 Welcome to Free Media. I'm Robbie Suave. And I'm Amber Duke. Let's get into it. NPR has suspended one of its top editors after he blew the whistle on the network's liberal bias. Yuri Berliner was suspended without work for five days. His official infraction is not seeking approval for outside work. He appeared on News Nation's Cuomo last night to tell his side of the story. Let's watch. So for those who are sitting there saying, I knew it, NPR, those laconic lefties, you know, 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 you feel about the media in general? I think it's evolved. You know, I've been at NPR a long time, 25 years, you could say I'm a lifer. And 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 like to dig into things and understand the complexity of things. I think that's evolved over the years into a much narrower kind of niche thinking, a group think that's really clustered around various selective progressive views that don't allow enough air, enough spaciousness to consider all kinds of perspectives. And suspended. I love that they got him, by the way, on not seeking approval for outside work, which basically means he didn't go to his editor and say, hey, I really want to write this freelance article for the Free Press. Oh, what is it about? It's trashing our entire company. I mean, I guess that's the only technical infringement that they could get him on. Which I do understand, like, you know, we have to be real, there are a lot of workplaces, probably the vast majority of media outlets that, you know, if you're agreement, if your contractual agreement is they get to sign off on work you do elsewhere or that they have like a very basic, you can't just go out and publicly disparage us, you know, you're going to get in trouble for it. So frankly, I'm not like, this isn't cancel culture exactly right that they suspended him. I think it's not the best sign that internally the people are so mad about him raising obvious issues with NPR. And like, are those people going to get in trouble? Are the people slamming him now at his company? And like, who gets in trouble? You know, we've been through so many media cycles now where there's some furor, some uprising at the New York Times or the Washington Post or elsewhere, liberal reporters unhappy about a conservative op-ed or something, making their views known. Do all of them get suspended without pay for five days? So I think it's a little bit of a hypocrisy issue without necessarily NPR having done anything hypocritical. But it's the, we should talk about the meat of the issue, which is that I think he's explaining what a lot of people probably would be concerned that their tax tiles, remember this is a publicly subsidized funded enterprise that seems wholly hostile to dissenting viewpoints on so many subjects. Right, and so people at NPR will often strike back at the idea that their taxpayer funded by pointing out that only 1% of their revenue or their... I think it's more than that, is it only 1%? Well, they claim it's 1%, but that's directly from the federal government. There's a factor in state, local and federal subsidies that are both direct and indirect to NPR. Suddenly it gets up to 10%. And so I mean the obvious retort too is, oh well if it's only this small iota of your overall budget, then just give up the money. And then you don't have to face questions about people being concerned about your liberal bias. And for people who didn't read Mr. Berliners article at the Free Press, he talks about the fact that NPR made this strategic decision to not cover the Hunter Biden laptop story. I believe they issued some kind of statement on it about how they weren't going to talk about it. Maybe that was associated press. It's hard to keep track these days. No, they did say that. They said it's not news. That's right. It's not news. And then when they covered breathlessly the Russian collusion hoax about the former president, Donald Trump, they didn't really cover much of the Mueller report which failed to substantiate those claims, didn't find enough evidence to say that Trump had colluded with Russia. And then he lists some other examples of this liberal bias. Namely the fact that out of all of the editorial positions in the company, there are 87 registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans. Zero. Zero. Yeah, and it's reflective in the company leadership. Their new leader, her name's Catherine Marr. She's the CEO. She's the CEO. That's right. And you know, people were going, Chris Rufo type people were going back to see what she was tweeting back then. And she just has a lot, there's one, you know, I don't care that she's a Biden supporter, right? There was a, there was one tweet where she was wearing a Biden hat like whatever. I assume she's a Biden supporter. But there was also a tweet where she says that intellectual ideological diversity is a dog whistle for racism. That's paraphrasing, but that's what she said. And if that's your view that ideological diversity is not just bad, but racist, I mean, that's the view of the person in charge, the leader by necessity. The company will end up reflecting that. And again, this is a company that draws party at 10, 11 percent. It's not nothing. It's certainly a healthy part of the budget from taxpayer funding, which I'm against regardless of what the editorial line of the company is writing. Right, no taxpayer funded media. I know we can agree on that. No, I don't care if it's saying 100% libertarian things. Why does anyone else have to pay for it? So that's my view and yours. But the fact that she has that hostile view toward intellectual diversity. Well, of course it's going to be a monolith on kind of liberal or really just even mainstream. Because as you're pointing out, the Russia gate, Hunter Biden, I think their COVID stuff was very mainstream establishment. It's just kind of manufacturing that very narrow range of opinions that I don't even call it left anymore. It's just like the mainstream elite Democratic Party consensus. It's like progressive wine ant kind of material. And then so the CEO, she had a couple of other tweets too that spoke to the idea that she's very obsessed with identity in terms of race and gender and not so much intellect and ideology. So she talked about how she recognizes that she has like straight white able-bodied privilege. And then in another tweet talks about how looting is essentially justified because people are striking back against like a racist system. I mean all of these crazy things that you hear on college campuses. But until recently maybe didn't expect the leaders of newsrooms to say those kinds of things. So she responded in a note to staff to Mr. Berliners article. And she accused him of being disrespectful and I think she called him offensive because he pointed out that the bulk of the newsroom all identifies a certain way politically and tends to come from liberal enclaves and tend to be wealthy white people. And she was like, well, you can't just say that people are going to think a certain way because of who they are and where they come from. But she believes in that clearly based on her own social media history. So what is the issue with saying, even statistically, right? People that come from wealthy white liberal cities tend to think a certain way. I mean that's just a fact. And she says it's disrespectful and offensive for him to point that out. Yeah, if you put her tweets next to like fake tweets from, what's that? It's like a parody of Wokeness. They're not real. Titania McGrath. That's right. Matt Taibbi made this observation in his sub-stack post on this which was great saying, I don't think you'd be able to tell apart her tweets from the parody tweets. They are like that over the top. But I guess that's the editorial direction at NPR these days. And you pointed out that she's actually going to be in DC this week speaking on of all things a disinformation panel. What a surprise. Disinformation experts always failing upwards as I say. More free media right after this. Thank you.