NPR veteran editor who sounded alarm on liberal bias at outlet resigns after suspension

Uri Berliner, a National Public Radio veteran editor who authored an essay that was critical of the news outlet's liberal bias, resigned Wednesday.

"Today, 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. If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way. But it hasn’t," he wrote last week in an essay for The Free Press.

"For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own – engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable," he added.

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

NPR suspended Berliner, a senior editor on the NPR business desk who has worked at the outlet for 25 years, for five days without compensation. The suspension was first reported on Tuesday by an NPR media reporter.

Berliner reportedly did not appeal NPR's decision to suspend him without pay and chose to resign.

"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 said in a statement. "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."