The peculiar tale of NPR’s decline and fall

Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, has written a buzzy article at the Free Press about how NPR has recently fallen apart. He attributes this to widespread changes following the murder of George Floyd in 2020:

There’s [now] an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.

I haven't listened to NPR in decades, but I don't doubt there's some truth to this. Oddly, though, it comes only in the second half of Berliner's piece. In the first half he offers three examples of stories where NPR "faltered," and not one of them has anything to do with racism, transphobia, and so forth. Nor is it clear the NPR actually faltered much. Here they are:

• NPR ran lots of stories about Donald Trump's collusion with Russia but never issued a mea culpa when special prosecutor Robert Mueller exonerated him.
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  Mueller specifically said he never even addressed "collusion" because it's not a legal term. However, he did document a large number of links between Trump and Russia. These links are the things everyone was reporting about, and Mueller mostly confirmed that they had happened. He just didn't think they rose to the level of indictment.

• NPR ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story during the tail end of the 2020 presidential campaign. But the laptop later turned out to be real.
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  "Later" is doing a lot of work here. At the time the laptop story was dodgy in the extreme. The narrative about a blind PC repair guy who just happened to contact Rudy Giuliani was bizarre. Multiple outlets passed on the story before the New York Post ran it, and even one of their reporters was so skeptical he refused to allow his byline to be used. Other reporters who followed up on the story found nothing. Giuliani refused to let anyone examine the hard drive. There was never any evidence implicating Joe Biden. The entire thing bore all the hallmarks of Republican ratfuckery and deserved to be treated skeptically by reputable journalists.

• NPR consistently reported that COVID-19 had a natural origin even though there was plenty of evidence that it might have been the result of a lab leak.
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  In this case NPR was entirely in the right. The authors of "Proximal Origins," which supported the natural origins theory very early on, didn't have any secret doubts about what they wrote. There's no serious evidence that Anthony Fauci or anyone else manipulated evidence in favor of natural origins. The lab leak theory was motivated from the start not by scientific evidence but by (admittedly legitimate) suspicion of China's behavior combined with the coincidence of the virus breaking out in a city that contained a major biolab. The lab leak hypothesis has always been unlikely, and over time has gotten ever more unlikely. It's all but completely discredited now.

In all three of these instances, Berliner has fallen prey to a sort of conventional centrist wisdom that requires liberal reporters to bend over backward in order to be "fair" to right-wing inventions. But at least in these three cases, conservatives don't have a leg to stand on. Berliner is accusing NPR of nothing more than exercising pretty good editorial judgment.