The NPR whistleblower that exposed the news outlet for liberal bias last year says its embrace of "fringe progressivism" was the reason for its defunding that became official this week.
"It’s a self-inflicted wound, a product of how NPR embraced a fringe progressivism that cost it any legitimate claim to stand as an impartial provider of news, much less one deserving of government support," Uri Berliner wrote in a Thursday op-ed entitled "Happy Independence Day, NPR."
Berliner resigned from NPR last April after he was suspended for not getting approval to do work for other outlets following an essay he wrote in The Free Press. The bombshell piece lambasted his former employer’s coverage of contentious topics like Russiagate, Hunter Biden's laptop, and the COVID lab leak theory.
He said that his decision to leave was due in part to "absence of viewpoint diversity" at the outlet.
Republicans in the Senate and House narrowly passed the rescissions package this week that yanked over $1 billion in federal broadcast funding for the fiscal year.
"I witnessed that change firsthand in my 25 years at the network—and I tried to do something about it," he said. "I was a senior business editor at NPR when, a little more than a year ago, I published my account in The Free Press of how the network had lost touch with the country, and, like the legacy media everywhere, forfeited the trust of the public."
He said that the outlet eventually "became a boutique product for a well-heeled...
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