A few years ago there was a study of Harvard students comparing their knowledge of American history when they were entering freshmen to when they were university graduates. The results were that they were less knowledgeable after four years at Harvard. Not actually surprising.
I was reminded of this reading a New York Times puff piece on NPR President Katherine Maher, published on December 30. A Times reader would finish the piece not having any idea why Maher is controversial and a less knowledgeable and informed citizen than before reading the piece,
Before getting to the Times article, let's review what we knew about Maher before the article was published.
Katherine Maher is the daughter of a Goldman Sachs executive and grew up in the very wealthy suburban town of Wilton, Connecticut. I'm from Wilton's significantly less wealthy neighboring town of Norwalk, so know Wilton quite well.
Armed with a university degree is in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from NYU, Maher did post-graduate work in Cairo and Damascus. Academic Middle Eastern studies was a field was initially funded by the Federal government back in the 1950s in the expectation that it would train experts in that area of the world who could help advise the government. The 9-11 postmortems found that these programs were abject failures in providing graduates who could make accurate assessments of what was happening in the Middle East. Instead, the programs had been taken over by academics hostile to the West and instead used to promote the theory that later became known as settler-colonialism, in which the West was responsible for everything bad that happened in the Islamic world. This was the setting in which Maher was marinated (it's only gotten worse since then).
Post-graduate employment followed with UNICEF, the World Bank, and the National Democratic Institute. In 2014 she joined the Wikimedia Foundation, initially as Chief Communications Officer and then as Executive Director, remaining with the organization until 2021. Along the way Maher also became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Atlantic Council. During the Biden Administration she joined the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board. She has all the right credentials.
The Wikimedia Foundation sets the strategy for Wikipedia and, under Maher's direction, it made a significant change in its approach. Even by 2014, Wikipedia was beginning to have credibility and reliability issues due to its editing process and susceptibility to manipulation. However, its stated purpose was still to be an accurate reflection of current knowledge. That was to change with Maher.
According to an article in the August 2024 edition of Pirate Wires, "How the Regime Captured Wikipedia, the proposed changes generated controversy within Wikimedia:
"The controversy was ultimately about who would control the site
containing “all the world’s knowledge,” and hundreds of millions in
Wikipedia funding. Would the site’s community of decentralized,
uncompensated editors continue to govern it according to its principles
of openness, transparency, and neutrality, or would a handful of highly
paid NGO technocrats re-orient Wikipedia toward endorsing and promoting
the ever-shifting currents of the Western elite social justice regime? "
"The Movement Strategy, also known as Wikimedia 2030, was indeed a
massive undertaking. Launched in 2017 by then-WMF executive director and
CEO Katherine Maher, the strategy would be a complete re-imagining of WMF and Wikipedia’s
mission. Where Wikipedia had been built on the principle of
decentralized knowledge, the Movement Strategy would veer into the
hyper-centralized space of top-down social justice activism and
advocacy."
"As the driving force behind the Movement Strategy, Maher would directly
endorse this view in comments revealed after she took the top job at NPR
this year, in which she said she opposed the “free and open” ethos of
Wikipedia because it was rooted in “white male Westernized construct” that precipitated the “exclusion of communities and languages.”
Further, Maher played a critical role in establishing the Wiki Endowment:
"The central aspect of WMF’s new financial strategy was the establishment
of the Wikimedia Endowment, a pool of money that, as its name suggests,
is designed to fund the organization essentially “in perpetuity.”
Distinct from Wikimedia's budget, which funds Wikipedia's day-to-day
operations, the Endowment was set up in 2016 as a donor-advised fund at
leftist mega-fund, Tides Foundation, an $800 million fund that’s part of
the wider Tides Center, a network of such funds “that partners with
social change leaders and organizations to…accelerate social justice.”
The Tides Foundation’s IRS 990 filing lists its mission as “Grantmaking through funds to accelerate the pace of social change.”
When you use Wikipedia you will often see a page asking for donations to support Wikipedia. However, this is misleading because Wikipedia has more than enough funding to continue its current operations. Instead, your donations go to the Wikimedia Endowment which funnels money to left-wing causes.
Maher bragged about her accomplishments. According to Katherine Maher's Color Revolution in the April 2024 edition of City Journal:
In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive
ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very
active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through
conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions
related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.
In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight
against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see
is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” These speech
protections, Maher continued, make it “a little bit tricky” to suppress
“bad information” and “the influence peddlers who have made a real
market economy around it.”
Maher’s general policy at Wikipedia, she tweeted, was to support
efforts to “eliminate racist, misogynist, transphobic, and other forms
of discriminatory content”—which, under current left-wing definitions,
could include almost anything to the right of Joe Biden.
The City Journal goes on to note:
On the surface, this appears to be a contradiction. Maher backed
dissent abroad but suppressed it at home. She not only censored content
at Wikipedia but also supported deplatforming then-President Donald
Trump, who opposed the domestic revolution following the death of George
Floyd. “Must be satisfying to deplatform fascists,” Maher wrote
on Twitter, after Trump was effectively removed from social media.
“Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.”
This is not hypocrisy; it is the politics of friend and enemy. For Maher, “democracy” means the advancement of left-wing race and gender ideology all over the world. This requires
elevating progressive dissidents overseas, while suppressing
conservative dissidents at home. For partisans of Color Revolution,
dissent and censorship are not in contradiction—they are two sides of
the same coin.
This misuse of "democracy" is common across leftists in the countries of the West. According to EU bureaucrats, voting the way they want is supporting democracy but voting against the desired policies of bureaucrats is anti-democracy. Any opposition to progressive policies is anti-democracy.
What Maher did to Wikipedia, and here statements about why or, as she would say, "intentionality", demonstrate why she is such a danger to a free society. Wikipedia has always had its problems, but under Maher it deteriorated into a propaganda machine that is now integrated into larger communication networks. While Wikipedia is still useful if you want to find out the release date of Reach Out (I'll Be There) by The Four Tops or the birth and death dates for a person, it is useless when it comes to any topic that progressive ideology believes is political. The network designed for spreading Wikipedia's agitprop includes Google, where Wikipedia results show at the top of every search (Google also poured more than $200 million into the Wikipedia Foundation), and many of the AI models include Wikipedia as one of the sources used for their training. The result is Google searches and AI incorporate deliberately misleading information approved by Maher and people who think like her.
It's also why total control of social and traditional media is so important to people like Maher and why progressives became so hysterical when Elon Musk took control of Twitter. That progressives still controlled most social and traditional media was not the point. Any outlet they could not control in order to suppress dissent is considered a danger to democracy. In the case of Twitter pre-Musk, people were banned or suspended for misgendering, accounts were permanently suspended for merely posting Department of Justice crime statistics without making any comment, or accounts suppressed if then-President Trump retweeted them. I saw all of this happen; these weren't nutcase conspiracy or hardcore MAGA accounts, they just happened to not be progressives, or were progressives who dissented from orthodoxy on a particular topic.
In Maher's worldview everyone should be like her in following the strict progressive line, not deviating one inch. In 2016 she criticized Hillary Clinton for using the phrase "boy and girl" because “it’s
erasing language for non-binary people”, and it's no surprise that in 2020 she tweeted that "America is addicted to white supremacy".
So, in 2024 when Maher was named as CEO of National Public Radio, there were legitimate questions about her lack of commitment to free speech and her express agenda to privilege left-wing beliefs; Particularly germane questions for an organization receiving significant taxpayer funding when she so publicly disdained the views of many Americans.
But according to the Times you would be mistaken if there were legitimate questions to be asked of Maher. Let's look at how the story starts:
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.
A flattering photograph depicting a resolute Maher notes that she "has dealt with plenty of criticism this year. Did she consider quitting? "I really don't like bullies," she said.
The third sentence of the article tells readers, "Right-wing activists dredged up her old posts on social media and tried to get her fired."
Remember that when reading the New York Times what you need to focus on is not the substance of a story. The key questions are why is the Times publishing this story at this particular time and what is the narrative it is trying to create?
For the narrative part look at the beginning; title and sub-title, photo, and opening sentences. The narrative here is Katherine Maher is one of the "good guys" since she was a Right-Wing Target (which in Timespeak is equivalent of being a Nazi). She's "unyielding", a fact reinforced by the photo and legend telling the reader those attacking her are "bullies". And just to make sure there is no doubt, we learn "Right-wing activists dredged up her old posts". Ah, those Nazi dredgers! And, since they are old posts of what possible relevance could they be?
All this to set up the closing part of the narrative - that some of those who should be her allies in public media may not be as steadfast as they should be in supporting here because of that nasty right-wing intimidation. They need to strengthen their backbones to deal with those Nazis!
Here are some other excerpts with my comments. The entire article is linked at the start of this post.
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. At one
point, the chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
one of NPR’s biggest supporters, told Ms. Maher she should quit. Her predecessors were accused of bringing a tote bag to a knife fight. “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.
This is a warning to those in public broadcasting to toughen up. Maher is a role model. It also casts her as a champion of the First Amendment. The First Amendment argument is absurd. Maher would never stand up for the First Amendment rights of someone she disagreed with and arguing that a decision by the government not to fund an organization dedicated to bias and being one-sided has anything to do with the First Amendment is simply nonsense. It is Maher's sense of entitlement that makes her demand that I fund NPR. She is compelling my support of her speech, while wanting to suppress mine even though I'm not seeking federal funding.
As we've seen Maher was singing a different tune before being appointed to NPR. So was the Times. Remember that after the 2022 midterms, when it was looking like Biden would be reelected and the Democrats could also control the House and Senate, the Times began running news stories and op-ed pieces about how "we" needed to rethink the First Amendment. If the Democrats had achieved a trifecta and controlled Congress the crackdown on speech would have been brutal. The Progressive view of speech and freedom is expressed in this quote from Frank Herbert's Children of Dune:
When
I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according
to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your
freedom because that is according to my principles.
The Times then tells us about the crisis faced by Maher as her critics "seized the moment".
In early April 2024, 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.)
NPR’s
critics seized the moment. In early May, Republicans in Congress called
on Ms. Maher to testify on allegations of bias. Compounding the
situation: Some at NPR were surprised by Ms. Maher’s social media posts;
she told The Times that the board hadn’t asked her about them before
she was hired.
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.
There are several things to note about this section. The Uri Berliner piece created an uproar. Berliner was a long time NPR employee and, by 20th century standards, a card-carrying liberal who voted against Trump. You can read his article here. To describe it as "accusing the network of a liberal bias" is a misleading characterization; that's not what Berliner is complaining about. He writes;
It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my
tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy,
but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.
In recent years,
however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its
coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a
very small segment of the U.S. population.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.
That
wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a
niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s
devastating both for its journalism and its business model.
There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how
they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about
instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate
apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of
Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.
He goes into some detail using three examples, Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, and COVID coverage, of the bias and distortion in NPR and how it failed to admit mistakes.(1)
Berliner also tells us, "I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word gay." Of course it would not be corrected by NPR because, at the time, the Democratic priority was to damage Governor DeSantis, so anything that aided in that goal was fine. It is also consistent with traditional media practice in referring to Republican bills by the name Democrats give it, while referring to Democrat bills by the name preferred by Democrats.
Finally, he writes of the madness that descended upon NPR in the wake of George Floyd and transgender mania. He never uses the word, but what Berliner describes is a corrupt organization.
Berliner was suspended without pay for writing the article and resigned several days later.
The Times article is very careful not to be too specific about the allegations made by those nasty right wingers. The author and his editors want the reader to understand who the bad guys and good guys are and not get too caught up in the details. The piece also states that Maher was criticized for supporting "liberal causes", but Maher is not a liberal, she's a progressive authoritarian. A liberal supports free speech, freedom of conscience, due process, equal protection under the laws, fairplay, treating people equally. 21st century progressives reject all of this.
The only two specific "right-wing" claims mentioned in the article are Maher's characterization of Donald Trump and NPR's coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop. NPR refused to cover the story at all, with its managing editor for news writing “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.” As we now know, the FBI validated the contents of the laptop in 2019 and the 51 Intelligence Community former officials who denounced it were very clever in stating that it had "all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation", allowing them to later claim that they never said it was disinformation. The truth is that NPR refused to cover the story because of the potential damage to the Biden campaign.
Near the end of the Times story we encounter this passage:
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.
Maher is one of those folks who talks about "her truth" and "your truth" and how we all have truths. But, in truth, she believes her truth is the real truth and if you don't agree with it you are wrong, so she is not biased and you have no right to speech. Katherine Maher and the New York Times are blights upon this nation. They are at least as great a threat to our future as creatures like Tucker Carlson.
--------------------------------
(1) Berliner notes how on Russia, "we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff. Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations,
Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking
points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports".
If you've read my Russia Collusion posts, you know that Adam Schiff lied about everything. I've read the same testimony he heard and then lied about. None of the "journalists" at NPR had the slightest interest in comparing documentary evidence with Schiff's claims because it would have undermined their desired narrative.
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