The New York Times is not your most reliable narrator on all stories about NPR: their weekday podcast The Daily runs on hundreds of NPR affiliates, which creates an obvious rooting interest for the network. On Tuesday, Times media reporter Benjamin Mullin poured on the sympathy for almost 2,500 words, starting with the headline:
NPR’s C.E.O. Was a Right-Wing Target. Then the Real Trouble Started.
Katherine Maher has taken an unyielding approach to NPR’s biggest battles — which has sometimes put her at odds with her colleagues in public media.
As usual, Mullin and the Times line up the "right-wingers" and avoid the "L word." Start with paragraph 2:
Right-wing activists dredged up her old posts on social media and tried to get her fired. Congress stripped more than $500 million in annual funding from public media.
She has become a target not just of NPR’s traditional opponents on the political right but of some within the tightknit world of public broadcasting, who wanted her to take a more pragmatic tack.
So NPR has "traditional opponents," but that doesn't exactly mean they're on the liberal side. Mullin touted Maher's hard line against the right, after "her predecessors were accused of bringing a tote bag to a knife fight."
Ms. Maher, 42, stood by her strategy.
“The government targeted public funding to punish specific editorial decisions it disagreed with,” she said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “That’s not a funding dispute dressed up as a constitutional case; that’s textbook First Amendment retaliation.”
Ms. Maher’s stance brought support pouring in for her organization. NPR emerged from the biggest political battle in its history on firm footing, generating record donations.
In a previous statement, Maher called it "retaliatory, viewpoint-based discrimination." Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! They engage in retaliatory discrimination all the time. Mullin didn't interview any conservatives to rebut this First Amendment bilge or anything else.
That L word did pop up in the middle of the piece:
In early April 2024, two weeks after she started, Ms. Maher and NPR faced an unexpected crisis. Uri Berliner, a senior editor at NPR, published an essay in The Free Press accusing the network of a liberal bias in its news coverage.
The crisis deepened a week later. Chris Rufo, the conservative activist who ran social media campaigns against figures including Claudine Gay, the former Harvard president, circulated years-old social media posts from Ms. Maher that criticized Donald J. Trump and supported liberal causes. (“Also, Donald Trump is a racist,” read one.)
Maher had a pile of outrageously radical posts that would have made juicier quotes, which were no doubt a plus in getting the NPR gig. Mullin noted NPR's critics "seized the moment" and requested in May of 2024 that she "testify on allegations of bias." He did not note she skipped that hearing -- so much for accountability. I testified then about how Maher should have to face Congress.
NPR and PBS responded to conservative arguments of liberal bias by denying reality and attempting no moderation in the daily drumbeat of that bias. Maher stiff-armed any compromisers:
On a call this spring, Patricia Harrison, the chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, asked Ms. Maher whether she would be willing to say anything to members of Congress or the press to acknowledge concerns from listeners who viewed NPR’s reporting as biased, according to two people familiar with her remarks.
Ms. Maher rebuffed that suggestion. She didn’t believe that NPR was biased, and she thought saying so would undermine the organization and fail to placate those who were critical of the network, according to a person familiar with her thinking. After she refused, months of simmering tension between the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR came to the surface. Ms. Harrison told Ms. Maher she should resign her position for the good of public media.
Mullin offered another cursory treatment of the March 26 hearing where the NPR and PBS CEO's ridiculously denied their systematic leftist tilt. It had a "you say tomato, I say to-mah-to" sound:
The hearing was predictably divided along partisan lines. The Republicans, who argued that NPR and PBS were outmoded, a waste of taxpayer money or liberally biased, interrogated Ms. Kerger and Ms. Maher, asking the NPR chief executive about her social media posts and the network’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop. The Democrats praised NPR and PBS and mocked the proceedings (“Is Elmo now, or has he ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”).
This also happened when Mullin and his colleague Michael Grynbaum covered the hearing. As we noted at that time, the Times included absolutely none of the Republican questions loaded with examples of taxpayer-subsidized propaganda, and they never mentioned conservative witness Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation. This left the impression that the Republican “dark pronouncements” had no basis in fact. Who needs to confront our truckloads of evidence?
