New NPR CEO Katherine Maher tried to rally the troops on Friday with a memo to staff that vaguely attacked NPR senior editor Uri Berliner’s expose of the taxpayer-funded network’s viewpoint diversity. She never actually mentioned Berliner, or seemed to engage with his overall argument.
Instead, she vaguely expressed insult at Berliner noting the existence of a pile of identity groups among the employees: “Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”
Maher just unfurled rah-rah “we have the best people” verbiage: “This is the work of our people, and our people represent America, our irreducibly complex nation. Given the very real challenges of covering the myriad perspectives, motivations, and interests of a nation of more than 330 million very different people, we succeed through our diversity. This is a bedrock institutional commitment, hard-won, and hard-protected.”
“Our people represent America, our irreducibly complex nation,” she added. “We succeed through our diversity.” No. NPR doesn’t not represent the simplest diversity, letting conservatives have a voice. This is why Berliner turned from internal conversations to public expression.
In the end, Maher just supports more internal talk, not an engagement with “the enemy,” the conservatives who are shut out. She announced they were “establishing quarterly NPR Network-wide editorial planning and review meetings, as a complement to our other channels for Member station engagement.”
The New York Post reports that Maher’s history of woke tweets before she joined NPR is now haunting this new controversy:
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. This wouldn’t hurt her with a hiring panel at NPR. It would certainly be a plus!
“I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive,” Maher wrote on May 31, 2020. “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.” (This perfectly matches a network whose “Code Switch” team touted the book In Defense of Looting and lauded a professor saying anti-police riots should be described as “rebellions.”)
The next day, she lectured her 27,000 followers on “white silence.”
“White silence is complicity,” she scolded.
“If you are white, today is the day to start a conversation in your community.”
NPR is also the network that took the founders of Black Lives Matter announcing they were “Marxist-trained” and attempted to argue that they weren’t really pushing communism.
The Post noted Maher came to NPR from the Wikimedia Foundation. “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.”