Thread by @Fritschner

Finally read the Uri Berliner piece on NPR biasand I'm baffled by how little the enormous media controversy it spawned has resulted in scrutiny of its claims for factual accuracy. There are significant problems with the piece including obvious, verifiable falsehoods

https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/1777780360819986570

To recap, the premise is "I'm a lib who worked at NPR for 25 years and it's too lib now." The author's argument begins with deeply flawed polling analysis (to which I will return) and then proof points based on NPR's coverage of three Trump-era stories, all of which he gets wrong

The first, he says, is "Russiagate." They interviewed Schiff 25 times he says, and Schiff alluded "to purported evidence of collusion" "during many of those conversations." I checked these interviews- Schiff discussed "evidence" of "collusion" once, referring to "public evidence"

Berliner goes on: "But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming."

This is wildly untrue. I mean, my goodness, look at this-

npr.org/2019/03/24/706…
npr.org/2019/03/24/706…

And obviously Berliner is here repeating a Republican talking point that simply is not true. It is not true that the Mueller investigation found "no credible evidence of collusion," they found insufficient evidence to charge Trump with criminal conspiracy. This claim is false.

The next "miscue" he says was not reporting on the NY Post Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020. He says "NPR turned a blind eye" and "didn't make the hard choice of transparency." This isn't true. NPR covered the story at the time and explained why they were being cautious:

Berliner says "the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later" with a link to a Washington Post story. But that story says the opposite. In fact it supports NPR's 2020 decision
washingtonpost.com/technology/202…

His third point is that NPR "became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists"...at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story." Guess what...

If you've read this far you're going to be super shocked to learn that this claim of rigid, unquestioning adherence to avoiding and/or taking down the lab leak theory without ever explaining why also is not true

npr.org/2021/06/03/100…
npr.org/2021/06/17/100…

Those NPR stories are good, they make a good faith effort to grapple with a difficult question. Scientists criticized the lab leak theory in 2020 for the same reason Berliner claims to have written this piece- Trump et al pushed it without evidence to advance a political agenda

I read this because I kept seeing a claim in my feed that seemed *very* dubious: "I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None."

Having some familiarity with voter data I wondered, how did he come by this information? It's true that he could have paid money to access the DC voter file and individually search out his colleagues' party registration one by one. That seems, at best, highly problematic. However

Many people who work in DC live in Maryland or Virginia. and he doesn't mention either. MD voter file data is expensive, but if he was really determined to politistalk all of his colleagues he could have paid the money.

Virginia, however, does not have party registration at all.

A quarter of DC voters do not have registered party affiliation, even though the D primary is their biggest say in local govt. If he did this survey at all, which I confess I doubt, did he simply forget to include non-party-affiliated? Did he exclude them?

https://twitter.com/scottdetrow/status/1778848287576973682

Berliner has been on a whirlwind media tour disparaging NPR and his coworkers' ethics since the story ran, and if that continues I hope at some point someone will ask him how exactly he went about determining the party registration of each individual person he works with in DC.

The rest of the piece is a rant about NPR's "growing DEI staff" after the murder of George Floyd. I drew conclusions about Berliner from this section which I will keep to myself, having not met him, but suffice it to say you get why he and Bari Weiss were a match for this content

I promised to return to the flawed analysis, and it's crucial to his thesis. He argues NPR has lost audience because of lefty reporting bias, as evidenced by numbers which A) do not in the first instance add up, and B) indicate an opposite cause/effect from the one he posits

You'd think a savvy newsman would know college educated people have moved away from the political right over the past ten years, it is in fact the defining political trend of our era. His argument is at best preposterously ignorant and at worst (I think highly likely) bad faith

You'd also think he'd know media balkanization is largely driven by a highly profitable right wing media ecosphere rising as mainstream media sees severe systemic shocks amid a rapidly polarizing polity. This trend started in (talk) radio, and Berliner must surely know that.

I'll end with two points of personal observation:

1) I wish the author had attempted to feel or express any empathy for his colleagues. The argument was badly flawed but the conclusion might be correct, IDK. Either way the absence of empathy strikes me as notable and damning.

2) This goes for all of us, left right and center, but we should always be particularly skeptical of people who tell us what we want to hear. Especially when they try to buy our confidence and trust like this- this is manipulation and when you see it you should be on your guard:

This is about bias so I will state mine— I like NPR. I always have, since I was old enough to understand what Bob Edwards, Robert Siegel, Linda Wertheimer, Carl Kasell et al were saying. You can view my links and consider my points on their own terms, but that’s where I come from

When you see a huge glaring typo right at the beginning of your thread after you finished it

This from @AskLeezul takes apart the second half of the essay (the George Floyd/systemic racism/DEI part) and is far more knowledgeable and better written than what I said above, it’s worth your time.
view.nl.npr.org/?qs=c1cd831479…

https://twitter.com/deggans/status/1778771741566791694

https://x.com/Fritschner/status/1780285283994394768