(Image on Unsplash courtesy of Maja Kochanowska)

(This post was updated April 16, 2024)

Calling out your political or ideological opponent or opposite has long been easy intellectually. If attacked, you can appeal to like-minded supporters. They can make you rich, too, as the careers of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Fox News’ Sean Hannity show.

Calling out someone on your own political “team” or tribe—well, that’s another matter. Some reporters can get away with it relatively unscathed by careful political positioning. As social conservative Aaron Renn has noted, The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta has taken this path with his book on evangelicals and politics.

Other reporters pay a higher price.

Your work may be denounced by colleagues and suspended by your superiors. So far, this has been the fate of Uri Berliner, a business editor for NPR.

On April 9, the Free Press, a popular Substack, published his withering critique of the taxpayer-funded news behemoth for being more committed to an ideological and political agenda than the Truth with a capital “T.”

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.

That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.

The New York Times reported that Tony Cavin, an NPR managing editor, “rejected all of (Mr. Berliner’s) claims of unfairness.” Given the criticism, you wonder whether Mr. Berliner’s job is at stake. He told CNN that “for now” he remains an editor at NPR.

Or you could lose more.

Take the case of reporter Kate Coleman, who died on April 2.

She participated in the Free Speech movement at UC Berkley in the mid-1960s and wrote for New Left publications such as The Berkley Barb, where she had a column. Yet her ideology was secondary to her identity as a reporter. Indeed, she feared the loss of her house or life after she co-wrote an expose of the Black Panthers in 1978. (As the Alternative Considerations of Jonestown website noted, Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones himself denounced Ms. Coleman and Mr. Avery by name in Jonestown).

She and Paul Avery, a fellow Bay Area reporter, discovered that the Panthers, despite their public image as tough lefty do-gooders, had descended into gangsterism. The ringleader was Black Panther founder Huey Newton. In one early paragraph, they noted the following:

New West has learned that there exists a secret wing of the Party, assembled originally by Newton as his palace guard loyal to him against any contender. Within the Party, the group is known as “the Squad.” By all appearances, the Squad is simply a team of Newton’s bodyguards—but they often operate like underworld hitmen.

Mr. Berliner and Ms. Coleman were more than brave, possessed more than the cardinal virtue of courage, though. They were also skilled or prudent.

Ms. Coleman noted she and Mr. Avery conducted more than six months of interviews (the key one being with David Horowitz, then a friend of Mr. Newton’s who recommended the Panthers hire Betty Van Patter to audit the Panther’s financial books; her body was found floating in San Francisco Bay, an apparent murder victim of the Panthers).

Mr. Berliner took careful notice of his company for a quarter of a century. He charted NPR’s recent rise and fall, from a left-leaning but intellectually curious media outfit to a partisan progressive publication, and a taxpayer-funded one at that.

In their professional lives at least, Ms. Coleman and Mr. Berliner deserved the honor of being called True Writers, almost the highest accolade this website can bestow. They worshipped the true God—Truth, not diversity, not ideology, not money. They didn’t tell readers how to think. They tried to tell them the truth and let them figure it out from there.

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