Taxpayers should have stopped funding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting long ago, but National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher’s cowardly, disingenuous, and dishonest testimony before Congress on March 26 must surely convince reluctant lawmakers that now is the time to cut the cord.
Long before Maher took the helm, defenders of NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service have always played a disingenuous game regarding taxpayer support. On the one hand, these organizations claim that federal funding makes up just a tiny part of their overall budgets. But then they turn around and say taxpayer money is essential to what they do.
The reality is that CPB direct payments to NPR and PBS are small. But also CPB gives hundreds of millions in smaller grants to local stations across the country. These stations are then required to carry national NPR and PBS content, which NPR and PBS force them to pay for. If the taxpayer funding to these local stations dried up, NPR and PBS would lose the primary revenue stream for most of their programming, which is why the leadership of these organizations is always so eager to come to Congress and fight for taxpayer dollars.
In addition to playing this time-honored game of bait and switch, Maher was forced to defend a cornucopia of her past statements, all of which completely undermined her testimony that NPR was a trusted source of unbiased news.
Asked if she still believes that America began in “black plunder and white democracy,” Maher said she did not. But when presented with evidence that she tweeted that thought while taking a day to read the book The Case for Reparations, Maher denied any memory of ever having read the book.
Asked if she still believed “America is addicted to white supremacy,” again a quotation from her own X account, this time, Maher claimed that “much of my thinking has evolved over the last half-decade.” In addition to failing to defend her own beliefs, Maher did not explain how or why her thinking “evolved” on this question.
Asked about criticisms raised by former NPR reporter Uri Berliner, including the revelation that 87 registered Democrats worked in editorial positions at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., but not a single Republican, Maher testified, “I wish I had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Berliner.”
Berliner then took to X, noting that he did, in fact, ask to meet with Maher to discuss the very allegations of bias he detailed in his essay but that Maher declined, instead attacking Berliner on NPR’s website and calling his words “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”
Maher is the daughter of rich parents and grew up in New York City before studying abroad in Cairo and Syria. After graduation, she worked for the Council on Foreign Relations in London and UNICEF in New York City. She then went to work for the World Bank before rising to become the CEO of Wikimedia in 2019, where she said, “I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”
Unbiased truth is the last thing Maher is trying to accomplish at NPR. But even before she arrived, Berliner reported that managers told reporters to be “agents of change,” not objective fact gatherers. Under Maher, NPR has become even more biased against not just conservatives but also traditional mainstream American values.
DEMOCRATS HAVE LEARNED NOTHING ON IMMIGRATION
To call NPR a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party would be unfair because an entity bent on helping Democrats win elections would try to push the party in a moderate direction. But that is not what NPR has become.
NPR is a left-wing advocacy network funded by the wealthiest and most radical anti-American enclaves of New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, plus all the rest of us who are taxpayers. If NPR wants to continue as a nonprofit group pushing a racist, Marxist worldview that lets liberals feel better about themselves, let it be so. But letting it be means leaving it alone, not supporting it with taxpayer money.
