2024 has not been kind to American journalism. Mainstream news outlets — including NBC News, CBS, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, TIME and Business Insider — have laid off hundreds of staffers. Publishers and media analysts have been casting about for possible explanations, whether difficult economic headwinds, the collapse of ad revenue or Americans’ “news fatigue” ahead of another presidential election.

Bashing National Public Radio‘s leftward bias is a favorite pastime of conservatives, especially since it is funded by taxpayer money, but critics received a boost this week from an unlikely source.

Uri Berliner, a 25-year veteran of NPR who is now a senior business editor there, published a lengthy essay this week that was remarkable because it absolutely blasted his employer’s approach to journalism. It was such a complete takedown that I found myself marveling, “He wrote this while he still works there?”

My next question was, “Will it do any good?”

NPR reporter Uri Berliner wrote an essay for The Free Press arguing that the network has lost chunks of its audience by growing too dogmatically progressive. Some of the evidence supports his claim. Unfortunately, he undermines his case by leading with an example that in no way vindicates the thesis, and actually undermines it: coverage of the Trump-Russia scandal.

Berliner presents the story as a nothingburger that NPR breathlessly hyped and then ignored when it turned out to exonerate the president:

After a nearly two-year court battle, former Trump White House counsel Don McGahn testified behind closed doors on Friday about his role in the events described in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

A federal judge ordered the Justice Department to get an answer directly from President Trump about whether recent tweets and statements by him constituted orders to declassify, unredact, and make public special counsel Robert Mueller’s entire report along with all of the FBI interviews connected to that investigation.

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Justice Department to release certain previously redacted sections of the Mueller report by Election Day, ruling that portions of the report were improperly deemed classified.

U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton in Washington, D.C. said that the DOJ violated federal law by unnecessarily redacting at least at least 15 pages of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign.

U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton has ordered the Justice Department to release certain redacted portions of Robert Mueller's report by Nov. 2 – one day before the presidential election.

BuzzFeed News reported that Walton ruled the DOJ had improperly redacted significant sections of the report. Those redacted items included discussions within then-Special Counsel Mueller’s office about whether to charge certain people with crimes.

John Dowd, one of the lead lawyers who represented President Trump during Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion, said Tuesday that the special counsel engineered a perjury trap for Trump in the exact same way that James Comey’s FBI invented a trap for former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

“Mueller’s scheme was the same one captured in the (newly released) FBI set-up notes pertaining to Flynn. They knew they had nothing, but using their official power they created and perpetuated the facade of an investigation,” said Dowd.

A U.S. appeals court on Thursday instructed the judge presiding over the criminal case against President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn to respond to a petition in which Flynn asked the appellate court to toss the charges.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit gave District Judge Emmet Sullivan 10 days to respond to an emergency petition filed by Flynn’s lawyers seeking to force Sullivan to grant a Justice Department request to dismiss the case.

Washington (CNN) - The Supreme Court on Wednesday temporarily blocked the release of former special counsel Robert Mueller's grand jury material to the Democratic-led House of Representatives.