BUNKERTIME: NPR’s Katherine Maher Is Not Taking Questions About Her Tweets.
[Uri] Berliner’s tell-all mostly took aim at specific examples of NPR being led astray by its deference to progressive shibboleths: the Hunter Biden laptop, COVID-19, etc. He implored his new boss—Maher’s tenure as CEO had only begun about four weeks ago—to correct NPR’s lack of viewpoint diversity. That’s probably a tall order, since Maher had once tweeted that ideological diversity is “often a dog whistle for anti-feminist, anti-POC stories.”
* * * * * * * *
When asked by event organizer Jon Bateman, a Carnegie senior fellow, to address the Berliner controversy, she said that she had never met him and was not responsible for the editorial policies of the newsroom.
“The newsroom is entirely independent,” she said. “My responsibility is to ensure that we have the resources to do this work. We have a mandate to serve all Americans.”
She repeated these lines over and over again. When asked more specifically about whether she thinks NPR is succeeding or failing at making different viewpoints welcome, she pointed to the audience and said that her mission was to expand the outlet’s reach.
“Are we growing our audiences?” she asked. “That is so much more representative of how we are doing our job, because I am not in the newsroom.”
We’ve all seen veteran newspaper columnists who swear up and down that they’re totally objective, and then, when bumped up or transferred over to write opinion columns, invariably start producing nothing but cant that’s so far to the left it would make Che Guevara blush. Maher has simply reversed the process — after more than a decade of being a Titania McGrath clone, now she wants us to believe that her radio network is totally objective and “serving all Americans.”
One person who isn’t buying her shtick: Larry Sanger Speaks Out. The Wikipedia co-founder discusses Katherine Maher and the corruption of the Internet.
Christopher Rufo: What are you thinking as you’re watching these statements from former Wikipedia CEO Katherine Maher, who is now the CEO of NPR?
Larry Sanger: I’ve been following your tweets. You’ve kind of shocked me. The bias of Wikipedia, the fact that certain points of view have been systematically silenced, is nothing new. I’ve written about it myself. But I did not know just how radical-sounding Katherine Maher is. For the ex-CEO of Wikipedia to say that it was somehow a mistake for Wikipedia to be “free and open,” that it led to bad consequences—my jaw is on the floor. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised that she thinks it, but I am surprised that she would say it.
Rufo: In another clip, she says explicitly that she worked with governments to suppress “misinformation” on Wikipedia.
Sanger: Yes, but how did she do that in the Wikipedia system? Because I don’t understand it myself. We know that there is a lot of backchannel communication and I think it has to be the case that the Wikimedia Foundation now, probably governments, probably the CIA, have accounts that they control, in which they actually exert their influence.
Exit quote:
Given her current position as head of state-run radio, her obsession with top-down government control and propaganda, and with racial identity, exactly!
As for the rest of us: Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) Pushes to Defund Taxpayer-Funded NPR.
Faster, please:
Once again, and magically, old-school lib @NellieBowles at TGIF crystallizes my right-wing-religious-nut thoughts precisely, as Paul Shaffer used to do for David Letterman. From today's TGIF newsletter: https://t.co/EGRwQQopQh pic.twitter.com/1fWwxnEarf
— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) April 19, 2024
But of course, as Jesse Walker writes at Reason: Another Day, Another Doomed Plan To Defund NPR. “Maybe someday we’ll get there. But if [Jim] Banks [R-IN] and Blackburn manage to pull it off this year, I’ll eat an NPR tote bag.”