Last week, National Public Radio’s Uri Berliner exposed the ideological rot at the core of the taxpayer-subsidized “news” organization, which the 25-year veteran revealed to be little more than a left-wing propaganda megaphone.
He closed his critique by calling on CEO Katherine Maher to straighten the place out and stop telling listeners what to think.
Maher took the bait and answered in a rambling, incoherent note to her employees. But more importantly, her rabid hate-Trump, pro-Floyd-Hoax-riot tweets resurfaced across social media.
Which only goes to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same. NPR was a purulent nest of left-wing subversives before Maher arrived, and it will likely remain the same.
Berliner’s Piece
Berliner explained that NPR’s audience has gone from being somewhat balanced ideologically to being almost exclusively left-wing, largely because the organization is itself a transmission belt of left-wing nonsense.
Berliner explained that NPR refused to acknowledge that the Trump-Russia Collusion story was a risible hoax, that the network refused to report the Hunter Biden laptop story, and that it swallowed whole the false claim that the Covid-19 virus sprang from nature. It refused to report the truth — that the virus came from a poorly run Chinese lab. Instead, it went along with the false claim that the lab-leak origin was the product of racist or right-wing conspiracy theorists.
Nor did the network correct itself on any of the three matters.
After George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose while police restrained him, a death that ignited the Floyd Hoax riots nationwide, the network’s chief, John Lansing declared that “anti-racism” would be its mission. “When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” Lansing wrote, “we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.”
“Diversity” became NPR’s “North Star” Berliner wrote, and everything at the outfit was viewed through the lens of race or sexual “identity”:
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.
The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance — disseminated by news management — we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories — on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.
NPR’s editorial operation is exclusively Democratic, Berliner reported. Zero Republicans work there.
NPR’s bent has destroyed its credibility, he averred, which shows in its audience: “overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.”
Thus did he hope that Maher, the former Wikimedia CEO with zero news experience running, would right the leftist ship:
A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who’s been a leader in tech. She doesn’t have a news background, which could be an asset given where things stand. I’ll be rooting for her. It’s a tough job. Her first rule could be simple enough: don’t tell people how to think. It could even be the new North Star.
Maher’s Missive … No Wonder
No such luck.
“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:
Each of our colleagues are here because they are excellent, accomplished professionals with an intense commitment to our work: we are stronger because of the work we do together, and we owe each other our utmost respect. We fulfill our mission best when we look and sound like the country we serve.
Except that Berliner proved that NPR doesn’t “sound like the country we serve.”
There followed several paragraphs of meaningless left-wing cant. That was no surprise given the sentiments she loudly professed on social media, notably X (then Twitter), from at least 2016 through 2020.
Maher keeps “her pronouns” in her X bio, and in 2020 called herself “someone with cis white mobility privilege” who would not leave the country if Donald Trump were elected to a second term.
“This person is a crazy racist,” Elon Musk replied to Christopher Rufo’s repost.
When NPR hired the news tyro in January, the New York Post disinterred her shrill leftist and hate-Trump tweets before Musk turned Twitter into X.
After Floyd died, Maher denounced “white silence”:
White silence is complicity. If you are white, today is the day to start a conversation in your community.
“I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive,” she wrote of Floyd Hoax rioters in Los Angeles. “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.”
“Donald Trump is a racist,” she wrote in 2018, and before that, naturally, she declared herself allied with Russia Collusion Hoax perpetrator Hillary Clinton.
“I do wish Hillary wouldn’t use the language ‘boy’ and ‘girl,’ she tweeted in October 2016. “It’s erasing language for non-binary people.”
And, the science-denier wrote that July, “I’m an unalloyed progressive and supporting Hillary this time around.”
The chances that NPR will stop its hard-left, bellicose, hate-Trump propaganda anytime soon appear to be about zero.
