NPR

An article by a far right extremist who promotes misinformation and disinformation and racist conspiracy theories:

I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.

"It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding. 

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population. 

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

But it hasn’t.

For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise. 

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals. 

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America. 

That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency. 

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff. 

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming. 

It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story. 

What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media. 

Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.

In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned...

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump. 

When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency. 

Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines...

When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded. 

Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive...

The lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die. And understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his colleagues, “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.”

Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that “the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.” 

When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work...

You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. Lansing came to NPR in 2019 from the federally funded agency that oversees Voice of America. Like others who have served in the top job at NPR, he was hired primarily to raise money and to ensure good working relations with hundreds of member stations that acquire NPR’s programming...

America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.

“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.”

And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too. 

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR’s internal website suggested, the groups were simply a “great way to meet like-minded colleagues” and “help new employees feel included,” it would have been one thing. 

But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR’s union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.

In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage. 

Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and management, are common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what’s notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview. 

And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.

There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line. 

The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.

More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the “intersectional” lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world...

I can’t count the number of times I would meet someone, describe what I do, and they’d say, “I love NPR!”...

It still happens, but often now the trajectory of the conversation is different. After the initial “I love NPR,” there’s a pause and a person will acknowledge, “I don’t listen as much as I used to.” Or, with some chagrin: “What’s happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?”

In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question. Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None. 

So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star. 

In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive told me that she had been “skewered” for bringing up diversity of thought when she arrived at NPR. So, she said, “I want to be careful how we discuss this publicly.”

For years, I have been persistent... I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word gay. I pushed to set the record straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate—Latinx...

No one in a C-suite or upper management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint diversity at NPR and how that affects our journalism. 

Which is a shame. Because for all the emphasis on our North Star, NPR’s news audience in recent years has become less diverse, not more so. Back in 2011, our audience leaned a bit to the left but roughly reflected America politically; now, the audience is cramped into a smaller, progressive silo.

Despite all the resources we’d devoted to building up our news audience among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.

These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren’t conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio—where for years NPR had no peer—is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from. 

Even within our diminished audience, there’s evidence of trouble at the most basic level: trust. 

In February, our audience insights team sent an email proudly announcing that we had a higher trustworthy score than CNN or The New York Times. But the research from Harris Poll is hardly reassuring. It found that “3-in-10 audience members familiar with NPR said they associate NPR with the characteristic ‘trustworthy.’ ” Only in a world where media credibility has completely imploded would a 3-in-10 trustworthy score be something to boast about."

Related:

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "The size of NPR's terrestrial listenership spiked during the 2016 election season and Trump's first year in office, but has slid since then, as its programming has become more focused on issues of race and gender.  In 2022, the size of its audience reached a 20-year low."

Richard Hanania on X - "NPR responds to the Free Press piece. One journalist literally begins his statement by saying "As a person of color..." completely discrediting himself and proving the author's point."

NPR's new CEO Katherine Maher's woke tweets arise as editor claims bias - "The woke, anti-Trump tweets of NPR’s new CEO are coming back to haunt her after she struggled to refute bombshell charges of journalistic bias lodged this week by a veteran editor.  Award-winning NPR business editor Uri Berliner’s lengthy essay in The Free Press was “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning,” Katherine Maher, the radio network’s 42-year-old president, complained in a letter to staffers... in January, when Maher was announced as NPR’s new leader, The Post revealed her penchant for parroting the progressive line on social media — including bluntly biased Twitter posts like “Donald Trump is a racist,” which she wrote in 2018... The NPR job is Maher’s first position in journalism or media.  She was previously the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, after holding communications roles for the likes of HSBC, UNICEF and the World Bank.  Maher earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies from New York University, according to her LinkedIn account, and grew up in Wilton, Conn. — a town that her mother, Ceci Maher, now represents as a Democratic state senator... Berliner did some investigative journalism on his workplace to understand the reason for its coverage choices, he wrote.  “In DC, where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans,” he reported.  “None.”  Maher’s Friday letter did not mention this finding, or debunk any of Berliner’s bias claims. "
Clearly, if you point out that she doesn't have industry experience, you're a sexist (but not a racist, since you can't be racist towards white people)
Naturally, if you point out that Wikipedia is also biased and this has a link to her being CEO, you are spreading misinformation

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says that she abandoned a "free and open" internet as the mission of Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a "white male Westernized construct" and "did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be.""

Katherine Maher on X - "I know that hysteric white woman voice. I was taught to do it. I’ve done it. It’s a disturbing recognition. While I don’t recall ever using it to deliberately expose another person to immediate physical harm on my own cognizance, it’s not impossible. That is whiteness."
i/o on X - "NPR's new CEO seems uniquely qualified to reform the race and gender-crazed organization."
Jimmy Gandhi on X - "@eyeslasho I remember a time when it was sexist to refer to a woman as "hysteric". But that was a long time ago back in the 2010s."
Obviously, if you criticise NPR, you are a far right fascist who hates democracy

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "New NPR CEO calls Trump a "deranged racist sociopath.""

Meme - Katherine Maher @krmaher: "CNN is talking about the tragedy of damage to iconic retail zones and shoe stores in LA. I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. But it's 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. Also, reporting on extinguished shoe store fires is just lazy reporting. (Also to be clear, I am not conflating provocateurs with protestors. Instead, saying this should not be the thing anyone sheds tears over. Cheesecakes are insured; the right to be black and breathe is without measure.)"
This is probably the highest profile person I've seen spout the "looting is good because racism and there's no harm because insurance exists" line

Wesley Yang on X - "It's only very recently that it became high status for women who look like this to indulge in signaling like this. Such scathing contempt for high-end retail consumption! Such heartfelt concern for the expressive rights of the marginalized! It's how you get to be CEO of NPR."

Jonathan Turley on X - "After the scathing account of bias at NPR from one of its most respected editors, NPR CEO Katherine Maher has responded and appeared to confirm that the publicly supported media company has no intention to bring greater balance to its coverage or editorial staff... Maher responded to none of these specific points in substance. Instead, she attacks Berliner as "profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning" to his colleagues by calling out the company for its political bias."
H.S. Daniels on X - "Exactly what you’d expect from National Pravda Radio: it’s all about how it made them feel. Nothing about the veracity of his points. She is the perfect CEO for our DEI age."
Peter Boghossian on X - "Something deeper is going on: Maher literally cannot respond to specific points in substance. Not because the claims are true (they are) but because the ideology robs one of the ability to engage in argument. The only thing she has recourse to is her feeling state. @NPR"

Trump-hating, Biden and BLM-supporting NPR CEO pushes back against ‘woke’ allegations - "As the election unfolded on November 4, Maher referenced "disinfo prep calls" that she and others had in the lead-up to the election, calls that no doubt "prepped" media as to how to react to election results... Maher was earning about half a million dollars per year as the CEO of Wikipedia and was likely insulated from the effects of looting entirely... Maher couldn't address Berliner's points on their merits. Instead, she attacked him personally... Maher is better at parroting talking points of the Democrat left, saying "We fulfill our mission best when we look and sound like the country we serve," than she is explaining exactly why this is so"

J.D. Haltigan, PhD 🏒👨‍💻 on X - "New NPR CEO seems to have many symptoms of the Cluster B Longhouse psychopathology. Antagonistic, performative, accusatory, & frankly delusional. Pronouns in bio. Unstable."
HEADLINES Etc. *Stop The Cultural Decline* on X - "This makes it easier for Trump to defund NPR."

Coddled affluent professional on X - "You can tell NPR values viewpoint diversity based on who they brought in as their new CEO."

Katherine Maher on X - "Never underestimate the ability of white people to center ourselves."
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "New NPR CEO: "Never underestimate the ability of white people to center ourselves.""

Meme - End Wokeness: "This is the new CEO and President of NPR. After seeing her old tweets, I'm starting to think she's just an Al chatbot. They must be trolling us, right? Right?"
Katherine Maher @krmaher: "Lots of jokes about leaving the US, and I get it. But as someone with cis white mobility privilege, I'm thinking I'm staying and investing in ridding ourselves of this spectre of tyranny."

Katherine Maher on X - "Airline business class demographics are such a pet peeve of mine. In the lounge and on the plane, usually > 80% male, usually white."
Of course, this is just pointing out racism and sexism, not evidence she hates white people

Katherine Maher on X - "For the record I don't usually fly business class. Just board past it on the way to the back of the bus."
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "She goes straight to the back of the bus. She is the Rosa Parks of her generation. The MLK of whiteness. She is one of us. Humble. Grounded. Sensitive to gluten, tree pollens, and social injustice. She is NPR."

Katherine Maher on X - "Always trust structural privilege to show itself."
i/o on X - "It's the stream of banalities and boilerplate she offers up that most offends me. There's no evidence that she's ever had an original thought or experienced a unique insight in her life. What gurgles and gushes from inside her is artificial and predictable. If she projects any gravitas at all it's from the accumulated weight of all the cliches piled up inside her brain."

David Folkenflik on X - "Veteran NPR editor Uri Berliner suspended as network grapples with fallout over his essay - my story"
AG on X - "Incredible. He wrote a piece suggesting that the organization doesn’t take criticism seriously, is dominated by activists, & doesn’t engage in any self-reflection. The CEO, who has a history of supporting activism, then responds by ignoring the substance and suspending him."

Ryan Gruber on X - "This new NPR CEO seems like someone Chris Rufo would've created by asking AI to generate a version of an NPR CEO that would get dragged for two weeks and then be paid a handsome sum of money to leave quietly."

Katherine Maher on X - "Agenda for today? Put on a dress, meet some senior officials, boss it in a man's world, critique the politics of representation, scotch."
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "She puts on a dress. She meets senior officials. She is a boss in a man's world, blazing trails and waxing passionately about the politics of representation. After it all: a splash of scotch. No, hold the ice. Neat. Straight-up. NPR."
Elon Musk on X - "You get pretty much the same output if you prompt Grok to be so woke that it sounds parody 😂"
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "It’s incredible. It seems like Google Gemini was trained exclusively on her tweets."

stephen fowler on X - "And there's also plenty of things the network and newsroom can improve or do better, plenty of listeners (even ex-listeners) who engage in good faith, and plenty of room for journalism overall to be better reflective of the country. The NPR network of stations do a great job."
Stephen L. Miller on X - "Hey, there's the "good faith" thing. *Drink Here's the thing, their former colleague made a pretty persuasive "good faith" argument about the problems at NPR, and you all went crying to management about it."

The New York Times is a right-wing newsletter, with recipes - "Sound familiar? It should: This is the same playbook the Times, Rufo, and Elise Stefanik ran against Harvard last winter.  That’s because the New York Times is an active and eager participant in a right-wing culture war intended to demonize and destroy any institutions that might provide the slightest bit of resistance to Trumpist authoritarianism"
southpaw on X - "This NYT article exists to launder right-wing propagandist Chris Rufo’s bad faith attacks on Maher into news coverage—without sufficient context for readers who don’t already know how Rufo operates to understand what’s happening. It’s contemptible."
The left can do whatever it wants, and those who notice are bad people. If someone reports a murder in "bad faith", the police need to ignore this attempt at weaponisation

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "NPR is now claiming that I am "targeting" its CEO by highlighting her own tweets. Katherine Maher is a standard-issue affluent, white female liberal, who is now discovering that her inner monologue is wildly out of touch with the public that, in part, pays her salary."
Dennis Kneale on X - "“Targeting” is a favorite term the media use to describe any criticism Trump utters. The same thing applied here to Chris Rufo. It makes simple words look like an assault. It is wussie. .@realchrisrufo"

Liberal News - "Years ago, while working at Fox News, I told the audience that major media outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and most network news outlets would not tolerate conservative thought.   My imagery was that any employee wearing a MAGA hat, for example, even on private time, would be banished.   Subsequently, we have seen that play out in many leftwing companies. The latest is National Public Radio, where a former executive writes that a liberal bias is enforced enthusiastically... In my 20+ years at the Fox News Channel, I never saw employees punished for liberal beliefs. People like Alan Colmes, Juan Williams, and Shepherd Smith prospered. The Executive Producer of the O'Reilly Factor was a proud Democrat.   That has never happened at the liberal news organizations. You either fall into line or work elsewhere."

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says that, as CEO of Wikipedia, she "took a very active approach to disinformation," coordinated censorship "through conversations with government," and suppressed content related to the pandemic and the 2020 election. NPR's new censor-in-chief."
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says the "the number one challenge" in her fight against disinformation is "the First Amendment in the United States," which makes it "a little bit tricky" to censor "bad information" and "the influence peddlers" who spread it. NPR's censor-in-chief."
Of course, despite this admission, left wingers will still claim that Wikipedia is unbiased, and only far right conspiracy theorists think it is

i/o on X - "The CEO of an organization whose stated mission is "to create a more informed public" says that truth "might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of... getting things done.”"
The left want doctors who oppose gay marriage to be deregistered, but of course if you point out that a clearly biased media CEO who believes in censorship is problematic, you're a bad person

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "We have NPR in a dilemma: they have to sacrifice their CEO, or concede that ideological bias is now built-in. Either way, they have entered a reputation spiral. They will have to pay the price, now or later."

Thread by @feelsdesperate on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The NPR CEO tweets are great fun and support my thesis that parody, satire, and fiction can no longer compete with reality (she’s a better Titania McGrath than Titania McGrath), but the fact that this intellectually vacant and ideologically excited midwit was chosen to lead one of the few remaining viable legacy news orgs is also an important marker for NGO teleology and where things are headed.  There’s no reason that NPR has to care about its mission, reach, or whether its listener base is shrinking.  NPR can regress into smug self satisfaction, focusing primarily on the wants and needs of its employees and a small segment of the public that is closely ideologically aligned.  The narcissism and self entitlement of NGO employees is a constant force that threatens to pull these orgs off course and concerted leadership effort is required to ward off entropy and chaos.  The decision to elevate a veteran NGO midwit who loves therapy culture and mimetic ideological nonsense as CEO signals that NPR has no interest in righting the ship and is leaning into the chaos. A diminished NPR that can’t make basic sense of the world is of course a loss to the public.  The entitled people who diminish institutions always have hysteric counter narratives to launch about how it just shows that they’re willing to bear the costs of their principles and are following a higher calling, but it’s easy to see that that’s just laundered narcissism and that the stupidity, incompetence, and derangement of over socialized mediocre people who have found their way to positions of power is shredding institutions and leading to all sorts of broad negative externalities."

Quotations from Chairman Maher - "I have spent the past few days exploring Maher’s prolific history on social media, which she seems to have used as a private diary, narrating her every thought, emotion, meeting, and political opinion in real-time. This archive is a collection of her statements, but at a deeper level, it provides a window into the soul of a uniquely American archetype: the affluent, white, female liberal—many of whom now sit atop our elite institutions.   What you notice first about Maher’s public speech are the buzzwords and phrases: “structural privilege,” “epistemic emergency,” “transit justice,” “non-binary people,” “late-stage capitalism,” “cis white mobility privilege,” “the politics of representation,” “folx.” She supported Black Lives Matter from its earliest days. She compares driving cars with smoking cigarettes. She is very concerned about “toxic masculinity.”  On every topic, Maher adopts the fashionable language of left-wing academic theory and uses it as social currency, even when her efforts veer into self-parody. She never explains, never provides new interpretation—she just repeats the phrases, in search of affirmation and, when the time is right, a promotion. Maher understands the game: America’s elite institutions reward loyalty to the narrative. Those who repeat the words move up; those who don’t move out.   Next, you notice the partisanship. Maher was “excited” about Elizabeth Warren in 2012. She “just [couldn’t] wait to vote” for Hillary in 2016. She once had a dream about “sampling and comparing nuts and baklava on roadside stands” with Kamala Harris. She worked to “get out the vote” in Arizona for Joe Biden but slightly resented being called a “Biden supporter”; for her, it was simply a matter of being a “supporter of human rights, dignity, and justice.”  Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a “deranged racist sociopath.”  If you read Maher’s tweets closely, you also get glimpses of the human being. She spent much of her time in airports, taxis, meetings, and conferences. She expressed anger over the fact that most first-class flyers were white men, then noted that she went straight “to the back of the bus.” In her thirties, unmarried and without children, she felt the need to explain that “the planet is literally burning” and that she could not, in good conscience, “bring a child into a warming world.”...   Americans, even CEOs, are entitled to their opinions and to their own life decisions, of course. But the personal and psychological elements that suffuse Maher’s public persona seem to lead to political conclusions that are, certainly, worthy of public criticism.  The most troubling of these conclusions is her support for radically narrowing the range of acceptable opinions. In 2020, she argued that the New York Times should not have published Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed, “Send in the Troops,” during the George Floyd riots. In 2021, she celebrated the banishment of then-president Donald Trump from social media, writing: “Must be satisfying to deplatform fascists. Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.”  As CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher made censorship a critical part of her policy, under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.  In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” These speech protections, Maher continued, make it “a little bit tricky” to suppress “bad information” and “the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”   Maher’s general policy at Wikipedia, she tweeted, was to support efforts to “eliminate racist, misogynist, transphobic, and other forms of discriminatory content”—which, under current left-wing definitions, could include almost anything to the right of Joe Biden.  The new CEO of NPR, then, is a left-wing ideologue who supports wide-scale censorship and considers the First Amendment an impediment to her campaign to sanitize the world of wrong opinions.  Maher is no aberration. She is part of a rising cohort of affluent, left-wing, female managers who dominate the departments of university administration, human resources, and DEI. They are the matriarchs of the American Longhouse: they value safety over liberty, censorship over debate, and relativism over truth.  Each social gambit is designed for smothering the institution in ideology. Maher says that she knows “that hysteric white woman voice.” She has “done it.” And while she might not be proud of it—she is aware that she has “a big fat privilege pass”—she is willing to do what it takes to move the dictates of conventional left-wing opinion into a position of domination.  It didn’t begin at NPR, and it won’t end there."

Thread by @realChrisBrunet on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "This is Catherine Tait, the president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (@CBC).  Her base salary is $497,100, paid by Canadian taxpayers, and she is every inch the odious shitlib that NPR's Katherine Maher is... For starters, she lives in Brooklyn, New York, while being in charge of Canadian media. She is a Hilary Clinton donor. By 2025, she demands that all ''companies with whom she does business to ensure that at least one key creative position – producer, director, writer, showrunner and lead performer – is held by members of visible minorities, Indigenous Peoples, persons with disabilities and members of the LGBT community''. In 2019 she compared Netflix to colonialism in India and Africa.  "I was thinking about the British Empire and how, if you were there and you were the viceroy of India, you would feel that you were doing only good for the people of India. Or similar, if you were in French Africa, you would think, I’m educating them, I’m bringing their resources to the world, and I’m helping them. There was a time when cultural imperialism was absolutely accepted. Fast forward to what happens after imperialism and the damage that can do to local communities. So all I would say is, let us be mindful of how it is we as Canadians respond to global companies coming into our country." This year she laid off 10% of the CBC's workforce, cutting 600 positions to deal with a a $125-million budget deficit, but wouldn't rule out paying CBC executives huge bonuses.  ''Over $99 million in bonuses was awarded to employees at the public broadcaster between 2015 and 2022.''  ''CBC defines its bonus program as a 'short-term incentive plan.''' She supports Twitter censorship.  “As head of a media organization which values freedom of speech and of the press, I would prefer that Twitter take meaningful action on its own to address this problem,” wrote Tait. She is working with the Trudeau government to create legislation to deal with “online hate.”  “We have been sharing our mounting concerns with the Canadian government, which is proposing legislation to address online hate. There is significant public support for such legislation,” wrote Tait. on CBC Kids News, her network explains drag queens to kids. Here are some DEI programs at the CBC that she created.  She commits to racial quotas in her DEI plan.  ''Half of all new hires for executive and senior management positions will be Indigenous people, racialized people, or people with disabilities''  ''retention and promotion rates for people from these three groups will be doubled''
In addition to her ~$500k salary last year, while the CBC ran a budget deficit of $125 million, she ran up $119,309 in personal expenses.  ''Expenses included $12,841 for a 2022 Tokyo conference of Public Broadcasters International; $12,673 for a 2022 European tour to London, Brussels and Geneva; $12,220 to Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2021 for discussions with the International Olympic Committee; $10,334 for a 2023 Prague conference of Public Broadcasters International; $9,841 for a 2022 trip to Hollywood for meetings with production industry representatives; and $9,648 for a 2022 trip to London for a discussion on threats facing journalists.''
She hired more than 20 employees for DEI roles in 2020-21 alone  63% of Management at CBC are women  More than 75% of CBC staff took unconscious bias training. Latinx and Middle Eastern people are not eligible for ''initiatives to promote and celebrate the historical contribution and heritage'' at the CBC.  Asian and black people are. She wants more regulation of news content and for the federal government to further support “trusted sources” of news. During the Canadian trucker 'Freedom Convoy', the CBC repeatedly spread the conspiracy theory that 'Russian actors' were potentially funding and fueling the protests. According to the CBC's gender transition/affirmation guide, EVERYONE MUST USE PROPER NAMES AND PRONOUNS TO ADDRESS THE TRANSITIONING EMPLOYEE.  It could be hurtful to refer to someone by the wrong name and pronouns once you have established which set they prefer."
Left wingers continue to insist that DEI doesn't mean racial quotas

Melissa Chen on X - "Look past the temptation to characterize @realchrisrufo ’s whimsical commentary exposing Katherine Maher’s (@krmaher ) own tweets as performance art or offense archeology.   That is a distraction.   What he has done is unearth something far more sinister.   Ms Maher’s politics and her willingness to express them publicly as the CEO of two of our major sense-making institutions - Wikipedia and NPR - whose role in shaping not just public opinion but the collective repository of human knowledge - are highly relevant here.  Is it a coincidence that Wikipedia considers the publications in the left column as reliable sources for Wiki entries? While those on the right, including the NY Post, are considered unreliable?   Do we now get a glimpse of how something like the Hunter Biden laptop story was actively suppressed by a vertically-integrated messaging apparatus at a crucial time?  We know what she thinks of Trump and BLM and Antifa (pro-looting) and… white men. And now it’s obvious how Google search results, science journals, Wiki articles, newspapers and social media all ended up parroting a political orthodoxy that was championed by the coastal liberal elite class.   Police departments were defunded. Laws were no longer enforced. Admissions tests were discarded. Discriminatory quotas based on race and identity were applied across all swathes of society. Fraudulent organizations were promoted that led to zero improvement in the lives of people they were purported to help.   Imagine how much we don’t know of the political views of other leaders who had the perspicacity to practice some form of digital modesty?  We have been living in The Matrix.   Most of you have already taken the red pill. The question for us now is, where do we go from here?"

Wesley Yang on X - "NPR and other nodes in the Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus no longer aim at producing a broad consensus that speaks to and for the nation as a whole -- it aims to keep the disparate elements of its ruling coalition in alignment. They need only to convince themselves."
i/o on X - "Christopher Lasch, writing in 1994: "The culture wars... are best understood as a form of class warfare, in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of a rational public debate, as to create parallel or 'alternative' institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.""

Coddled affluent professional on X - "Uncanny valley.  Is she real?  If you asked OpenAI to generate a feminized, NGO avatar for lib technocratic Sovietization of knowledge production this is exactly what you'd expect.  Just admit it: if she didn't exist and she was purely an illusion of high powered AI microprocessors you wouldn't be able to tell the difference."

Thread by @DanFriedman81 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I’ve been following the drama around NPR CEO Katherine Maher, and, while lots of conservatives are dunking on her tweets and statements, I don’t see a lot of liberals circling the wagons around her. But a lot of them were just like her between 2017 and 2020. If Maher is forced to step down over her “in this house” tweet history, a lot of other people who advanced their careers a few years ago by being performatively woke could also be in trouble. I guess their plan is to just delete their old tweets and try to keep their heads down. These people went completely fucking insane. They destroyed the lives and businesses of a lot of people who didn’t deserve it. And now they’re going to try to pretend that none of it ever happened. Katherine Maher espoused exactly the opinions that were expected of her to be promoted as a white female nonprofit executive in the 2010s. She is not an unusual figure. There are people like her in c-suite positions in every company right now."

Michelle Tandler on X - "Is anybody else feeling upset about NPR? This is a brand and organization that I trusted my entire life. I've known for a while it was left-leaning, but seeing all these tweets from the current CEO is just - I don't even know the words for it - nauseating? It is so clear that she is on Team Blue 100%.   She posts photos of herself sporting a Biden hat, posing next to a cut-out of Warren, name-calling the former president, and using every SJW phrase & insult I can think of. From what I understand, NPR receives $3M in federal funding directly and $90M in funding from local radio stations, which are also funded with tax dollars.   How can an organization called "National Public Radio" be run by a team that is 100% Team Blue?
I am feeling such an odd mix of feelings about all this.   I feel betrayed. I feel sad. I feel frustrated. I feel concerned.   So long as NPR is run by 100% Democrats, I think it should be called National Democrat Radio.   Not National Public Radio.
I've been thinking a lot recently about how to build trust.   The most important principle in building trust is to do what you say you are going to do.   NPR is supposed to be non-partisan. But they just hired a leader who seems to be about as SJW as it comes.   Really disturbing.
Oh, and P.S. apparently, even Bill Maher (@billmaher ) isn't morally righteous enough for her.   Here is what she thinks of him: 'But yeah he's a racist bigot for sure"
I hope she is asked to step down from the helm of NPR.   She is a completely inappropriate leader for the organization, especially now - as it is under a microscope for its partisan leanings.   I think she needs to go. Alternatively, NPR should be defunded."

Nate Fisher renaissanceman.org -MBA/MS CyberSec on X - "I had my awakening in 2015. I had been following closely how the IRS was blocking right-leaning non-profits and having significant delays.  I was (perhaps still am) a liberal who wanted strong discourse and debate. I started to then - only at that point in my life - start to understand how far left a majority of the media was and how it was silencing healthy debate. As someone who voted dem in many elections - I politically fled to another tent that seemed to want to protect freedom of speech.   Start to look at the news with fresh eyes, and see how things carry an odor of accusations and suppositions where it was supposed to be ‘balls and strikes’.  Unfortunately - the media now only survives with money, and that means they need sponsors.  The sponsors ultimately are shading the news to the lean they want, or are pressured to move to.   NPR was supposed to be unbiased. I had to turn it off perhaps 10 years ago because it was just too much propaganda. So the taxpayer money is then paying for a propaganda network. How very non-USSR like.  I want fairness. I want debate. There is no debate today, and opinions that do not conform to the norm can have serious consequences for anyone who tries to voice dissent. Think of the labels thrown at anyone who disagrees - and how that label can damage their careers.  They have successfully weaponized rhetoric to not only silence dissent through censorship, but through besmirching the character of anyone who disagrees.   This is why you will never see people publicly talk about their political leanings if they disagree with the main talking points we are all supposed to be supporting.   One inch a day for the last 18 years or so."

Bizzarely, the following 2 images were blocked by iFunny:

i/o @eyeslasho: "Total number of NPR interns in 2021: 50

Number of white males: 5"

Peter Boghossian @peterboghossian: "Here’s my offer, @NPR . Like Lee Iacocca who rescued Chrysler, I’ll take over NPR for a salary of $1 per year. I will restore neutrality, dramatically increase public trust, put a near total halt for calls to defund NPR, and dramatically increase listenership."
DogeDesigner @cb_doge: "BREAKING: NPR is dying. 🪦"
"npr.org Organic Traffic"