“The number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment,” said Katherine Maher in 2021 when she was CEO of Wikimedia, the company overseeing Wikipedia. In the topsy-turvy world of the Leftmedia, that makes Maher, now CEO of NPR, worthy of ... [checks notes] ... Harper’s Magazine’s First Amendment Award.
Like awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to terrorists and antisemites, or the Pulitzer to the Russia-collusion hoaxers at The New York Times and The Washington Post, the Harper’s award is just the latest in the farcical back-slapping among leftists.
Maher will receive the award on October 26. Earlier this year, the magazine said in a press release, “As president and CEO of NPR, Katherine Maher has guided one of America’s most important public media institutions through a period of extraordinary political, legal, and financial scrutiny, reaffirming journalism’s essential role in a democratic society.”
Maher gushed about it, of course. “Public media exists to serve the public interest, and I can think of no greater service to the public than the defense of the First Amendment,” she said. “The freedom, imagination, and initiative of all Americans flourish with its protections, so that we may better understand the world and one another. The compact of citizenship asks that we each step up to defend our constitutional rights if they are threatened. On behalf of NPR and the NPR Network, I am deeply honored to accept this award.”
Hey Katherine, what’s your opinion on the Second Amendment?
That’s rhetorical, but let’s go back to Maher’s problem with the First Amendment. In 2021, she discussed efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation, which, as we all remember, preoccupied leftist censors and speech suppressors for years. The First Amendment provides “a fairly robust protection of rights, and that is a protection of rights both for platforms, which I actually think is very important that platforms have those rights to be able to regulate what kind of content they want on their sites,” Maher said. “But 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, and sort of the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”
What leftists like Maher meant was that conservatives could not say true things like COVID came from a Wuhan lab or that Hunter Biden’s laptop was real and incriminating.
In October 2020, Terence Samuel, NPR’s managing editor for news, explained the network’s decision to ignore Hunter Biden’s laptop: “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.”
For all of Harper’s concern for “democratic society,” spiking that story almost certainly helped Joe Biden win the 2020 presidential election — and the Leftmedia planned it that way. Had voters known Biden was using his son in a family influence-peddling scheme, they probably wouldn’t have voted for him. Imagine the difference in America if Biden had never been president.
As Jonathan Turley notes, “Maher has supported ‘deplatforming’ anyone she deems to be a ‘fascist’ and even suggested that she might support ‘punching Nazis.’ She also declared that ‘our reverence for the truth might be a distraction [in] getting things done.’”
Maher circled the wagons when longtime NPR veteran Uri Berliner complained about persistent left-wing bias at the network. Rather than address the problem, he was suspended and resigned, saying Maher’s “divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR.”
After all of the above, last year, Maher had the unmitigated gall to insist, “I have never seen any instance of political bias determining editorial decisions.” The audience in that congressional hearing did the logical thing — they laughed.
And yet Maher will be awarded for upholding the First Amendment at NPR?
Maybe that’s because she also told Congress last year, “I do want to say that NPR acknowledges we were mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner.”
Oops! LOL!
Tim Graham, executive editor of the media watchdog NewsBusters, noted, “Harper’s Magazine is demonstrating the usual liberal impulse, that being fiercely critical of Trump and the Republicans is what the First Amendment is all about. But NPR didn’t hold President Biden accountable. Instead, they insisted that covering corruption in Biden’s family was a ‘distraction.’”
The real reason Harper’s is giving the award to Maher is for “successfully battling Trump’s 2025 executive order aimed at terminating federal funding for NPR and PBS.” Yet that is false. Yes, Maher fought tooth and nail to ensure NPR continued receiving gobs of taxpayer dollars, but Republicans managed to cut NPR funding anyway.
I get a good laugh out of stuff like this, but Maher is really the one laughing — all the way to the bank. In the latest fiscal filing from NPR, Maher’s compensation for FY2024 reached $695,444. Nice work if you can get it, especially with all the hand-wringing about NPR’s supposedly looming disappearance.
