Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin left an NPR reporter speechless Tuesday after the journalist attempted to criticize former president Donald Trump at an event focused on raising awareness of fentanyl overdoses.
First Lady Suzanne Youngkin said at the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?mibextid=KsPBc6&amp;ref=watch_permalink&amp;v=525326550011269&amp;rdid=dKIiV4hHAW07QYz7" target="_blank" rel="noopener">&#8220;It Only Takes One&#8221;</a> event that her husband&#8217;s administration had &#8220;all hands on deck&#8221; for a nonpartisan community outreach program aimed at helping &#8220;the most vulnerable&#8221; overcome addiction. Youngkin echoed his wife&#8217;s point, telling the crowd that &#8220;it&#8217;s time to move mountains&#8221; to fight addiction, because &#8220;fentanyl kills.&#8221;
After the event, Brad Kutner, a reporter for NPR affiliate WVTF, attempted to make the conversation about Trump, claiming that the &#8220;peak in fentanyl overdoses occurred during the Trump administration when the borders supposedly were closed.&#8221;
&#8220;Where does the intersection of closing the border and an increase in fentanyl deaths come into play here?” Kutner asked the governor.
&#8220;Here we go,&#8221; Youngkin said, before laying into the reporter.
“You and I will have nice conversations until I see you trying to play politics on an issue that is really disturbing to me,&#8221; Youngkin said.
&#8220;Their children lost their lives, they lost it due to fentanyl, they lost it because it was poisoned,&#8221; the normally mild-mannered governor barked. &#8220;And it is coming across our border. We all know this. Do not try to undermine this article by playing politics.&#8221;
Data from the National Institutes of Health found that the rate of increase in fentanyl overdoses slowed between 2017 and 2019, while Trump was in office. Overdoses picked up again in 2020 amid government-mandated COVID lockdowns.
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-787583" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/08/fig2-2024.jpg" alt="" width="1801" height="1351" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/08/fig2-2024.jpg 1801w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/08/fig2-2024-300x225.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/08/fig2-2024-768x576.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/08/fig2-2024-1536x1152.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1801px) 100vw, 1801px" /></div>
Kutner claimed in response that the Virginia Department of Health found overdoses had <a href="https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/drug-overdose-data/overdose-deaths/">declined</a> each year since 2021, under President Joe Biden was in the White House. But data from the National Institutes of Health shows that nationwide, fentanyl overdoses continued to <a href="https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates#Fig2">rise in 2021 and 2022</a>, the latest year available. Virginia was an exception.
“Do you know how long I&#8217;ve been working on this? When did I become governor?” said Youngkin, who was elected in 2021.
As Kutner struggled to understand a chart, Youngkin queried, “Are you a mathematician?”
“Are you?” the reporter countered.
“Yes, is the short answer,” replied Youngkin, who has degrees in mechanical engineering and business administration.
Read the full exchange between Youngkin and Kunter here:
<blockquote>REPORTER: Peak in fentanyl overdoses occurred during the Trump administration when the borders supposedly were closed. Where does the intersection of closing the border and an increase in fentanyl deaths come into play here?
YOUNGKIN: I&#8217;m not sure you&#8217;re right.
REPORTER: Even in our state, the peak was in 2021. It was rising from 18 up to 2021.
YOUNGKIN: Sorry, who was president in 2021? So don&#8217;t premise a question with a false narrative. We know where this is coming from. It&#8217;s coming across an open border. The Biden administration opened the border and allowed this to happen. And anytime you want to take a deep dive on drug seizures coming across the border go talk to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
REPORTER: Were they seizing less during the Trump administration and thats what was leading to the increase in deaths?
YOUNGKIN: The increase in deaths has happened during the Biden administration.
REPORTER: No, the increase started during the Trump administration. In Virginia they started to go up in 2018.
YOUNGKIN: You premised the question incorrectly. Here we go. What we do know is there has been a systematic effort to bring fentanyl into this country, and at the end of the day it has absolutely rocketed while this border has been opened. And every Virginia parent here will talk to you about what happened to their child. Don&#8217;t try to undermine&#8211;
REPORTER: I&#8217;m not undermining! VDH numbers&#8211;
YOUNGKIN: You and I will have nice conversations until I see you trying to play politics on an issue that is really disturbing to me. Their children lost their lives, they lost it due to fentanyl, they lost it because it was poisoned. And it is coming across our border. We all know this. Do not try to undermine this article by playing politics.
REPORTER: These are your VDH numbers.
YOUNGKIN: Don&#8217;t even try it. 2021 is the peak. Don&#8217;t even suggest&#8211;
REPORTER: There&#8217;s an increase there&#8211;
YOUNGKIN: Are you a mathematician?
REPORTER: Are you?
YOUNGKIN: Yes, is the short answer. 2020, 2021, peaks in 2021. Fentanyl starting coming across the border at an extraordinary rate. It comes from China through California, gets flown into Virginia, trucked up our highways and we seize it every day.
REPORTER: So the decrease that we&#8217;re showing in 22 and then 23, there&#8217;s no part&#8211;am I missing something?
YOUNGKIN: These are overdoses. Do you know how long I&#8217;ve been working on this? When did I become governor? If you want to have an in-depth statistical discussion and decide who is responsible for overdose deaths in Virginia, I&#8217;m happy to go get our secretary of public safety out here and he will take you on a deep dive. But at the end of the day we understand where the fentanyl comes from, we understand that it comes from China into Mexico it comes across our border. It either goes to California and is flown into Richmond, or it comes up our highway system&#8230; We interdict a lot of it. The fact that the federal government has not closed our border and continues to allow fentanyl to come across this border is a travesty, and anybody who tries to suggest differently is trying to make a political excuse for a failed administration in Washington.</blockquote>

Glenn Youngkin Campaigns Ahead Of Next Week’s Gubernatorial Election

Youngkin Slams Reporter For Politicizing Fentanyl Awareness Event

Donald Trump

Glenn Youngkin

Media Bias

Virginia

Katherine Maher, who became the CEO of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/national-public-radio-npr" target="_blank" rel="noopener">National Public Radio (NPR)</a> in March, has turned down an <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/house-republicans-seek-npr-ceo-testimony-about-liberal-bias-allegations" target="_blank" rel="noopener">invitation from House Republicans</a> to testify before Congress this week regarding claims of left-wing bias at her network.
NPR issued a <a href="https://twitter.com/davidfolkenflik/status/1787601110070350115" target="_blank" rel="noopener">statement</a> saying that its board of directors had a previously scheduled meeting on Wednesday, the day the hearing will take place on Capitol Hill. It stressed that Maher would be open to testifying at a future date.
&#8220;This meeting will be Maher&#8217;s first opportunity to review and consult with the Board on the challenges and opportunities facing the organization, including a strategy to lead NPR forward in fulfilling its public service mission to serve all of America,&#8221; the statement said.
&#8220;Maher is therefore unable to attend this week&#8217;s hearing and has communicated that to the committee and proposed alternate dates,&#8221; the statement added. &#8220;Maher will provide written testimony in her absence.&#8221;
Last week, the Energy and Commerce Committee, led by Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), sent an <a href="https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/e-and-c-republicans-open-investigation-into-allegations-of-political-bias-at-taxpayer-funded-npr-request-attendance-at-hearing" target="_blank" rel="noopener">invitation</a> to Maher, seeking her testimony in response to allegations raised by a longtime editor, Uri Berliner, who has since <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/npr-editor-who-accused-network-of-liberal-bias-resigns" target="_blank" rel="noopener">resigned</a> from NPR.
The invite also raised concerns about Maher&#8217;s comments and social media posts displaying personal views in favor of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/15/business/media/npr-chief-executive-criticized-over-tweets.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">liberal causes</a> and favoring President Joe Biden over former President Donald Trump.
&#8220;It speaks volumes that Ms. Maher has chosen not to appear tomorrow to answer for how her taxpayer-funded news outlet discriminates against the viewpoints of millions of Americans,&#8221; a panel spokesperson told The Daily Wire. &#8220;The Chair looks forward to reviewing her thorough and transparent responses to the Committee’s letter.&#8221;
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The panel&#8217;s calendar <a href="https://energycommerce.house.gov/calendars?start=2024-05-08&amp;end=2024-05-08" target="_blank" rel="noopener">shows</a> the hearing still being set to take place on Wednesday with testimony from American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Howard Husock; James Erwin, federal affairs manager for telecommunications at Americans for Tax Reform; NewsBusters executive editor Tim Graham; and Free Press co-CEO Craig Aaron.
&#8220;To no surprise NPR President &amp; CEO Katherine Maher is declining to come before the committee I sit on — [the House Energy and Commerce Committee] — to answer basic questions about National Public Radio’s extremely liberal culture and reporting,&#8221; Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) <a href="https://twitter.com/DanCrenshawTX/status/1787902787067498509" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> in a post to X.
&#8220;Republicans have known of NPR’s public biases for years &#8211; a news broadcast that mostly elite liberals listen to, to feel better about ramming their woke agenda down America&#8217;s throat,&#8221; he continued, adding, &#8220;This just confirms NPR is a waste of taxpayer dollars.&#8221;

Katherine Maher

‘Speaks Volumes’: NPR CEO Declines Invite To Hearing on Bias Allegations, Proposes Alternate Dates

'Speaks Volumes': NPR CEO Declines Invite To Hearing on Bias Allegations, Proposes Alternate Dates

Congress

National Public Radio (NPR)

Politics

U.S. House of Representatives

House Republicans have requested Katherine Maher, who became the CEO of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/national-public-radio-npr" target="_blank" rel="noopener">National Public Radio (NPR)</a> in March, provide testimony to Congress about the allegations of left-wing bias at the network, an invitation that could lead to a high-profile clash on Capitol Hill next week.
Energy and Commerce Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) led a <a href="https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/04_30_24_Letter_to_NPR_with_Hearing_Invitation_2_aa76bcfe12.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">letter</a> that was sent to Maher this week, asking the media executive to appear before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee on May 8 to address claims related to NPR&#8217;s coverage of topics related to politics, COVID, transgender issues, audience figures, the network’s own level of diversity, and more.
&#8220;The Committee has concerns about the direction in which NPR may be headed under past and present leadership. As a taxpayer funded, public radio organization, NPR should focus on fair and objective news reporting that both considers and reflects the views of the larger U.S. population and not just a niche audience,&#8221; the letter said.
Controversy rocked NPR when a longtime editor, Uri Berliner, went public last month with the bias allegations and lamented how NPR had &#8220;lost America&#8217;s trust&#8221; with an increasingly leftist bent. After being suspended for five days, Berliner <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/npr-editor-who-accused-network-of-liberal-bias-resigns" target="_blank" rel="noopener">stepped down</a>, saying he could not work in a newsroom where he was being &#8220;disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm&#8221; the problems he cited.
Berliner&#8217;s resignation happened after Maher <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/nprs-new-ceo-scolds-25-year-veteran-for-expose-outing-networks-bias" target="_blank" rel="noopener">condemned</a> what she said was a &#8220;deeply simplistic&#8221; and &#8220;profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning&#8221; assessment of NPR. Maher faced more blowback as posts and clips spread on social media, showing her being critical of former President Donald Trump and supportive of President Joe Biden. They also displayed personal views in favor of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/15/business/media/npr-chief-executive-criticized-over-tweets.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">liberal causes</a>. Maher later <a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/media/npr-chief-defends-coverage-accuses-critics-of-bad-faith-distortion-of-her-views-cc5869ac" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told</a> The Wall Street Journal that critics were making a &#8220;bad faith distortion&#8221; of her views.
The House GOP letter noted many of the allegations raised by Berliner, including a claim that all of NPR&#8217;s editorial staffers in Washington, D.C., were registered Democrats. They also highlighted past comments from Mater about dealing with &#8220;bad information,&#8221; striking a balance with the speech protections under the First Amendment, and warning how the &#8220;truth might be a distraction.&#8221;
McMorris Rodgers and her colleagues wrote the committee is &#8220;concerned that your personal views and opinions on matters of public interest heavily influence your decision making at NPR and may cloud objective reporting of the news at NPR.&#8221; In addition to the invite, they posed questions to Maher on internal NPR matters such as employee party affiliation, asking that the information be provided by May 14.
&#8220;In your own words, &#8216;slowing down a little bit and bringing the conversation in, [] listening with sincerity, debating with respect, consulting widely, and weighing difficult decisions with candor,&#8217; might be what NPR needs to rebuild the damage to its reputation and credibility,&#8221; the letter said.
It was not immediately clear whether Maher would cooperate with the House Republicans. The Daily Wire has reached out to NPR seeking comment on the letter.
Although there has been a renewed push to cut funding for NPR, including a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/partisan-propaganda-machine-republicans-push-to-defund-npr-over-political-bias" target="_blank" rel="noopener">proposed</a> measure from House Republicans, Berliner rejected the calls to defund the network. &#8220;I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism,&#8221; he said.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers

House Republicans Seek NPR CEO Testimony About Liberal Bias Allegations

Media

U.S.

A group of Republican senators reached out to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/national-public-radio-npr" target="_blank" rel="noopener">National Public Radio (NPR)</a>, urging the network to &#8220;start a course correction&#8221; to shake off a left-wing bias controversy under the leadership of CEO Katherine Maher.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) led a <a href="https://senatorkevincramer.app.box.com/s/onanzoiim9oo6h46mixszdniek7jk5an" target="_blank" rel="noopener">letter</a> sent to Maher on Monday, highlighting concerns raised by Uri Berliner, a longtime editor at NPR who <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/npr-editor-who-accused-network-of-liberal-bias-resigns" target="_blank" rel="noopener">resigned</a> this month after he stoked fresh scrutiny of the media organization with claims that it &#8220;lost America&#8217;s trust&#8221; with an increasingly leftist bent.
“It is not NPR’s job to tell Americans what to think but to inform them with unbiased facts. Moreover, the internal cultural shifts and management decisions to prioritize ideological narratives do not just undermine your organization’s integrity; they have also alienated a significant portion of your audience,” the senators wrote in the letter.
&#8220;As Mr. Berliner points out, this has had tangible effects on NPR&#8217;s trust ratings and listener demographics, which have skewed increasingly away from any semblance of a broad, inclusive audience,&#8221; they added.
Berliner announced his resignation during a five-day suspension without pay over his critique of NPR. Although he pushed back on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/partisan-propaganda-machine-republicans-push-to-defund-npr-over-political-bias" target="_blank" rel="noopener">calls to defund NPR</a>, Berliner said he could not work in a newsroom after being &#8220;disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm&#8221; the problems he cited.
Maher, who began serving as NPR&#8217;s chief executive in March, had <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/nprs-new-ceo-scolds-25-year-veteran-for-expose-outing-networks-bias" target="_blank" rel="noopener">condemned</a> what she said was a &#8220;deeply simplistic&#8221; and &#8220;profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning&#8221; assessment from Berliner.
Resurfaced posts and clips show Maher being critical of former President Donald Trump and supportive of President Joe Biden. They also displayed personal views in favor of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/15/business/media/npr-chief-executive-criticized-over-tweets.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">liberal causes</a>.
The GOP lawmakers specifically pointed to NPR&#8217;s handling of major news stories that Berliner <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust?utm_source=direct&amp;utm_campaign=post&amp;utm_medium=web&amp;fbclid=IwAR2BI7aGsLrw5JzADcxw-Ddx9IFpaQzQxVieieHiYiYvBozjQ3W_q8XSMoY_aem_Afb8djuPsGMotINI-8VtH0_ouA2n_5T1rMS3kvz8x_-AGiNOlKuozOh6WEdCnd1xeok&amp;triedRedirect=true" target="_blank" rel="noopener">flagged</a> as being problematic, including issues related to the Hunter Biden laptop, the COVID-19 lab leak theory, and the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.
They also noted Berliner&#8217;s finding that all of NPR&#8217;s editorial staffers in Washington, D.C., were registered Democrats.
&#8220;If NPR’s goal was to become an echo chamber, mission accomplished. But as a publicly funded entity, you are responsible for providing impartial coverage that accurately informs all Americans, regardless of political affiliation,&#8221; the senators said.
&#8220;We urge you to start a course correction to address these issues,&#8221; they added. &#8220;If NPR does not want to devolve into a one-sided opinion outlet, it should take a page from its local affiliates and embrace a culture of intellectual diversity and focus on balanced reporting.&#8221;
In addition to Cramer, the letter was signed by Sens. John Barrasso (R-WY), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Eric Schmitt (R-MO), and Dan Sullivan (R-AK).
The Daily Wire reached out to NPR seeking comment on the letter.

GOP Senators Urge NPR To ‘Start A Course Correction’ Amid Left-Wing Bias Controversy

GOP Senators Urge NPR To 'Start A Course Correction' Amid Left-Wing Bias Controversy

U.S. Senate

Republicans in the House and Senate are pushing to defund NPR after a now-former editor wrote an essay exposing the liberal bias of the outlet and reports broke on leftist comments made by CEO Katherine Maher. 
Republican Reps. Jim Banks (IN), Claudia Tenney (NY), and Bob Good (VA) all introduced their own legislation to end funding for the outlet. Banks introduced <a href="https://banks.house.gov/uploadedfiles/defund_npr_act.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">his measure</a> on Friday, taking aim at Maher and calling NPR “low grade propaganda.”
“NPR’s new CEO is a radical, left-wing activist who doesn’t believe in free speech or objective journalism,” Banks said in a statement. “Hoosiers shouldn’t be writing her paychecks. Katherine Maher isn’t qualified to teach an introductory journalism class, much less capable of responsibly spending millions of American tax dollars.”
Recently, clips of Maher <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/white-male-westernized-npr-president-said-she-opposed-wikipedias-free-and-open-mission" target="_blank" rel="noopener">posted by</a> journalist Chris Rufo show Maher saying that the “number one challenge” for her in fighting so-called disinformation was the First Amendment, which she called a “fairly robust protection of rights.” She also claimed that former President Donald Trump was a racist and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-ceo-of-npr-is-everything-wrong-with-the-news-media" target="_blank" rel="noopener">posted</a> about her desire to go on a road trip with Vice President Kamala Harris eating “nuts and baklava.”
Tenney, who <a href="https://tenney.house.gov/media/press-releases/congresswoman-tenney-moves-defund-npr#:~:text=%22My%20legislation%2C%20the%20Defund%20NPR,bias%20in%20our%20news%20media." target="_blank" rel="noopener">introduced</a> the “Defund NPR Act of 2024” said that the outlet had become a “partisan propaganda machine.” 
“As a former newspaper owner and publisher, I understand the importance of non-partisan, balanced media coverage, and have seen first-hand the left-wing bias in our news media,” she said. “NPR is using American taxpayer dollars to manipulate the news and lie to the American people on behalf of a political agenda. It’s past time the American people stop footing the bill for NPR, and the partisan, left-wing activists that control it.&#8221;
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Good <a href="https://good.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-good-calls-defunding-biased-npr" target="_blank" rel="noopener">introduced</a> similar legislation alongside eight co-sponsors, saying that it was “egregious” for taxpayers to be backing partisan news coverage. 
The lawmakers&#8217; push comes after now-former senior business editor Uri Berliner <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/we-lost-americas-trust-npr-veteran-says-network-has-lost-its-way" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote an essay</a> in the Free Press saying that the network had lost the trust of Americans because of its coverage of things like gender ideology and refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead up to the 2020 election. 
Berliner, who resigned days after the essay was published, said that NPR lacked serious viewpoint diversity. 
“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,” he wrote.

NPR To Cut 10% Of Staff As Advertising Revenue Falls

‘Partisan Propaganda Machine’: Republicans Push To Defund NPR Over Political Bias

House Republicans

Jim Banks

Leftism

Legacy Media

If you don&#8217;t remember &#8220;Car Talk,&#8221; it was a radio show that lasted more than three decades on NPR, until it ended in 2012. The idea was that people called in with practical questions and dilemmas relating to their cars, and then the hosts dispensed advice — whether it was about car maintenance or repair or whatever. The show no longer exists, though, because the NPR that broadcast that show for 35 years no longer exists. The idea of a show that actually addresses people&#8217;s problems in real life, based on knowledge of how markets and automobiles or anything else actually works, has been unthinkable to the management of NPR for some time. Shows that cover the news from an objective factual perspective, to the extent possible, are also out of style. Instead, for the past decade, NPR has been controlled by activists who have devoted themselves to two primary pursuits. 
The first pursuit is blanketing the airwaves with identity politics at every conceivable opportunity. That&#8217;s why they run segments on diverse gender representation in <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/06/10/1104266396/lgbtq-communitys-battle-for-the-dinosaur-emoji-key-moments-from-jan-6-hearing" target="_blank" rel="noopener">dinosaur emojis</a> for example. 
The second pursuit has been shutting down stories that are inconvenient for the politicians who are voting to spend your money to finance NPR&#8217;s operation. Infamously, NPR&#8217;s executive editor, Terence Samuel, claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop scandal wasn&#8217;t a &#8220;<a href="https://twitter.com/NPRpubliceditor/status/1319281101223940096" target="_blank" rel="noopener">real story</a>.&#8221; He said it was a &#8220;distraction.&#8221; And instead of firing Samuel, NPR promoted him. American University even invited Samuel to deliver a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFvV24PWfF4&amp;lc=Ugz7bLd9ECugl009UZF4AaABAg" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lecture</a> entitled, &#8220;How Journalism Can Save Itself and Democracy.&#8221;
It&#8217;s harder to think of a better way to summarize what NPR has become. They aren&#8217;t simply bumbling propagandists. They&#8217;re also incredibly self-satisfied and narcissistic. They believe that they alone can save American democracy. And they think that, in order to do that, they need to control what kinds of information you can see. It&#8217;s not that they thought the Hunter Biden laptop story was &#8220;unvetted&#8221; or &#8220;Russian disinformation&#8221; or whatever the excuse was. They always knew it was factually accurate. But just because something is factually accurate, in NPR&#8217;s eyes, doesn&#8217;t make it true. According to NPR, truth is subjective; whatever&#8217;s most expedient politically for them is what&#8217;s true.
For a long time now, this position — which really amounts to nihilism — was unstated at NPR, at least publicly. But now it&#8217;s explicit, thanks to a new CEO and president by the name of Katherine Maher who recently took over at NPR. Maher very clearly does not believe that the truth is objective. She also doesn&#8217;t believe it&#8217;s worth trying to find out what the truth may be. This is an extraordinary position for the chief executive of a publicly funded news organization to have, but it&#8217;s what Katherine Maher believes. 
This is a speech of hers that&#8217;s been making the rounds this week. It&#8217;s from back when she was running Wikimedia, which is mainly known for Wikipedia. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="002 Truth" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WWEiwvNwsGM?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&nbsp;
This is what passes for good public speaking these days. But she speaks in a robotic, sing-songy voice that makes it sound like she’s a kindergarten teacher lecturing a bunch of 5-year-olds. She has the tone of someone who believes firmly in the superiority of her own intellect, even though what she’s saying is so abjectly stupid. 
She says truth is subjective, and that everyone in the room has his or her own &#8220;truth.&#8221; But here&#8217;s the problem. Truth exists because reality exists. Either something is a part of reality or it isn&#8217;t. To deny objective truth is to deny reality. And you can&#8217;t even deny reality without asserting a reality — the reality that there is no reality. So the relativistic view is not only false, but so false as to be incomprehensible if you think about it for more than two seconds.
Maher&#8217;s remarks are the same idiot relativism that you can hear from any freshman philosophy student, but she goes to great pains to make her take seem nuanced and innovative. She talks in circles and ends back at &#8220;there are many different truths.&#8221; She says this even after acknowledging that the truth exists. Again, those are two contradictory ideas, but that doesn&#8217;t bother Maher for a second. Like most of our overeducated elite class, she&#8217;s incapable of speaking without a parade of cliches while making tedious and absurd ideas sound far more complex than they really are. 
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1350-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
Also according to Maher, we have &#8220;glorious chronicles to the human experience in many different cultures&#8221; because we have &#8220;many different truths.&#8221; But that&#8217;s not what these &#8220;glorious chronicles&#8221; show us. Instead, they show us that the truth is objective and eternal. Different cultures and people across time have had different ways of perceiving the truth — talking about it, accessing it, embracing it, or rejecting it, yes. But the truth remains the same. That is what makes the study of history, and different cultures through history, so fascinating. It is precisely because all of these different people across time and space lived in the same reality, and yet had wildly different ways of existing in it, and responding to it. 
Katherine Maher doesn&#8217;t seem to understand this, or at least she pretends not to. She repeats her theory of truth at every possible opportunity. Here&#8217;s some more footage from a conference two years ago. Maher begins by explaining that Galileo was prosecuted for saying that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun, which is a basically accurate if wildly oversimplified retelling of that historical episode — although it doesn&#8217;t prove what Maher seems to think it does. Then she makes an incredible statement. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="003 Truth is Changing" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dP5g369_nvs?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&#8220;The truth, by definition, is malleable,&#8221; says Maher. Really? By whose definition exactly? You can make the case that postmodernists thinkers and their precursors — like Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Rousseau — might agree with that statement. But you won&#8217;t hear many traditional thinkers (prior to, say, Heidegger) saying that the truth is &#8220;malleable.&#8221; So why should we adopt the postmodern belief and not the traditional one? There has to be some reason to side with one school of thought and not another.
In any event, if truth is merely &#8220;malleable&#8221; — if there&#8217;s no knowable, essential structure to it — then definitions themselves are just language games. There&#8217;s no significance to any of it. It&#8217;s just a power struggle. When you get down to it, that&#8217;s really what Maher is saying. She&#8217;s asserting that &#8220;the truth&#8221; is &#8220;malleable&#8221; as an act of political will because she doesn&#8217;t believe in any objectively true definitions. She keeps saying, over and over again, the words &#8220;the truth,&#8221; only to make it clear that she has no idea what that is.
And from that very shaky foundation, Maher starts to derive some very shaky corollaries. At one point, Maher implies that people don&#8217;t trust the media anymore not because the media lied to them, but because people have different mistaken &#8220;truths&#8221; that they&#8217;re clinging to. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="004 Misinformation" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IqICz5BBR5A?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
It&#8217;s another revealing statement that Maher makes without any justification. She&#8217;s implying that democracies aren&#8217;t (or can&#8217;t be) xenophobic or nationalist. But the Greeks were both. Greek democracies were very much “xenophobic” — if that’s how you want to put it — and nationalist in nature. There&#8217;s no doubt about that. So why is democracy the goal here? Is that even her goal?
Really, her only given justification for thinking our traditional conception of truth is inadequate, and needs to be reworked, is that the &#8220;truth&#8221; we have now is the product of a history which is also political. &#8220;History is written by victors&#8221; is one of the many cliches she invokes throughout her speeches. And she says that excludes various potential sources of knowledge like &#8220;indigenous&#8221; perspectives and practices, or women with their &#8220;emotional intelligence.&#8221;
But that&#8217;s not incompatible with the reality that &#8220;the truth&#8221; is real, is universal, and many aspects of it have been uniquely uncovered by Western thought, science, and technology. Even if you bought into Maher&#8217;s talking points about a “plurality of perspectives” being better than &#8220;one alone&#8221; for getting at &#8220;the truth,&#8221; the fact remains that it took 2,000 years of Western, Eurocentric, supposedly white supremacist, heteronormative, misogynist history for us to reach the point at which these minor tail-end improvements she&#8217;s suggesting could be made. 
It took 2,000 years of history to create the civilization that Maher is now critiquing. And if she thinks this new approach will cause some kind of &#8220;scientific revolution,&#8221; it won&#8217;t. The more likely outcome is that it will destroy the civilization that was built over thousands of years. That is the point after all. And this is the essence of what we call wokeness. The Left likes to put conservatives on the spot by demanding a definition of “woke.” Well, here it is — the rejection of truth as a category. That’s what wokeness is, when boiled down to its most fundamental parts.
As for Maher, it&#8217;s tempting to dismiss all of this footage as the ramblings of a single woman who has no idea what she&#8217;s talking about. But it&#8217;s a bit more significant than that. Maher was selected to lead NPR, after an allegedly careful vetting process. There&#8217;s no way that NPR didn&#8217;t scrutinize her beliefs, which Maher has expressed many times over the last few years in public social media posts and numerous speeches.
On Twitter, Chris Rufo has exposed some of the more deranged posts from this woman. There are really too many to mention, but suffice it to say, she&#8217;s like a woke AI bot that churns out the least original woke liberal woman talking points you can possibly imagine. She uses the word &#8220;folx,&#8221; with the &#8220;x&#8221; at the end. She says &#8220;Latinx.&#8221; She called Donald Trump a racist and cried with joy when Biden took office, of course. She wrote that she once dreamed of going on a road trip with Kamala Harris eating &#8220;nuts and baklava.&#8221; She expresses her happiness when she logs into the public WiFi at a COVID clinic and the password is &#8220;HeSheThey,&#8221; recognizing the lived experience of nonbinary patients. She calls the Internet &#8220;sexist.&#8221; 
At one point, she apologized for using the phrase “people who identify as women,” because it&#8217;s a form of “trans-erasure.&#8221; She writes about the importance of &#8220;transit justice&#8221; and vegetarian Thanksgiving, and rants about the &#8220;male gaze&#8221; and &#8220;late-stage capitalism,&#8221; even as she drew a salary of $800,000 a year. There are many more examples; Chris Rufo&#8217;s feed has categorized many of them.
To burnish her intellectual credentials even further, Maher even <a href="https://x.com/njhochman/status/1780638504097022442">sat on a panel</a> with Lizzo at a Ted conference where tickets cost more than $10,000. The name of Lizzos&#8217; talk was, &#8220;The Black history of twerking — and how it taught me self-love.&#8221; 
But Maher doesn&#8217;t need lessons on self-love, she has that covered. What she&#8217;s looking for now is power. 
In a video posted by the Atlantic Council and unearthed by Rufo, Maher explains that the First Amendment — which you&#8217;d think journalists would support, since it&#8217;s the one thing keeping journalists out of prison — is not a sacred constitutional principle. Instead, she says, it&#8217;s a &#8220;challenge&#8221; to be overcome. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="005 Katherine Maher Vs First Free Speech" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MGpZJt5uU2s?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
The only people who view the First Amendment as a &#8220;challenge&#8221; are government censors who want to shut down any dissent by force. And now that she&#8217;s running a state-funded media outlet, that&#8217;s exactly what Maher is. She&#8217;s a state-funded censor.
To that end, she no longer believes in transparency. The irony is that, when she was running Wikimedia, Maher kept talking about the importance of showing people everything that&#8217;s going on inside the company. Every edit on Wikipedia, she said, is public for a reason. Disclosure is sometimes &#8220;painful,&#8221; she said, but it&#8217;s necessary. 
Transparency is key, she said at the time. But apparently this is one of the malleable &#8220;truths&#8221; that Katherine Maher has decided to discard. As you&#8217;ve probably heard, she just forced out an NPR whistleblower who <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/04/17/media/npr-editor-uri-berliner-resigns-after-bombshell-expose-reveals-networks-pervasive-left-wing-bias/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a> a damning <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust" target="_blank" rel="noopener">column</a> in the Free Press about the organization&#8217;s corruption and overwhelming bias. She <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/npr-suspends-editor-who-accused-network-of-bias-issues-final-warning" target="_blank" rel="noopener">suspended</a> this 25-year veteran of NPR without pay because he pointed out that the organization is now completely one-sided. 
For example, the whistleblower wrote:
<blockquote>Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.</blockquote>
That&#8217;s not the kind of transparency that the new NPR CEO appreciates, apparently. She&#8217;s happy to talk about how NPR employs too many white men. But she definitely doesn&#8217;t want to talk about political bias, or how useless NPR has become. It used to be that NPR at least pretended to be embarrassed about this. In 2011, NPR&#8217;s CEO at the time, Vivian Schiller, resigned after a Project Veritas sting exposed what she thought about conservatives in the Tea Party movement. To summarize: she didn’t like them. Schiller had to resign once her views came to light. Back then, NPR believed that the appearance of fairness was at least a little important.
But that was the &#8220;Car Talk&#8221; era of NPR. Now they believe their CEO can categorically reject the idea that there&#8217;s any truth to report on. This is a belief system that&#8217;s now in vogue in newsrooms all over the country. It&#8217;s a big reason for the rise of transgenderism, COVID hysteria, and all the media&#8217;s lying we had to endure under the previous administration. 
This is the belief system that insists that men can become women, because the meaning of the words &#8220;men&#8221; and &#8220;women&#8221; are subjective. And it will spell the end of Western civilization unless we reject it. That is, of course, the point of everything Katherine Maher is saying. In the absence of truth, there is only a struggle for power. And right now — and hopefully not for much longer — it&#8217;s people like Katherine Maher who have that power.

Day 2 – Web Summit 2019 Lisbon

New CEO Of NPR Is Everything Wrong With The News Media

Activists

Progressivism

Readers Pass

Woke Culture

NPR&#8217;s president and CEO said she abandoned the idea of a &#8220;free and open&#8221; internet as the mission of Wikipedia, which she used to lead, because it is a &#8220;white, male, Westernized construct.&#8221;
In a newly resurfaced video clip, Katherine Maher, who took over as NPR&#8217;s chief executive in January says she found Wikpedia&#8217;s &#8220;free and open&#8221; ethos &#8220;inherently limited.&#8221; The clip was posted to X by Christopher Rufo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Maher served as chief executive at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, from 2019 to 2021.
&#8220;I have come to the opinion and the perspective that &#8216;free and open&#8217; was a way of looking at the world that was inherently limited relative to what we were trying to achieve,&#8221; Maher says in the clip.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says that she abandoned a &quot;free and open&quot; internet as the mission of Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a &quot;white male Westernized construct&quot; and &quot;did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be.&quot; <a href="https://t.co/Ved9mgGvJH">pic.twitter.com/Ved9mgGvJH</a>
&mdash; Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) <a href="https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1780929268949614848?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 18, 2024</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher doesn&#39;t just want to &quot;stamp out bad information&quot; on the internet. She wants to replace it with &quot;good information&quot;—i.e., left-wing narratives—and force the public to &quot;sit within that good information&quot; as &quot;a collective.&quot;
Big Sister has arrived. <a href="https://t.co/7kfq8VYHfj">pic.twitter.com/7kfq8VYHfj</a>
&mdash; Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) <a href="https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1781009614584381486?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 18, 2024</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says the &quot;the number one challenge&quot; in her fight against disinformation is &quot;the First Amendment in the United States,&quot; which makes it &quot;a little bit tricky&quot; to censor &quot;bad information&quot; and &quot;the influence peddlers&quot; who spread it.
NPR&#39;s censor-in-chief. <a href="https://t.co/0vY6hIpbmO">pic.twitter.com/0vY6hIpbmO</a>
&mdash; Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) <a href="https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1780597079439446250?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 17, 2024</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
&#8220;&#8216;Free and open&#8217; has the best of intentionality, but in the end what &#8216;free and open&#8217; often ended up doing, and particularly in the case of Wikipedia, was recapitulating many of the same power structures and dynamics that exist offline, prior to the advent of the internet,&#8221; Maher said.
One of the problems with Wikipedia is the way it relies on a &#8220;written tradition&#8221; and &#8220;reliable sources,&#8221; Maher said.
&#8220;You see the exclusion of communities, of languages because of the ways in which Wikipedia is based on reliable sources. The idea of a written tradition, which is particular to some cultures and not to others,&#8221; the former Wikimedia CEO said.
&#8220;The ways in which we ascribe notability often really comes from sort of this white, male, Westernized construct around who matters in societies and who is elevated and whose voices. And so some of these ideas of sort of this radical openness really did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be,&#8221; she said.
X owner Elon Musk responded to the clip, <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1780962477011796287" target="_blank" rel="noopener">posting</a>, &#8220;That’s literally the point of Wikipedia.&#8221;
Maher has recently come under fire from conservatives after a former NPR editor blew the whistle on the outlet&#8217;s liberal bias. Former editor Uri Berliner resigned Wednesday after NPR suspended him.
In the wake of the NPR editor&#8217;s accusations, a slew of since-deleted tweets and previous statements from Maher have surfaced, adding fuel to the outrage.
In another clip posted by Rufo, Maher says she is interested in how we can &#8220;immerse ourself in good information,&#8221; not just &#8220;stamp out bad information.&#8221;
In yet another clip, Maher says the &#8220;number one challenge&#8221; for her in fighting disinformation is the First Amendment, which she calls a &#8220;fairly robust protection of rights.&#8221;
&#8220;It also means that it is a little bit tricky to really address some of the real challenges of where does bad information come from,&#8221; she said.
She has been accused of expressing explicitly biased views in her previous tweets.
In 2018, Maher <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/04/13/us-news/nprs-new-ceo-katherine-mahers-woke-tweets-arise-as-editor-claims-bias/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">posted</a>, “Donald Trump is a racist.”
In 2020 she wrote, &#8220;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.&#8221;

Web Summit Lisbon 2023

‘White, Male, Westernized’: NPR President Said She Opposed Wikipedia’s ‘Free And Open’ Mission

'White, Male, Westernized': NPR President Said She Opposed Wikipedia's 'Free And Open' Mission

Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

First Amendment

Free Speech

Wikipedia

Wokeness

Dozens of National Public Radio (NPR) employees signed on to a letter suggesting that their now-former senior business editor <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/we-lost-americas-trust-npr-veteran-says-network-has-lost-its-way" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Uri Berliner</a> was spot on in his assessment of the liberal bias that has taken over the network.
New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin shared screenshots of the letter, addressed to CEO <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/nprs-new-ceo-scolds-25-year-veteran-for-expose-outing-networks-bias" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Katherine Maher</a> and Editor in Chief <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/npr-chief-hits-back-at-whistleblower-who-says-colleagues-secretly-agree" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Edith Chapin</a>, which claimed that Berliner&#8217;s essay in The Free Press had left many of them feeling as though they&#8217;d been personally attacked.
&#8220;About 50 NPR employees sign a letter to CEO Katherine Maher and top editor Edith Chapin calling for, among other things, a public rebuke of the &#8216;factual inaccuracies and elisions&#8217; in Uri Berliner’s Free Press essay,&#8221; Mullin&#8217;s caption read.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
new: About 50 NPR employees sign a letter to CEO Katherine Maher and top editor Edith Chapin calling for, among other things, a public rebuke of the “factual inaccuracies and elisions” in Uri Berliner’s Free Press essay. <a href="https://t.co/jXc1R4J0G3">pic.twitter.com/jXc1R4J0G3</a>
&mdash; Ben Mullin (@BenMullin) <a href="https://twitter.com/BenMullin/status/1780635242170028359?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 17, 2024</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
&#8220;We&#8217;re writing to urge stronger support for staff who have had their journalistic expertise called into question by one of their own in a public forum,&#8221; the letter read. &#8220;We also urge more transparency regarding the consequences of making unauthorized public comments that seek to change NPR&#8217;s editorial direction.&#8221;
The letter went on to say that while both Chapin and Maher had shared their objections to Berliner&#8217;s claims — namely that the outlet been wholly disinterested in presenting stories that might hurt President Joe Biden or help former President Donald Trump — the employees were concerned that their efforts to spur policy changes through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives were being undermined by Berliner&#8217;s public comments.
&#8220;Staff, many from marginalized backgrounds, have pushed for internal policy changes through mechanisms like the DEI accountability committee, sharing of affinity group guidelines, and an ad-hoc content review group,&#8221; they wrote, complaining that Berliner was getting more attention and apparent change from a short essay than they had after years of work.
<a href="https://onelink.to/dwapp" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" aria-describedby="sk-tooltip-9096" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://onelink.to/dwapp&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1700760801843000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2PQrVSrJfhxNb4LcARqniG">CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP</a>
Their concern on that point, they said, was that others within the network might get the idea that a pointed editorial was more effective at forcing change than going through proper channels.
They also complained that Berliner&#8217;s essay had &#8220;made their jobs harder&#8221; and called on Maher and Chapin to clearly &#8220;offer public support and defense of those individuals whose work was directly undermined by the opinion piece.&#8221;

US-BUSINESS-NPR

Dozens Of NPR Employees Write Letter Proving Uri Berliner Was Right About Everything

Censorship

Senior Business Editor Uri Berliner is resigning from <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/national-public-radio-npr" target="_blank" rel="noopener">National Public Radio (NPR)</a> a little more than a week after he publicly <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/we-lost-americas-trust-npr-veteran-says-network-has-lost-its-way" target="_blank" rel="noopener">accused</a> the network of espousing left-wing bias in an essay.
In a post to X on Wednesday, Berliner shared what he said was his resignation letter to NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/nprs-new-ceo-scolds-25-year-veteran-for-expose-outing-networks-bias" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lashed out</a> at the editor&#8217;s critique and has faced blowback over old tweets.
&#8220;I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years,&#8221; Berliner said. &#8220;I don&#8217;t support calls to defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
My resignation letter to NPR CEO <a href="https://twitter.com/krmaher?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@krmaher</a> <a href="https://t.co/0hafVbcZAK">pic.twitter.com/0hafVbcZAK</a>
&mdash; Uri Berliner (@uberliner) <a href="https://twitter.com/uberliner/status/1780610524411048183?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 17, 2024</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
He added, &#8220;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.&#8221;
The Free Press <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust?utm_source=direct&amp;utm_campaign=post&amp;utm_medium=web&amp;fbclid=IwAR2BI7aGsLrw5JzADcxw-Ddx9IFpaQzQxVieieHiYiYvBozjQ3W_q8XSMoY_aem_Afb8djuPsGMotINI-8VtH0_ouA2n_5T1rMS3kvz8x_-AGiNOlKuozOh6WEdCnd1xeok&amp;triedRedirect=true" target="_blank" rel="noopener">published</a> the essay on Tuesday last week in which Berliner argued NPR &#8220;lost America&#8217;s trust&#8221; with its increasingly liberal bent.
His critique touched on topics related to former President Donald Trump, NPR&#8217;s COVID coverage, reporting on transgender issues, audience figures, the network&#8217;s own level of diversity, and more.
Berliner additionally wrote about how he tried to make some of his concerns known internally. He said no one ever &#8220;trashed&#8221; him, but he was repeatedly brushed off and nothing changed.
On Tuesday of this week, NPR&#8217;s media correspondent David Folkenflik reported that Berliner had received a letter informing him that he had been <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/npr-suspends-editor-who-accused-network-of-bias-issues-final-warning" target="_blank" rel="noopener">suspended</a> without pay for five days starting on Friday.
NPR told Berliner he failed to follow the network&#8217;s rules and get approval for outside work for other news outlets. Berliner was also accused of publicly releasing proprietary information about audience demographics that <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/npr" target="_blank" rel="noopener">NPR</a> considered confidential.
The letter, billed as a &#8220;final warning,&#8221; said Berliner would be fired for another policy violation. Berliner conceded he did not get permission to speak with Folkenflik, but said he thought it would be &#8220;extraordinary&#8221; if he were fired for speaking to an NPR journalist.
In the backlash that followed the essay, Trump <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-calls-for-cutting-npr-funds-after-editor-accuses-network-of-bias" target="_blank" rel="noopener">demanded</a> NPR&#8217;s funding be cut. And Maher, who has served as NPR&#8217;s chief executive for less than a month, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/nprs-new-ceo-scolds-25-year-veteran-for-expose-outing-networks-bias" target="_blank" rel="noopener">condemned</a> the &#8220;deeply simplistic&#8221; and &#8220;profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning&#8221; assessment.
Old tweets from Maher that displayed her personal views in favor of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/15/business/media/npr-chief-executive-criticized-over-tweets.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">liberal causes</a> began to resurface as the fallout over Berliner&#8217;s essay and follow-up interviews began to grow, fueling more criticism, particularly from the Right.
Maher called Trump a &#8220;racist&#8221; in a <a href="https://archive.is/9Egnx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">2018 post</a> that has since been deleted and shared a <a href="https://twitter.com/krmaher/status/1323094291732815872" target="_blank" rel="noopener">photo</a> of herself wearing a hat touting President Joe Biden&#8217;s campaign in November of 2020.
Journalist Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, posted to X on Wednesday a clip of Maher talking about the First Amendment and platforms dealing with &#8220;bad information.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says the &quot;the number one challenge&quot; in her fight against disinformation is &quot;the First Amendment in the United States,&quot; which makes it &quot;a little bit tricky&quot; to censor &quot;bad information&quot; and &quot;the influence peddlers&quot; who spread it.
NPR&#39;s censor-in-chief. <a href="https://t.co/0vY6hIpbmO">pic.twitter.com/0vY6hIpbmO</a>
&mdash; Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) <a href="https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1780597079439446250?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 17, 2024</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Berliner told Folkenflik the posts indicate Maher is the &#8220;opposite&#8221; of the kind of leader NPR needs to be &#8220;unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about.&#8221;
Maher released a statement that said &#8220;everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen&#8221; in America.
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&#8220;What matters is NPR&#8217;s work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public,&#8221; she added. &#8220;NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests.&#8221;
The report from Folkenflik noted that NPR emphasized that &#8220;the CEO is not involved in editorial decisions.&#8221;
Folkenflik wrote that some in the newsroom acknowledge Berliner&#8217;s critique as valid, while others say they are no longer willing to work with him.
NPR&#8217;s chief news executive, Edith Chapin, reportedly announced that Executive Editor Eva Rodriguez would lead monthly coverage review meetings. Berliner reportedly said he welcomed the announcement but would reserve judgment until those meetings happen.

NPR Editor Who Accused Network Of Liberal Bias Resigns

<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/national-public-radio-npr" target="_blank" rel="noopener">National Public Radio (NPR)</a> has suspended Senior Business Editor Uri Berliner after he publicly <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/we-lost-americas-trust-npr-veteran-says-network-has-lost-its-way" target="_blank" rel="noopener">accused</a> the network of espousing left-wing bias with an essay that began a media firestorm.
Last week, Berliner received a letter that informed him of a five-day suspension without pay beginning Friday, according to a <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/04/16/1244962042/npr-editor-uri-berliner-suspended-essay" target="_blank" rel="noopener">report</a> by NPR&#8217;s media correspondent David Folkenflik.
NPR told Berliner he failed to follow the network&#8217;s rules and get approval for outside work for other news outlets after his <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust?utm_source=direct&amp;utm_campaign=post&amp;utm_medium=web&amp;fbclid=IwAR2BI7aGsLrw5JzADcxw-Ddx9IFpaQzQxVieieHiYiYvBozjQ3W_q8XSMoY_aem_Afb8djuPsGMotINI-8VtH0_ouA2n_5T1rMS3kvz8x_-AGiNOlKuozOh6WEdCnd1xeok&amp;triedRedirect=true" target="_blank" rel="noopener">essay</a> for The Free Press and follow-up interviews.
Berliner was also accused of publicly releasing proprietary information about audience demographics that <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/npr" target="_blank" rel="noopener">NPR</a> considered confidential, per the report.
The letter, which was called a &#8220;final warning,&#8221; said Berliner would be fired for another policy violation.
Berliner, a dues-paying member of NPR&#8217;s newsroom union, told Folkenflik that he would not appeal the punishment.
He claimed the figures discussed in his essay &#8220;were essentially marketing material. If they had been really good, they probably would have distributed them and sent them out to the world.&#8221;
Berliner conceded that he did not get permission to speak with Folkenflik, but said he thought it would be &#8220;extraordinary&#8221; if he were fired for speaking to an NPR journalist.
The Free Press <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust?utm_source=direct&amp;utm_campaign=post&amp;utm_medium=web&amp;fbclid=IwAR2BI7aGsLrw5JzADcxw-Ddx9IFpaQzQxVieieHiYiYvBozjQ3W_q8XSMoY_aem_Afb8djuPsGMotINI-8VtH0_ouA2n_5T1rMS3kvz8x_-AGiNOlKuozOh6WEdCnd1xeok&amp;triedRedirect=true" target="_blank" rel="noopener">published</a> the essay on Tuesday last week in which Berliner argued NPR &#8220;lost America&#8217;s trust&#8221; with its increasingly liberal bent.
His critique touched on topics related to former President Donald Trump, NPR&#8217;s COVID coverage, reporting on transgender issues, audience figures, the network&#8217;s own level of diversity, and more.
Berliner additionally wrote about how he tried to make some of his concerns known internally. He said no one ever &#8220;trashed&#8221; him, but he was repeatedly brushed off and nothing changed.
In the public backlash that followed the essay, Trump <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-calls-for-cutting-npr-funds-after-editor-accuses-network-of-bias" target="_blank" rel="noopener">demanded</a> that NPR&#8217;s funding be cut. Despite his critique, Berliner said &#8220;defunding&#8221; was not the way to address the &#8220;missteps&#8221; he outlined.
NPR&#8217;s chief executive of less than a month, Katherine Maher, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/nprs-new-ceo-scolds-25-year-veteran-for-expose-outing-networks-bias" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lashed out</a> at the &#8220;deeply simplistic&#8221; and &#8220;profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning&#8221; essay without mentioning Berliner&#8217;s name.
After Berliner&#8217;s essay was published, old tweets from Maher resurfaced that displayed her personal views in favor of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/15/business/media/npr-chief-executive-criticized-over-tweets.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">liberal causes,</a> fueling more criticism, particularly from the Right.
Maher called Trump a &#8220;racist&#8221; in a <a href="https://archive.is/9Egnx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">2018 post</a> that has since been deleted and shared a <a href="https://twitter.com/krmaher/status/1323094291732815872" target="_blank" rel="noopener">photo</a> of herself wearing a hat touting President Joe Biden&#8217;s campaign in November of 2020.
Berliner said the posts indicate Maher is the &#8220;opposite&#8221; of the kind of leader NPR needs to be &#8220;unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about.&#8221;
Maher released a statement that said &#8220;everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen&#8221; in America.
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&#8220;What matters is NPR&#8217;s work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public,&#8221; she added. &#8220;NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests.&#8221;
The report noted that NPR emphasized that &#8220;the CEO is not involved in editorial decisions.&#8221;
Folkenflik wrote that some in the newsroom acknowledge Berliner&#8217;s critique as valid, while others say they are no longer willing to work with him.
The report said NPR&#8217;s chief news executive, Edith Chapin, announced late Monday that Executive Editor Eva Rodriguez would lead monthly coverage review meetings.
Berliner reportedly said he welcomed the announcement but would reserve judgment until those meetings happen.

NPR HQ

NPR Suspends Editor Who Accused Network Of Bias, Issues ‘Final Warning’

NPR Suspends Editor Who Accused Network Of Bias, Issues 'Final Warning'

National Public Radio (NPR) CEO and president Katherine Maher <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-extra/2024/04/12/1244456600/from-npr-president-and-ceo-katherine-maher-thoughts-on-our-mission-and-our-work" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lashed out</a> at senior Editor Uri Berliner over a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/we-lost-americas-trust-npr-veteran-says-network-has-lost-its-way" target="_blank" rel="noopener">scathing op-ed</a> he wrote for The Free Press — in which he claimed that NPR had displayed political bias on a number of occasions and, in doing so, had &#8220;lost America&#8217;s trust.&#8221;
Maher, who stepped into her role at NPR just three weeks ago, claimed that Berliner&#8217;s assessment — made after 25 years with the outlet — was &#8220;deeply simplistic&#8221; as well as &#8220;profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.&#8221;
Without mentioning Berliner by name — or giving any specifics with regard to his comments — Maher simply claimed that NPR was devoted to providing information to the public, and that the outlet&#8217;s &#8220;service to this aspirational mission was called in question this week.&#8221;
&#8220;Asking a question about whether we&#8217;re living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions,&#8221; Maher continued. &#8220;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.&#8221;
Maher went on to suggest that Berliner&#8217;s assessment of bias had been based on his own objections to a diverse workplace — when, in fact, he had given a series of examples where diversity of thought had either not been present or had been actively shut down.
&#8220;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&#8217;s thoughts or political leanings,&#8221; Maher claimed. &#8220;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.&#8221;
Maher&#8217;s objections raised eyebrows after a number of her old Twitter posts came to light, revealing her personal political leanings.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
NPR&#39;s new CEO is just as insane as you&#39;d expect her to be <a href="https://t.co/BDob66lNne">pic.twitter.com/BDob66lNne</a>
&mdash; Nate Hochman (@njhochman) <a href="https://twitter.com/njhochman/status/1779632231226503196?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 14, 2024</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Two years ago I made a commitment to never step on a speaker&#39;s stage without talking about our climate crisis. It is the world we have built and our responsibility to confront. <a href="https://t.co/nSH8hDas5r">https://t.co/nSH8hDas5r</a>
&mdash; Katherine Maher (@krmaher) <a href="https://twitter.com/krmaher/status/1426066179832041472?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 13, 2021</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Now can we end the filibuster?
&mdash; Katherine Maher (@krmaher) <a href="https://twitter.com/krmaher/status/1374265831249518594?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 23, 2021</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
If we can basically agree people should wear a mask to the grocery store because it&#39;s in the best interests of most of us, we should also be able to protect the vast majority of us who want to go to the grocery store (and other public venues) without risk of fatal gun violence.
&mdash; Katherine Maher (@krmaher) <a href="https://twitter.com/krmaher/status/1374264135777619968?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 23, 2021</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Web Summit Qatar 2024 – Day One

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

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

Former President <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/donald-trump" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Donald Trump</a>, who is running another campaign for the White House, demanded this week that funding be cut from <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/national-public-radio-npr" target="_blank" rel="noopener">National Public Radio (NPR)</a> after a longtime NPR editor <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/we-lost-americas-trust-npr-veteran-says-network-has-lost-its-way" target="_blank" rel="noopener">accused</a> the network of espousing left-wing bias.
&#8220;NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM! EDITOR SAID THEY HAVE NO REPUBLICANS, AND IS ONLY USED TO &#8216;DAMAGE TRUMP.&#8217; THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!&#8221; Trump <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/112248653824267212" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> in a post to Truth Social on Wednesday.
The Free Press published an <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust" target="_blank" rel="noopener">op-ed</a> on Tuesday in which NPR Senior Business Editor Uri Berliner argued NPR &#8220;lost America&#8217;s trust&#8221; with its increasingly liberal bent. Despite his critique, Berliner said &#8220;defunding&#8221; was not the way to address the &#8220;missteps&#8221; he outlined.
&#8220;As the country becomes more fractured, there’s still a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith. Defunding, as a rebuke from Congress, wouldn’t change the journalism at NPR. That needs to come from within,&#8221; he said.
Multiple times during his presidency, Trump <a href="https://deadline.com/2020/02/donald-trump-public-media-pbs-npr-1202856498/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">proposed</a> reining in funding for public media, but Congress did not take him up on the cuts. If he is re-elected this year, that could change. As noted in a <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/11/trump-tightens-stranglehold-on-congressional-gop-00151629" target="_blank" rel="noopener">POLITICO report</a> after the House <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/house-blocks-fisa-spy-bill-opponents-demand-warrant-requirement" target="_blank" rel="noopener">blocked the advancement of a FISA bill</a> that Trump opposed, the former president is &#8220;tightening his stranglehold on the congressional GOP’s policy agenda.&#8221;
When NPR <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/npr-ditches-twitter-over-actions-that-undermine-our-credibility" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ditched</a> Twitter (now X) last year after being slapped with labels linking it to the U.S. government, the network <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter-government-funded-media-label" target="_blank" rel="noopener">insisted</a> it &#8220;receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.&#8221; Still, on its website, NPR says federal funding is <a href="https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances" target="_blank" rel="noopener">&#8220;essential&#8221;</a> and that ending it &#8220;would result in fewer programs, less journalism — especially local journalism—and eventually the loss of public radio stations, particularly in rural and economically distressed communities.&#8221;
In his op-ed, Berliner talked about how the &#8220;rise of advocacy took off&#8221; when Trump got elected to the White House in the 2016 election when he defeated Hillary Clinton.
&#8220;As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly),&#8221; Berliner said. &#8220;But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.&#8221;
Berliner discussed how NPR interviewed Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) dozens of times, during which he often spoke about there being evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia, but the network offered up &#8220;notably sparse&#8221; coverage when Robert Mueller&#8217;s special counsel report released in 2019 found &#8220;no credible evidence of collusion&#8221; and let Russiagate &#8220;fade&#8221; from its programming.
&#8220;It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens,&#8221; Berliner said. &#8220;You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.&#8221;
The editor shared an anecdote about the Hunter Biden laptop story, which emerged prior to the 2020 election, saying it was &#8220;newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.&#8221;
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Berliner also said he found 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans working editorial positions in D.C., where NPR is headquartered, but when he shared the data in a staff meeting and suggested there was a diversity problem, &#8220;the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference.&#8221;
NPR Editor-in-Chief Edith Chapin <a href="https://twitter.com/BenMullin/status/1777773343267062201" target="_blank" rel="noopener">released</a> a statement saying that she and her colleagues on the leadership team &#8220;strongly disagree with Uri’s assessment of the quality of our journalism and the integrity of our newsroom processes.&#8221; She also said, &#8220;We&#8217;re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories.&#8221;

Former President Donald Trump

Trump Calls For Cutting NPR Funds After Editor Accuses Network Of Bias

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