Old Tweets Come Back to Bite NPR Boss

[Valin]

The Free Press

Oliver Wiseman

April 15, 2024

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NPR has struggled to contain the fallout from the essay by Uri Berliner published in these pages last week. On Friday, NPR’s new CEO Katherine Maher issued a letter to staffers that skirted the substance of Uri’s concerns and instead called his character into question: “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,” she wrote. Of course, Uri did no such thing. Read the essay and judge for yourself. 

Now, with the world watching and wondering what has gone wrong at NPR, some inconvenient old tweets of Maher’s have resurfaced. 

Like this one about looting:

 

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[Valin]

Also On Our Radar

→ What Brendan Eich did next: A decade ago, Brendan Eich was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla, the software company he founded, after he made small donations to groups campaigning against same-sex marriage in California. Eich’s ouster was an early example of the contemporary cancel culture we have come to know all too well. But, as Andrew Beck writes in a piece for First Things marking the ten-year anniversary of that departure, Eich has refused to be defined by his cancellation: 

I am not here to complain about cancel culture. Brendan Eich does not. He is too busy. He refuses to be defined by the evil done to him, or by the purported heterodoxy of his beliefs, but by the work he does and by his character, as known by those closest to him.

Rather than taking to the airwaves and leaning into the role of martyr, as have so many others who have endured similar abuse, Eich never speaks publicly about the wrong done to him—not once even in private to me. Instead, he diligently pursues his vocation.

Read the full article here. Of note: Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who was a Facebook board member at the time, offered a tech titan’s mea culpa. He said in a tweet, “I regret not doing more to support and defend Brendan then. I should have realized what it meant and what was to follow. I do not intend to make that mistake again.” 

[Valin]

1 hour ago, Valin said:

The Free Press

Oliver Wiseman

April 15, 2024

(Snip)

NPR has struggled to contain the fallout from the essay by Uri Berliner published in these pages last week. On Friday, NPR’s new CEO Katherine Maher issued a letter to staffers that skirted the substance of Uri’s concerns and instead called his character into question: “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,” she wrote. Of course, Uri did no such thing. Read the essay and judge for yourself. 

Now, with the world watching and wondering what has gone wrong at NPR, some inconvenient old tweets of Maher’s have resurfaced. 

Like this one about looting:

 

(Snip)

 

NPR’s New CEO Scolds 25-Year Veteran For Exposé Outing Network’s Bias

 

[Valin]

Sometimes Evil Wears A Pleasant Face.

[Valin]

Quotations from Chairman Maher
NPR’s new CEO exemplifies the ideological capture of America’s institutions.
Christopher F. Rufo
Apr 17, 2024

Katherine Maher has a golden résumé, with stints and affiliations at UNICEF, the Atlantic Council, the World Economic Forum, the State Department, Stanford University, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She was chief executive officer and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. And, as of last month, she is CEO of National Public Radio.

Mere weeks into this new role, Maher has stepped into controversy. Long-time NPR senior editor Uri Berliner published a scathing indictment of the self-professed “public” media service’s ideological capture. Rather than address the substance of these criticisms—which will ring true to anyone who has listened to NPR over the past decade—Maher punished Berliner with a five-day unpaid suspension. (Berliner announced his resignation from NPR yesterday.)

But Maher has another problem: her archive of 29,400 tweets.

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.

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Top Comment

Nathan F

3 hrs ago

She's a real-life Titiana McGrath. If you thought NPR couldn't get any more left biased, think again. It needs to be defunded.