And, oh. If you haven’t seen the expose of NPR and its new, twisted CEO in The Free Press by a former, now fired 26 year editor, here’s a little recap.
And Americans are funding this trash while Biden is pouring even more money into it!
→” NPR’s CEO doesn’t love the First Amendment: After a longtime NPR editor came to The Free Press to blow the whistle on his time at the public radio network, the fallout was surprisingly fierce. Specifically, critics have now turned to explore new NPR CEO Katherine Maher’s politics. They are completely standard progressive: it’s all “White silence is complicity” and “as someone with cis white mobility privilege.” She calls my beloved Bill Maher “a racist bigot”; she hates Trump a lot.
Why, why didn’t she delete these? When I was hired at The New York Times, you better believe I deleted my tweets from the night Trump won in 2016 (I was drunk, I was crying, there were selfies). But also there are videos. Among the choice quotes of the new NPR CEO now flying around: “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.” And: the First Amendment is “the number one challenge” in American journalism. Tricky. Tricky indeed.
For people who think reform is possible: the win here is that NPR’s CEO announced that thanks to Uri Berliner’s bravery, the company will begin doing monthly content reviews. Yes, mixed with her denial of his account and basically calling him racist is this: “Interim Chief Content Officer, Edith Chapin, will establish a broad-based, rotating group that will meet monthly to review our coverage across all platforms.” NPR employees noticed and are furious about it.
But for my realists: NPR is gone for the moderate liberal and obviously long gone for the conservative of any stripe. Maybe also for anyone who didn’t write their thesis on indigenous land rights. Review boards won’t help NPR. And that’s okay! Uri Berliner and I disagree here, because my take is not to reform this group but to free it. NPR is a fabulous left-wing radio syndicate. That’s super cool. Taxpayers just shouldn’t foot the bill for that.
And we really do foot the bill, much as they deny it, with even more cash heading their way under Biden. From The Hill: “NPR insists that only roughly 1 percent of its budget comes from the government. But that is misleading due to a federal law that distributes funds through local stations and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been set aside for CPB in fiscal year 2026, a sizable increase from 2025.”
We are propping up an audio production company that hates not just the red half of the country but also half the Democrats, so I’d generously estimate they hate maybe 85 percent of the country? And the reason they need all you horrible people to keep funneling tax dollars to them is that without that sweet taxpayer cash, NPR would go bankrupt immediately. There’s simply no appetite in the real world for being yelled at about how looting is good and the First Amendment is bad and Bill Maher is the literal KKK. And the extent of their argument is basically: you must continue to pay us, so that we can continue to hate you. I say godspeed, NPR, be free, never change”
