Contempt or I Don’t Give A S#@%
Segment #428
Katherine Maher is not the spokesperson NPR and PBS needs at this moment. If you are looking for a lifeline, do you go on the Daily Show and ask them to toss you an anchor? Smug condescension with cheap shots at 50% (or more) of the country is not helpful…. And now to tell us how she loves to hear all voices is just not credible. The statutes are clear - you can’t be biased. A casual examination of the facts, their news programs, and insider articles from writers like Uri Berliner prove they are lying now.. It would be far better to reorganize, bring in a new team, and say we are going to do better. Instead they are doubling down which only serves to make people madder. The comparison between government gaslighting about the the secure border as millions come in is identical to the BS Katherine Maher is serving up now. I celebrate the right every citizen has to believe whatever they want. I don’t celebrate their option to lie about it. Most of my friends, staff, crew, and appraisers on Roadshow were liberal.. maybe six of us were conservative. So what that’s the real world. Own it.
Katherine Maher’s Testimony: Condescending and Dishonest?
You describe Maher’s testimony before the House Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) Subcommittee on March 26, 2025, as “condescending and dishonest.” Let’s break down the testimony, drawing on reports and X posts, to assess this charge, focusing on her responses to bias allegations and how they might have come across.
Key Moments in Maher’s Testimony
Bias Denial: When Rep. Jim Jordan asked, “Is NPR biased?” Maher responded, “I have never seen any instance of political bias determining editorial decisions” [,]. This prompted laughter in the room, as noted by the Daily Mail and X users like
@KanekoaTheGreat
[,]. Critics, including Rep. Jordan, cited Berliner’s 87-to-0 claim, arguing it’s implausible for a newsroom with such a partisan imbalance to remain unbiased. Maher’s refusal to concede bias, paired with her “concerning” comment on the 87-to-0 figure, struck many as evasive, especially given NPR’s coverage patterns.
Hunter Biden Laptop: Maher admitted NPR “was mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner” [,]. This was a significant concession, as NPR’s then-managing editor Terence Samuels had dismissed the story in 2020 as a “distraction” []. Critics on X, like
@amuse
, saw this as an admission of bias, arguing NPR only acknowledged the error under defunding pressure [].
Past Statements: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene grilled Maher on her 2020 tweets calling Trump a “deranged racist sociopath” and other posts, like one claiming “America is addicted to white supremacy” [,,]. Maher expressed regret for these tweets, saying they predated her NPR role, and defended NPR’s free speech principles [,]. To critics, including Rep. Tim Burchett, her past activism suggested a worldview incompatible with leading a taxpayer-funded, neutral outlet [].
Tone and Demeanor: Reports describe Maher as maintaining a measured tone, emphasizing NPR’s “unbiased, nonpartisan, fact-based reporting” and its service to 43 million listeners [,]. However, X users like
@realchrisrufo
called her “lying through her teeth,” likening her to a “Soviet commissar” defending Pravda []. The Hill labeled her appearance “cringeworthy,” citing contradictions, like claiming no bias while admitting coverage mistakes []. Her responses, often sidestepping direct questions (e.g., not confirming Berliner’s data), likely contributed to perceptions of condescension.
Why It Felt Condescending and Dishonest
Evasive Responses: Maher’s insistence that she’d “never seen” bias, despite the 87-to-0 claim and high-profile coverage critiques, may have seemed dismissive to you and others who hear bias regularly. Her “we don’t track voter registrations” answer avoided engaging with Berliner’s evidence, which could feel like stonewalling, especially if you view NPR’s lean as obvious.
Tone Disconnect: Maher’s polished, corporate-style delivery—emphasizing NPR’s mission and dodging pointed questions—may have clashed with the raw frustration of lawmakers and listeners like you. For example, when Rep. Brandon Gill pressed her on whether stories like NPR’s coverage of “gender queer dinosaur enthusiasts” justified taxpayer funds, Maher’s vague response about serving a “wide range” of interests sidestepped the critique, potentially coming off as aloof [].
Past vs. Present: Maher distanced herself from her pre-NPR tweets, claiming they reflected personal views, not her leadership []. To skeptics, this felt disingenuous, as her activist past (e.g., criticizing the First Amendment as a “challenge” to fighting disinformation in 2021 []) suggests a worldview that could influence NPR’s direction, even if she doesn’t directly edit stories.
Audience Reaction: The laughter during her bias denial, noted by multiple sources, signals that even some in the room found her claims hard to swallow [,]. X posts reflect similar incredulity, accusing Maher of lying outright [,]. If you’re already convinced of NPR’s bias, her testimony likely reinforced that by appearing to gaslight listeners who share your view.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is explicitly prohibited from exhibiting political bias as a condition of receiving federal funds. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which established the CPB, mandates that its funding be used to support programming that is objective, balanced, and free from political influence. Specifically:
Statutory Requirements: The Act requires the CPB to ensure "strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature" (47 U.S.C. § 396(g)(1)(A)). This applies to the content it funds, including programming on PBS and NPR.
CPB Oversight: The CPB distributes federal funds to public media stations and enforces guidelines to prevent bias. It is barred from directly producing content or interfering editorially, which insulates stations like NPR and PBS from government control but also holds them accountable to neutrality standards.
Inspector General Role: The CPB’s Inspector General investigates allegations of bias or misuse of funds, ensuring compliance with federal law. Violations could lead to funding cuts or legal repercussions.
In practice, accusations of bias (e.g., claims of liberal leanings by Republican lawmakers) persist, but studies, like those from the Pew Research Center, show NPR and PBS maintain broad trust across political spectra due to their commitment to fact-based reporting. Any perceived bias would violate their legal obligations and risk their federal funding, which constitutes about 15% of PBS’s and 1% of NPR’s budgets. The CPB’s structure, with a board appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, aims to balance political perspectives to prevent partisan dominance.
Thus, the CPB and its funded entities are not permitted to favor any political party, and mechanisms exist to enforce this neutrality.
I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.
Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, says he started sounding the alarm internally when he noticed a bias creep into the network’s coverage. (Pete Kiehart for The Free Press)
Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.
Here is Uri Berliner’s full text of the article..
You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.
I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.
So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.
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.
If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.
But it hasn’t.
For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
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.
Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. 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.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.
Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, 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.
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.
It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. 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.
What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.
Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.
In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “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.”
But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.
The laptop was 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.
When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.
Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin—supporting the hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.
The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.
But that wasn’t the case.
When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded.
Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential scientific paper known as “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Its authors wrote they didn’t believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die. And understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his colleagues, “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.”
Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.
Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that “the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.”
When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.
Uri Berliner near his home in Washington, D.C., on April 5, 2024. (Photo by Pete Kiehart for The Free Press)
I’m offering three examples of widely followed stories where I believe we faltered. Our coverage is out there in the public domain. Anyone can read or listen for themselves and make their own judgment. But to truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step inside the organization.
You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. Lansing came to NPR in 2019 from the federally funded agency that oversees Voice of America. Like others who have served in the top job at NPR, he was hired primarily to raise money and to ensure good working relations with hundreds of member stations that acquire NPR’s programming.
After working mostly behind the scenes, Lansing became a more visible and forceful figure after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. It was an anguished time in the newsroom, personally and professionally so for NPR staffers. Floyd’s murder, captured on video, changed both the conversation and the daily operations at NPR.
Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death, it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s—in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way.
But the message from the top was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.
“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “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.”
And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”
He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.
Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.
These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.
They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).
All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR’s internal website suggested, the groups were simply a “great way to meet like-minded colleagues” and “help new employees feel included,” it would have been one thing.
But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR’s union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.
In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.
Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and management, are common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what’s notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.
And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.