National Public Radio’s new CEO Katherine Maher appeared to have scrubbed her social media of hyper-partisan, left-leaning posts before rising to the helm of the government-backed news network.
“Donald Trump is a racist,” the former chief executive of the Wikimedia Foundation — the nonprofit behind the online encyclopedia — posted on Twitter in 2018, according to a snapshot of the tweet on the site Archive.Today.
It’s unclear when or why Maher deleted the post from her account, or if it was related to her new gig at NPR, which touts its “fact-based reporting; opinion and commentary are secondary.”
According to media bias rating agency AllBias, however, which surveyed nearly 24,000 news readers, NPR has a “media bias” that aligns with “liberal, progressive or left-wing thought and/or policy agendas.”
Maher, who is slated to take the reins at NPR on March 25, has made several hyper-partisan posts in the past.
She once justified the shoplifting epidemic in Los Angeles on the sins of slavery.
“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,” Maher wrote in 2020 on Twitter, which has since been rebranded as X.
Maher, 40, also told her 26,500-plus X followers that same year that “white silence is complicity.”
“If you are white, today is the day to start a conversation in your community,” she urged.
However, she had admitted shortly prior to using “that hysteric white woman voice.”
“I was taught to do it. I’ve done it. It’s a disturbing recognition. While I don’t recall ever using it to deliberately expose another person to immediate physical harm on my own cognizance, it’s not impossible. That is whiteness,” Maher posted.
Everything you need to know about the NPR political bias scandal
- Veteran NPR editor Uri Berliner wrote a bombshell essay that claimed the broadcaster allowed liberal bias to affect its coverage. The senior business editor also said the internal culture at NPR had made race and identity ”paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”
- Berliner slammed NPR for ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, and claimed a co-worker said he was happy the network wasn’t pursuing the story because it could help Donald Trump get re-elected.
- Berliner was suspended without pay following the essay and announced his resignation Wednesday.
- Berliner blasted NPR’s controversial new CEO, Katherine Maher, who previously posted hyper-partisan tweets, saying that she is the “opposite” of what the embattled radio outlet needs.
- After the essay was published, Berliner said, he received “a lot of support from colleagues, and many of them unexpected, who say they agree with me.”
- Berliner’s essay prompted new calls from Republican lawmakers to strip NPR of government funding.
- COLUMN: NPR, New York Times are in immense turmoil with the world on the verge of global conflict
Maher said “whiteness” is something she’s fallen victim to in a thread on X — blaming her fourth-grade history classes for “misrepresenting some things.”
“I grew up feeling superior (hah, how white of me) because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves, or so I’d been taught,” Maher added in the thread.
She went on to correct her grade-school teachings: “Not only did New England yes have the legal institution of slavery, albeit briefly, quite a bit of the economy of New England, including my home coast of Connecticut, was built on the backs of plantation labor.”
Representatives for NPR did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
After leaving her hometown of Wilton, Conn., Maher went on to study at the Arabic Language Institute at The American University in Cairo, Egypt, before obtaining her Bachelor of Arts in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies from New York University, per her LinkedIn account.
Maher has held roles in a variety of industries, including banking and communications for the likes of HSBC, UNICEF and The World Bank, before landing the CEO role at the Wikimedia Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia.
Maher is poised to succeed John Lansing as NPR’s CEO.
After four years at the helm, Lansing announced his retirement.
