NPR CEO’s Ludicrous, Far-Left Tweets Confirm Bias at Taxpayer-Funded Organization

Isaac SchorrApr 15th, 2024, 3:54 pm
 

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NPR CEO Katherine Maher’s old tweets have not aided her organization’s attempt to defend itself against allegations of ideological bias.

Last week, longtime NPR editor Uri Berliner bashed his current employer for becoming an “activist” and “scolding” outlet that had let politics blot out “the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work. ” He went on to call “the absence of viewpoint diversity” the “most damaging development” at NPR in recent years.

NPR has responded to the concerns raised by Berliner mostly by dismissing them. Editor-in-Chief and Chief Content Officer Edith Chapin said that she “strongly” disagreed with Berliner’s characterization of NPR . Maher, meanwhile, constructed a strawman by asserting that Berliner had questioned “whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity.”

Maher’s old tweets may shed some light on how she could understand Berliner’s critique in this way. You see, Maher herself doesn’t approach journalism as a nonpartisan observer or even as a run-of-the-mill Democrat doing her best to call balls and strikes. Far from it, her public pronouncements over the years paint the picture of a radical steeped in progressivism’s most controversial tenets, not someone you’d expect to be entrusted with the wheel of a powerful, ostensibly middle-of-the-road news organization funded in part by John Q. Taxpayer.

As early as 2016, for example, Maher was tsk-tsking Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for using “erasing language for non-binary people” by employing the phrase “boy and girl.”

Around the same time, she identified one of her chief pet peeves as encountering mostly white men in business class on planes.

Then there was her proclamation amid the riots that engulfed a number of American cities in 2020, that while “looting is counterproductive,” it was “hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.”

“No one is condoning looting. But placing the value of property over the value of people’s lives is moral failure,” she explained later that year.

Notably, Maher also participated in the pitchfork-carrying mob that resulted in New York Times Opinion editor James Bennet being fired for running an op-ed calling for the use of the military to quell the riots Maher offered a soft defense of.

“The piece is full of racist dog-whistles. It’s also based on a false premise that the country is in a state of ‘disorder,'” she submitted.

By the time November rolled around, Maher was broadcasting the fact that she was participating in get out the vote efforts on behalf of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

Maher’s entries in the discourse over the years are plainly risible, and she deserves to be on the receiving end of much mockery given her seemingly deliberate mischaracterization of Berliner. But ultimately, they’re much more noteworthy for their confirmation of Berliner’s argument.

It is, after all, no accident that someone with not just far-left politics, but a demonstrated intolerance for other views ended up running NPR. Quite the opposite, Maher’s hiring is an obvious reflection of the leftward lurch identified by Berliner, which shows no sign of abating with such a reflexive partisan at the helm.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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