Editors at National Review Online explain why now is a good time to stop spending federal tax dollars on National Public Radio.

National Public Radio has every right to operate as a left-wing propaganda outlet masquerading as a legitimate news organization. But it is not entitled to pursue this goal with taxpayer money. The latest revelations about the ideological rot at NPR have only made this case stronger.

Before his resignation on Wednesday, Uri Berliner had worked at NPR for 25 years, most recently as a senior editor. But after being suspended for last week writing a long essay for the Free Press criticizing the organization for its bias, Berliner decided to resign, saying he could no longer work there comfortably.

In his essay, Berliner argued that while NPR always had “a liberal bent,” in the past, it at least attempted to provide some balance. These days, he wrote, “those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”

The change, he said, started with the election of Donald Trump. He described how the programming relentlessly pushed the Russian-collusion story only to leave it largely unmentioned once the Mueller report did not establish collusion; how NPR consciously refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story in the runup to the 2020 election; and how during Covid, its journalists portrayed the lab-leak theory as having been debunked when it had not been.

In the wake of the George Floyd killing and the ensuing riots, NPR followed other institutions in imposing a DEI framework organization-wide. “Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace,” Berliner recounted.

He described how employee “affinity” groups emerged based on identity, including “MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).”