The Thursday episode of the “Ask a Jew” podcast hosted Uri Berliner, former senior business editor at NPR, who was suspended and later resigned from the outlet for his damning critique of the insular liberal bias of taxpayer funded NPR. Hosts Yael Bar tur and Chaya Leah Sufrin asked Berliner about how NPR covered Israel, and the resulting discussion was withering.
Berliner characterized one NPR story on anti-Semitism in particular as “bullshit.”
Yael Bar tur: So here’s a line from May 22 in NPR. It says, “Many U.S. and Israeli officials identified the attacks as the latest in a marked rise of anti-Semitic incidents in recent years. And more notably, as Israel ramps up its offensive in Gaza, where the risk of famine looms for a population ground down by a months-long blockade.”
(NPR’s “more notably” sentence appears to suggest the rise in anti-Semitic violence is an understandable response to Israel’s offensive in Gaza.)
Berliner called “BS” on his former employer.
Bar tur: ….is this bias, and you’ve written a lot about the bias against, you know, conservatives and the bias when it comes to COVID. Is it coming from the editors and the staff or is it a response to a demanding audience?
Berliner: No, it’s definitely not from a demanding audience. And the first story that you mentioned where it said that the rise in anti-Semitism was most notably in response to the current situation with the threat of malnutrition. I mean, there’s no other way to put it, but that’s bullshit. I mean, that’s just not true. I mean, as we all know, there was a rise in anti-Semitism before October, in the number of hate crimes.
Co-host Sufrin later added an anecdote about how her Jewish friends were turning away from NPR in “mourning” over its Israel coverage, and Berliner saw NPR as alienating everyone but its “hard left” audience.
Sufrin: I have a lot of friends who were religious NPR listeners, you know….40, 50, 60-years-old women who, this is where they got all their news. This was a, [NPR talk show host] “Terry Gross was their best friend,” and, you know, whatever. And they loved it. And they’re Jewish, not religious, not Orthodox, but very pro-Israel and they can’t listen to NPR anymore. And, and I feel like we’re really mourning something….
Berliner: ….I think the women that you described as, you know, 40- to 60-year-old women, Jewish or not, that’s NPR’s core audience. Yeah. So if they’re alienating them, I mean, I don’t know how many of them are Jewish, but still, I think that’s a problem. That’s a real problem. And I think that what happened at NPR — and I wrote about this — the audience used to be a little tilted towards liberal, but there were a lot of conservatives and moderates and people out in the heartland, the farmers would listen to it on their tractors. And now the audience is just hard left, pretty much.
The hosts were upset about NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride’s November 2023 column on whether they had a bias in the Israel-Hamas war. As usual, McBride typically rushes to the network’s defense and cited a study that said NPR was quite fair and balanced..
