Right-Wing Critiques Miscast NPR, NYT as Lefty Bastions

Uri Berliner (Free Press, 4/9/24) blamed what he saw as NPR‘s problems on the way that “race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”

“I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” reads the headline of a recent essay in the Free Press (4/9/24), a Substack-hosted outlet published by former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss. The author, senior NPR business editor Uri Berliner, argued that the broadcaster’s “progressive worldview” was compromising its journalism and alienating conservatives, including Berliner himself—who subsequently resigned.

Berliner’s screed was the latest instance of a trend in which legacy-media staffers publicly grouse that their workplaces are overrun by left-wing firebrands. Former New York Times assistant opinion editor Adam Rubenstein recently did so in the Atlantic (2/26/24). Two months before that, James Bennet, previously the editorial page editor at the Times, spent 16,000 words lamenting that the Times had “lost its way” in the Economist’s 1843 supplement (12/24/23).

Readers were invited to view these critics as brave iconoclasts at odds with the radical doctrines of their former employers. But the records of NPR and the New York Times show just how misleading this characterization is.

Right-wing embrace

The tirades shared several themes, including resentment of the 2020 protests against police violence following the murder of George Floyd. Rather than letting “evidence lead the way,” Berliner complained that NPR management “declared loud and clear” that “America’s infestation with systemic racism…was a given.” He rebuked NPR for supposedly “justifying looting” in relation to the demonstrations, citing an interview (8/27/20) with In Defense of Looting author Vicky Osterweil. Conveniently, Berliner didn’t note NPR’s repeated scolding of looters (6/2/20, 8/11/20, 10/28/20) before and after that interview.

Adam Rubenstein (Atlantic, 2/26/24) presents his career at the New York Times—where he was hired to seek out “expressly conservative views” because he had “contacts on the political right”—as evidence of the paper’s left-wing bias.

Both Rubenstein and Bennet condemned the Times’ handling of an op-ed (6/3/20) by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) that they took part in publishing. Appearing during the uprisings, the op-ed called for the deployment of the military to suppress protests. (In Bennet’s view, Cotton wanted to “protect lives and businesses from rioters.”) After much reader—and staffer—outrage at the bald incitement of racist violence, the Times appended a note stating regret over the piece, and both editors left the newspaper.

Embittered by the Times’ response, neither Rubenstein nor Bennet paused to consider that a paper that had not only commissioned a fascistic op-ed by a neocon senator, but had published that same senator multiple times before—in one case, to celebrate the Trump-ordered assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani (1/10/20)—might not be beholden to the left.

Bennet also complained that the Times was “slow” to report that “Trump might be right that Covid came from a Chinese lab”—which is true; the Times‘ coverage of the lab leak theory in 2020 was decidedly (and appropriately) skeptical (2/17/20, 4/30/20, 5/3/20; see FAIR.org, 10/6/20). The paper did eventually jump on the bandwagon of the evidence-free conspiracy theory, with David Leonhardt promoting it in his popular Morning newsletter (5/27/21).

James Bennet (1843, 12/24/23) blames the rise of Trump on journalists’ forfeiting “their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas”—which is odd, because his argument is that journalists shouldn’t arbitrate truth or broker ideas.

Berliner, too, took umbrage at his employer’s treatment of the lab theory:

We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

But NPR did budge. An episode of Morning Edition (2/27/23) featuring Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Gordon promoted the Energy Department’s admittedly shaky assertion, lending credence to a hypothesis informed far more by anti-China demagoguery than by scientific evidence (FAIR.org, 6/28/21, 4/7/23). This wasn’t the first time NPR had advanced the theory: In a 2021 segment of Morning Edition (6/3/21), media correspondent David Folkenflik suggested that news organizations publicizing the lab-leak claim were “listen[ing] closely.”

‘Good terms with people in power’

Alicia Montgomery (Slate, 4/16/24) diagnosed NPR‘s actual problem: “NPR culture encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planting a flag there, and calling it objectivity.”

The perceived lack of lab-leak coverage was one of many examples Berliner cited to make the case that NPR sought to “damage or topple Trump’s presidency.” Yet, as NPR alum Alicia Montgomery wrote for Slate (4/16/24):

I saw NO trace of the anti-Trump editorial machine that Uri references. On the contrary, people were at pains to find a way to cover Trump’s voters and his administration fairly. We went full-bore on “diner guy in a trucker hat” coverage and adopted the “alt-right” label to describe people who could accurately be called racists. The network had a reflexive need to stay on good terms with people in power, and journalists who had contacts within the administration were encouraged to pursue those bookings.

Contrary to Berliner’s allegations, Montgomery noted that staffers were “encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton.” When a colleague “asked what to do if one candidate just lied more than the other,” they were met with silence.

On the subject of Israel and Palestine, Berliner condemned what he perceived as NPR’s “oppressor versus oppressed” framing. Rubenstein, meanwhile, remarked that a colleague once told him, “The state of Israel makes me very uncomfortable.” It’s possible that a New York Times journalist said this, even if Rubenstein’s anecdotes elicited skepticism. But the coverage of the Times, and of NPR, contradict this sentiment.

Indeed, it’s hard to believe that media platforms resemble, in Rubenstein’s words, “young progressives on college campuses,” when they soften Israeli militarism through human-interest stories (NPR, 12/27/23; FAIR.org, 1/25/24), deem Israeli sources more worthy than Palestinian ones (FAIR.org, 11/3/23) and discourage the use of words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” to refer to Israel’s Gaza assault (Intercept, 4/15/24; FAIR.org, 4/18/24).

Warmly welcomed rebukes 

Politico (12/14/23) accepted Bennet’s depiction of a struggle at the Times between “traditional journalistic values like fairness, pluralism and political independence,” and “the ideological whims of the paper’s younger, left-leaning staffers.”

Undermining the self-assigned pariah status of Berliner, Rubenstein and Bennet, corporate media have normalized, even endorsed, the authors’ polemics.

The New York Times (4/11/24) reported that NPR had been “accused of liberal bias”—the word “accused” implying that insufficient appeal to the far right was a misdeed. The Chicago Tribune’s editorial board (4/14/24) called Berliner’s essay “nuanced and thoughtful,” and commended his “courage” in adopting what the Tribune considered a dissident stance among news organizations. Berliner offered “good lessons for all news organizations,” the paper concluded.

A month prior, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait (3/1/24) defended Rubenstein’s rant, breezing past its disdain for racial justice activists to insist on the veracity of a detail about a Chick-Fil-A sandwich. Chait wrapped the piece with a grumble about the “left-wing media criticism” that dared to doubt Rubenstein; right-wing media criticism, of course, was safely in Chait’s good graces.

The day 1843 published Bennet’s harangue, Politico (12/14/23) ran a splashy profile portraying Bennet as the victim of left-wing tyranny. The publication described Bennet as “armed” with damning email correspondence and verbatim quotations from the end of his tenure at the Times, depicting him as a lone soldier battling those who “pushed the paper to elevate liberal viewpoints and shun conservative perspectives.”

The real heretics

Criticism from the left is something the New York Times won’t tolerate (New York Post, 2/16/23).

NPR and the Times themselves, while articulating some disagreement with their critics, largely accepted those critics’ premises. In an internal email, NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin indulged Berliner’s demands to appeal to the right, stressing the need to serve “all audiences” and “[break] down the silos.” (NPR staffers have since written an internal letter urging a more forceful defense of the outlet.) Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s response to Bennet sympathized further, presenting a rightward shift as a point of pride: “Today we have a far more diverse mix of opinions, including more conservative and heterodox voices, than ever before.”

The New York Times’ message stands in stark contrast to one it sent not long before. In February 2023, over 1,200 Times contributors signed an open letter expressing alarm about the paper’s demeaning coverage of transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people, noting that three Times articles had been referenced as justification in anti-trans legislation. Rather than taking these concerns into consideration, or even recognizing their legitimacy, the paper declared it was “proud of its coverage.” Sulzberger went on to exalt said reportage as “true” and “important” (FAIR.org, 5/19/23).

In this media milieu—in which it’s more acceptable to support reactionaries in power than the people whose lives they attempt to destroy—the real “heretics” prove not to be those issuing critiques from the right, but from the left.