ALL BIAS CONSIDERED
Woke tweets of ‘lefty’ NPR’s CEO
The woke, anti-Trump tweets of NPR’s new CEO are coming back to haunt her after she struggled to refute bombshell charges of journalistic bias lodged this week by a veteran editor.
Award-winning NPR business editor Uri Berliner’s lengthy essay in The Free Press was “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning,” Katherine Maher, the radio network’s 42-year-old president, complained in a letter to staffers.
“Our people represent America, our irreducibly complex nation,” Maher wrote Friday. “We succeed through our diversity.”
But in January, when Maher was announced as NPR’s new leader, The Post revealed her penchant for parroting the progressive line on social media — including bluntly biased Twitter posts like “Donald Trump is a racist,” which she wrote in 2018.
That hyper-partisan message was scrubbed from what is now X, but preserved on the site Archive. Today. It’s unclear when she deleted it, or if its removal was tied to her new gig. Other woke posts remain on Maher’s X account.
In 2020, as the George Floyd riots raged, she attempted to justify looting in LA as payback for the sins of slavery.
“I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive,” she wrote on May 31, 2020. “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.”
The next day, she lectured her 27,000 followers, “White silence is complicity. If you are white, today is the day to start a conversation in your community.”
The NPR job is Maher’s first position in journalism. She was previously the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, after holding communications roles for HSBC, UNICEF and the World Bank.
Maher earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies from New York University, according to her LinkedIn account, and grew up in Wilton, Conn. — a town that her mother, Ceci Maher, now represents as a Democratic state senator.
Berliner’s essay on Tuesday slammed NPR for ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in 2020 for fear it could help Donald Trump get re-elected — saying his bosses turned the broadcaster into “an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience.”
“In DC, where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans,” he reported. “None.”
Maher’s Friday letter did not debunk any of Berliner’s bias claims. NPR did not respond to a request for comment.