NPR editor Uri Berliner issued a lengthy rebuke of NPR’s media coverage of major news stories over the last few years, such as the Hunter Biden laptop and the COVID lab leak theory, and called out the outlet’s “efforts to damage” Trump’s presidency.
Berliner, a senior business editor at the outlet, wrote in an essay for The Free Press that NPR’s coverage veered off the deep end when Trump was elected in 2016. He cited its coverage of Russiagate first, and said NPR “hitched our wagon” to Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who peddled Trump-Russia collusion claims for years.
“Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports,” Berliner wrote.
After the Robert Mueller report found “no credible evidence of collusion,” he wrote, the Trump-Russia story disappeared from NPR’s coverage. Berliner argued the outlet pretended like it never happened.
Berliner also pointed to NPR’s decision to turn a “blind eye” to the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.
“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,” he wrote.
When the New York Post first reported on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020, NPR infamously issued a statement as to why it wasn’t covering the story. At the time, a popular narrative in liberal media was the laptop was a possible Russian disinformation operation, but its contents were later verified by multiple outlets that previously cast aspersions on it.
“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,” NPR’s statement said.
NPR UNDER FIRE FOR CLAIMING HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY WAS ‘DISCREDITED’ BY US INTELLIGENCE, MEDIA
“But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father,” Berliner continued.
Berliner also pointed to NPR’s coverage of the COVID-19 lab leak theory, which he said the outlet was supposed to ignore. Similar to the Biden laptop story, the notion the virus may have leaked from a Wuhan virology lab was dismissed as right-wing claptrap before ultimately being accepted as at least a plausible theory in mainstream media.
“Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story,” he said.
Berliner said one of his colleagues on the Science team was asked why they were so dismissive of the theory and said his response was “odd.”
“The colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work,” he wrote.
The pandemic’s true origins remain unknown, with many experts still pointing to a natural, zoonotic origin as its most likely cause.
NPR didn’t respond to a request for comment.
