A New Old Story about Liberal Bias in the News

It's NPR today ... but I blew the whistle 28 years ago.

You may have heard about the NPR senior editor, Uri Berliner, who went public with his concerns about liberal bias at his news organization. He says this came after years of in-house conversations about the subject — conversations he felt went nowhere. Perhaps you also heard that he was suspended for five days without pay for what he did. And then … he resigned.

He explained why on X. “I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don’t support calls to defund NPR,” Berliner wrote. “I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.”

Good for Berliner. It takes courage to do what he did.

28 years ago, in March of 1996, another journalist, this one a correspondent at CBS News, went public with his concerns about liberal bias at his news organization. This also came after years of in-house conversations about bias — conversations he felt went nowhere.

I have a great deal of knowledge about the CBS News correspondent, about what he did and why he did it. I was that journalist.