NPR Editor: We’ve Evolved into a ‘Niché Thinking,’ They ‘Don’t Allow Enough Air’ to Consider All Kinds of Perspectives

CUOMO: “I want to bring in brother Berliner, because that was a brave thing he did, man. Your competition is your critic base in this business, and you knew when you wrote this, you weren’t gonna get a chorus of amens, you were going to get people probably digging through your garbage and saying it’s not true. And sure enough, colleagues came forward to do what you had to expect they were going to do, which is say, ‘We disagree. Uri is entitled to his opinion, but we disagree about the nature and quality of our reporting. What do you make of their response? What do you make of the attention?”
BERLINER: “I’m not surprised by the response that came from management and the same management that I’ve been making a lot of these points about, and they’re certainly entitled o that perspective. I will say, I’ve had a lot of support from colleagues, many of them unexpected, who say they agree with me. Some of them say this confidentially, but I think there’s been a lot of response saying, ‘Look, these are things that need to be addressed. We haven’t. We’re been too reluctant, too frightened, too timid to deal with these things.’ And I think that this is the right opportunity to bring it all out in the open.”
CUOMO: “So for those who are sitting there saying, ‘I knew it! NPR, those laconic lefties with that slow delivery and just feeding us all of this,’ are you saying that’s the truth or are you saying it’s something that has evolved? What do you want people to feel about NPR and what do you feel about the media in general?”
BERLINER: “I think it’s evolved. You know, I have been at NPR a long time, 25 years. You could say I’m a lifer. It’s a place I’ve always loved working. But when I started, there was a liberal orientation, but I think we were more guided by curiosity, open-mindedness, you know, you said, talked about policy, we were kind of nerdy and really liked to dig into things and understand the complexity of things. I think that’s evolved over the years into a much narrowed, kind of niché thinking, a group think that’s really clustered around very selective progressive views that don’t — they don’t allow enough air, enough spaciousness, to consider all kinds of perspectives.”