Embattled NPR CEO Katherine Maher brushes off criticism of her “woke” comments on social media and internally opens up after veteran staffers criticized the public broadcaster’s left-leaning bias. I pushed back against the chaos.
Maher, a former head of Wikipedia’s parent company Wikimedia who took over as NPR’s CEO in March, has argued for everything from the First Amendment to misinformation and the idea that written history leans toward a white male worldview. He has faced backlash for his past comments on everything from .
“Frankly, all of this is a little bit of a distraction compared to the changes that our organization needs to go through to best fulfill our mission,” Maher told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. he said.
A resident of Brooklyn’s liberal bastion of Park Slope gave an interview to a conservative publication two weeks after NPR came under fire for its short-sighted coverage of Uli Berliner. Write an essay for the website “Free Press” “I’ve been at NPR for 25 years. Here’s how we lost faith in America.”
Mr. Maher condemned Mr. Berliner’s claims of bias at the station, telling the Journal that NPR should accept the criticism, but defended the news organization against his accusations.
“We are having robust discussions across the organization, including in response to the article,” she said.
“Clear, well-founded stories” from reviewers, such as an article by Kelly McBride, NPR public editor and Poynter executive who investigated reporting on Israel and Gaza, were a sign that “our journalism is really solid.” “I realized that,” she added.
Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist, pointed out blind spots in journalism surrounding major news events, including the origins of COVID-19, the war in Gaza and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
He also counted 87 registered Democrats and no Republicans, and said he presented these findings to his colleagues at a May 2021 full editorial staff meeting.
Mr. Berliner was suspended without pay and resigned, citing Mr. Maher’s hostility toward him and his criticism of the media’s claims.
“When I suggested there was a diversity problem with 87 Democrats and 0 Republicans, the reaction was not hostile,” Berliner wrote. “It was worse. It was greeted with deep indifference.”
The imbroglio prompted Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators to demand that federal funds be withdrawn from NPR, which receives some of its underwriting from the government.
In response to Berliner’s essay, Maher claimed that the veteran journalist behaved in a “grossly disrespectful, hurtful and degrading manner” towards his colleagues.
She accused him of “questioning whether the people are sincerely fulfilling their mission…based on mere perceptions of identity.”
Before resigning, Berliner cited a number of past posts unearthed on X, pointing out Maher’s own biases and adding that the CEO was “the opposite” of what the struggling radio station needed. Ta.
Her post resurfaced by conservative author Christopher Rufo, who in 2018 called Donald Trump a “racist” and called Hillary Clinton “boy” and “girl.” This included criticizing the use of the word and saying it was “erasing language for non-binary people”.
“We’re looking for a leader right now who’s going to come together and bring more people into the tent and take a broader view of what America is about,” Berliner told NPR Media reporter David Folken last week. told Flick. “And this seems to be the opposite.”
Rufo and others also distributed a video clip of a 2021 interview in which Maher describes the First Amendment as the biggest challenge in the fight against disinformation.
Maher was referring to the difficulty of regulating social media platforms.
He said that while it’s important for tech companies to uphold free speech rights, “it also makes it a little harder to actually be able to address some of the real challenges of where bad information comes from.” It means being a road.”
Maher told the Journal that she has a “strong belief in the First Amendment” and that her comments were taken out of context.
She said she was referring to “the status of constitutional protections and why they limit the options of policymakers to address certain issues.” “This is in no way a personal opinion. It is a very malicious distortion of a nuanced view of the issue of policy landscape.”
Maher also said he is focused on long-term growth at NPR, rather than “a news cycle that questions what civilians said years ago.”
She also insisted that her personal political opinions do not influence the way she does her job.
“There are many professions where you put your personal perspective aside to lead public service. That’s exactly how I’ve always led organizations and how I’ll continue to lead NPR.” she said.
