He described it as “the absence of viewpoint diversity.”

NPR’s boss Katherine Maher, who chastised Mr. Berliner for being “profoundly disrespectful” in his critique of NPR’s lack of viewpoint diversity, has long been a left-wing ideologue herself with no tolerance for diversity of ideas. Back in 2018, for example, she tweeted that “ideological diversity” is “often a dog whistle for anti-feminist, anti-POC stories about meritocracy.”

Ms. Maher previewed the ideological conformity she expects of the media when she asserted that the New York Times should not have published Senator Tom Cotton’s June 3, 2020 op-ed, “Send in the Troops.” Senator Cotton had written this column as riots were breaking out all over following George Floyd’s death and were wreaking havoc in the nation’s cities.

Even worse, Ms. Maher had previously described the widespread looting at the time as “protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.” Perhaps NPR’s sympathetic interview in August 2020 with the author of the book entitled “In Defense of Looting” helped convince Ms. Maher that she would find ideologically compatible people to work with at NPR.

NPR is free to cater to a leftist, progressive audience if it wishes, but it should do so without a single dime of taxpayer funding.