Is NPR’s woke CEO Katherine Maher WORSE than we thought?



NPR’s president and CEO, Katherine Maher, has made headlines after the publicly funded media company punished journalist Uri Berliner for exposing the network’s leftist bias.

Now, Maher’s also under fire for her past outrageous statements about free speech.

And while that’s all bad enough, Maher may be even more nefarious than conservatives are just now finding out.

“She would be a very important tool in the hands of the government, and she’s being paid by National Public Radio,” Glenn Beck says. “She is a tool of the government in many ways.”

Blaze News staff writer Joseph MacKinnon has some enlightening details.

“At first blush, she looks like just another shrill leftist. She has the obligatory photo wearing the Biden campaign hat, and she has an unhealthy obsession with race,” MacKinnon says. “But you keep digging, as Rufo has, and you realize really quickly that there’s something more going on here.”

“From 30,000 feet,” he continues, “she looks like not just a tech savvy media queen but someone who spent a lot of time around color revolutions.”

Not only is Maher also a World Economic Forum World Global Leader, but she’s worked with the World Bank, various NGOs in tech comms and foreign policy spaces, and the National Democratic Institute.

The National Democratic Institute is a spin-off of the National Endowment for Democracy, which according to MacKinnon is an “organization that tries to transition unwilling regimes to become liberal democracies.”

“Can I redefine that a little bit?” Glenn asks, adding, “It’s a CIA front.”

“Whether or not she has CIA on a card somewhere tucked into her desk, she might as well have been,” MacKinnon says.


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Uri Berliner, the journalist who blew the whistle on NPR's left-wing bias, has resigned from NPR.

Last week, Berliner published an essay in the Free Press expressing concern that his employer, a corporate media outlet that receives taxpayer funding, has "lost America's trust" because it has embraced a "progressive worldview."

NPR leadership denied Berliner's perspective, despite the fact that he had worked there for 25 years and witnessed firsthand the liberal drift.

Then, last Friday, the company suspended Berliner without pay for five days. Leadership charged Berliner with violating a company policy that requires employees to receive prior approval before appearing in outside publications.

Berliner said in a statement on Wednesday that he did not resign because of his punishment. Rather, he decided to leave because of CEO Katherine Maher, who he felt criticized him in a memo to NPR staff last week.

Berliner announced:

I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don’t support calls to defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.

Berliner told the New York Times he has no immediate plans other than to spend time with family and rest.

On the same day that Berliner tendered his resignation, dozens of NPR employees sent a letter to company brass demanding they publicly rebuke and correct the "factual inaccuracies and elisions" in Berliner's essay.

— (@)

The demands seemingly confirm many of Berliner's core critiques of NPR. As the old saying goes: If the shoe fits, wear it.

Meanwhile, Republicans are pushing to defund NPR of taxpayer funds. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), in fact, is preparing to introduce legislation doing just that.

"The mainstream media has become obsessed with doing the Left’s bidding and taking down strong conservatives — and NPR has led the pack," Blackburn said. "It makes no sense that the American people are forced to fund a propagandist left-wing outlet that refuses to represent the voices of half the country. NPR should not receive our tax dollars."

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NPR is punishing senior editor Uri Berliner for exposing the outlet's left-wing bias.

Last week, Berliner sent shockwaves through the media with an essay in the Free Press highlighting what he believes is NPR's liberal transformation. According to Berliner, NPR has "lost America's trust" because NPR has embraced a "progressive worldview."

The essay was especially powerful because Berliner has worked at NPR for 25 years, and thus he has witnessed first-hand the outlet's leftward drift.

As evidence to back his perspective, Berliner pointed to NPR's coverage of the alleged Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy, its handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story, its coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, NPR's internal focus on race and identity, and the lack of viewpoint diversity among NPR's staff.

NPR executives initially pushed back on Berliner's criticisms.

"I and my colleagues on the leadership team strongly disagree with Uri’s assessment of the quality of our journalism and the integrity of our newsroom processes," said chief content officer Edith Chapin. "We believe that inclusion-among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage-is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

On Tuesday, NPR itself revealed that leadership had disciplined Berliner.

Despite his years of service with the company, Berliner was suspended without pay for five days beginning last Friday.

The violation? Berliner did not comply with company policy requiring staffers to receive prior approval before submitting work to outside publications. The formal rebuke said it was his "final warning" and threatened termination if he violates the policy again.

Important to this story is Berliner's contention that he tried to address his concerns about NPR's ideological problems with executives before writing about them publicly. Clearly, his concerns went unheard.

Still, Berliner loves the place where he works. That's why he's passionate about its integrity.

"I love NPR and feel it's a national trust," Berliner told NPR. "We have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they're capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners."

In the wake of Berliner's essay, NPR announced monthly reviews of its coverage. What will come of those reviews, if anything, remains to be seen.

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Uri Berliner is a Peabody Award-winning senior business editor who has worked at NPR for 25 years. Last week, he braved the ire of his peers and explained why NPR, long a leftist sinkhole for federal funds, has become an "openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience."

Following Berliner's damning exposé, longtime critics of NPR ramped up their scrutiny of the media outfit, recognizing not only its untrustworthy nature but also the radicalism of its new CEO, Katherine Maher.

Amidst renewed calls by former President Donald Trump and others for NPR to be defunded, South African billionaire Elon Musk — among those prickled by Maher's racially charged remarks and slurs — called Maher "a crazy racist!"

Propaganda for the 'tote bag-carrying coastal elite'

Berliner pulled out all the stops in an April 9 opinion piece for the Free Press, slamming NPR for mindlessly advancing Democratic propaganda and altogether giving up on journalistic independence.

At the outset, Berliner, the son of an LGBT activist and a child of Holocaust victims, admitted to resembling the stereotypical NPR listener — "an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag-carrying coastal elite" — and recognizing that NPR has "always had a liberal bent."

He alleged that despite its historic bias, NPR once had an "open-minded, curious culture." It has since since shed its skin and became a brazen mouthpiece for the liberal political establishment in Washington, D.C., suggested the veteran editor.

Berliner noted, for example, that NPR worked ardently to "damage or topple Trump's presidency," in part by "hitch[ing] our wagon to Trump's most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff" and amplifying the Russia collusion hoax.

When the Russia collusion narrative and the corresponding fictions that NPR helped spread were revealed to be false, Berliner indicated that the media outlet more or less pretended it never happened and moved on "with no mea culpas, no self-reflection," helping shatter trust in the media in the process.

Extra to helping kneecap a democratically elected president over blatant falsehoods manufactured by his political foes, Berliner noted that NPR also turned a blind eye to a Democratic scandal that could possibly have altered the course of the 2020 election had it been properly reported and not censored online —the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Berliner highlighted how in response to the New York Post's explosive story about the laptop, NPR's then-managing editor for news, Terence Samuel, said, "We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions."

Again, when the facts ultimately revealed NPR to be in the wrong, the organization "didn't make the hard choice of transparency."

Berliner also blasted NPR for lying about the origins of COVID-19, "even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists. But that wasn't the case."

The chief catalyst

According to the NPR veteran, "independent journalism" at his company began to take a major nosedive after former CEO John Lansing took the reins in 2019. Lansing reportedly seized upon the death of George Floyd as cause to center race and identity in everything the company did.

"When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism," Lansing allegedly noted in a company-wide article, "we can be agents of change."

"America's infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it," wrote Berliner.

In addition to transforming NPR into an identitarian activist organization, Lansing apparently helped eliminate all remaining "viewpoint diversity."

Berliner's article was not altogether hopeless. After diagnosing what was wrong with NPR, the business editor suggested that Katherine Maher, announced as the president and CEO of the company in January, might turn things around.

Maher formerly worked at the National Democratic Institute, which is primarily funded by George Soros' Open Society Foundations, took part in the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leader program, and served as CEO of Wikipedia's parent company, Wikimedia.

"Her first rule could be simple enough: don't tell people how to think," wrote Berliner.

From one radical CEO to another

Maher apparently figured that Berliner's proposed rule was worth breaking, suggesting in her April 11 response to his article that it's all right to criticize NPR — just not in a manner she doesn't like.

"Asking a question about whether we're living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions," Maher wrote in a response wherein she altogether avoided addressing Berliner by name. "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 intimated further that Berliner was wrong to suggest NPR was radically partisan and devoid of viewpoint diversity, writing, "It is deeply simplistic to assert that the diversity of America can be reduced to any particular set of beliefs, and faulty reasoning to infer that identity is determinative of one's thoughts or political leanings."

While Maher might find it difficult to guess at the worldview(s) embraced by her new and old underlings underlings, it's not hard to infer where she stands on the issues in light of the following posts she made on X in recent years:

  • September 2020 — "Let's be clear here too: I am a white woman. I already got the leg up. ... My race is consistently an advantage."
  • May 2020 — "America is addicted to white supremacy and that's the real issue."
  • May 2020 — "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."
  • May 2020 - "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."
  • March 2019 — "When people turn their noses up at buses, that's also often implicit racism, by devaluing services that provide essential (and already often underresouced) connective links to minority communities."
  • March 2019 — "Climate change, income inequality, disproportionate representation, structural racism, and lax regulation will only become a more toxic brew in the years to come."

Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo shared an old post of Maher's to X Sunday, where she wrote, "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."

Elon Musk responded, "This person is a crazy racist!"

@realchrisrufo This person is a crazy racist!
— (@)

Among the many now calling for NPR to be defunded is former President Donald Trump, who wrote Wednesday on Truth Social, "NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM!" reported CNN.

Trump underscored that NPR is a "LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE" that should not be awarded one additional dollar of government funds.

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