If woke-elite bingo was a game, Katherine Maher would take the top prize.
The controversial new CEO of NPR, who has only been on the job since March 25, is already at the center of a firestorm that began when veteran NPR reporter and editor Uri Berliner wrote a Free Press essay critical of the network’s increasingly hard-left bias.
Maher suspended Berliner without pay for five days; he responded by resigning Wednesday.
“We’re looking for a leader right now who’s going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about,” Berliner told NPR correspondent David Folkenflik of Maher Tuesday. “And this seems to be the opposite of that.”
As a a result, Maher’s now on the hot seat herself, both for what she’s said in the past and for how much her life resembles an almost too-on-the-nose script from someone like Lena Dunham.
To begin with, she lives — where else — in progressive Park Slope in Brooklyn. Maher and her husband, lawyer Ashutosh Upreti, who wed in August 2023, bought the three-bedroom brownstone for $2.7 million last fall.
Maher’s LinkedIn ticks off every possible far-left box: stints at Wikimedia, the World Economic Forum, Stanford University, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council and UNICEF, as well as forays into high finance at HSBC and the World Bank, prior to joining NPR in January.
The Elizabeth Warren fan’s X account reveals references calling Donald Trump a “deranged racist sociopath” and a dream in which Maher and Vice-President Kamala Harris were “sampling and comparing nuts and baklava on roadside stands.”
Maher’s meet-cute with her husband, as described in a New York Times “Vows” column after their wedding, happened at a friend’s “interdenominational seder” in San Francisco’s Mission District in April 2019.
The two later went out for drinks, with Maher mistakenly thinking that Upreti was angling for a job as counsel with Wikimedia. She peppered him with questions such as ““How do you think about organizational risk, and what does a strategic legal function look like?”
Maher grew up in blue-chip Wilton, Conn. — one of three children of a commodities operations man, Gordon Roberts Maher, who called himself a “spiritual Parisian.”
Maher’s grandfather worked for IBM and “family lore contends he may or may not have been a postwar spy,” according to Gordon Roberts Maher’s 2020 obituary.
Conservatives have had a field day unearthing Maher’s vast archive of over-the-top neo-Marxist tweets and a now infamous Ted Talk in which she said that a “reverence for the truth” is a “distraction.”
“Perhaps for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth and seeking to convince others of the truth might not be the right place to start,” Maher said during the TED Talk. “In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
Conservative activist and commentator Christopher F. Rufo culled the X archive of Maher’s 29,400 tweets in an essay, “Quotations from Chairman Maher,” published on his Web site Wednesday.
“This archive is a collection of her statements, but at a deeper level, it provides a window into the soul of a uniquely American archetype: the affluent, white, female liberal — many of whom now sit atop our elite institutions,” Rufo wrote.
Many remaining NPR staffers, however, seem to think that Maher isn’t doing enough to ensure that NPR’s current way of doing journalism continues apace. Fifty employees signed a letter to Maher and top editor Edith Chapin that demanded, among other things, a public rebuke of the “factual inaccuracies and elisions” in Uri Berliner’s Free Press essay.
Berliner took some parting shots at Maher in the resignation letter he posted on X Wednesday.
“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years,” Berliner wrote Wednesday. “I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism.”
Berliner added that he “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.”
https://nypost.com/feed
Dana Kennedy
