'One of the things I found really kind of inspiring was, if I worked on a story, there might be a farmer in Nebraska on his tractor first thing in the morning listening to, you know, a story I worked on,' he told the Daily Mail.

'That was one of the reasons I wanted to work at NPR, because of its reach to all kinds of people. But, you know, I don't know that farmer still listens.'

Last year, Berliner wrote an article titled: 'How We Lost America's Trust'.

It detailed how NPR had become obsessed with diversity and progressive storytelling angles, losing its way journalistically and shedding millions of listeners along the way.

On Thursday, his article was submitted as evidence in a hearing of the House DOGE subcommittee, during which Republicans advocated to defund public broadcasters NPR and PBS for becoming 'radical left-wing echo chambers.'

The Republican chairwoman, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, said: 'We believe that you all can hate us on your own dime.'

During the hearing, NPR Chief Executive Katherine Maher admitted the network had been 'mistaken' in not pursuing the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, and she disavowed her past social media posts calling Donald Trump a 'racist' and a 'sociopath.'

NPR is partly funded through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) which was authorized by Congress in 1967. 

Each year, the CPB receives $500 million in taxpayer funding that it distributes to NPR and PBS.

Berliner resigned as an editor after he was suspended over his article last year.

Following the congressional hearing, he reflected on how NPR had reached this point.

'In 2011 our audience was pretty closely divided between people who said they were liberal moderates and conservatives, maybe a little bit to the left,' he explained.

'By 2023 it was six to one progressives and I think the programming, pretty clearly, has been tailored to them. People in in the middle, the moderates, certainly the conservatives, have left. They've just gone, and they've lost that audience.'