PBS’s Ferguson: It’s Sad Berliner Left NPR, It’ll Make the Newsroom More ‘Tribal’

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” “PBS NewsHour” Correspondent Jane Ferguson stated that it’s tragic that Uri Berliner quit NPR and that when things like that happen, “people just become siloed and the newsrooms become siloed and completely sort of tribal in that way. And I think that’s the saddest thing, to see that he had actually left afterwards.”

Ferguson said, “I think one of the saddest things about the increasing sort of row — the NPR row is just the latest, we’ve seen also within the newsroom in The New York Times, there’s really no major news organization in the United States that hasn’t had some sort of newsroom uprising recently or critique. The saddest thing about this is that he ended up quitting. And, back in the past, there’s — I don’t know which is better, what we have now, where people go public and talk about these newsroom issues and say, listen, there’s not enough diversity of opinion, there’s way too much pushback, this is not fair, or in the past, where — what we’ve seen over the years, is that people just quit. They’ll leave one news organization and gravitate towards another. And so, people just become siloed and the newsrooms become siloed and completely sort of tribal in that way. And I think that’s the saddest thing, to see that he had actually left afterwards.”

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