By Jeffrey Blehar
Thursday, April 18, 2024
However heartfelt as a lament, Uri Berliner’s now-infamous insider look at the editorial slide of
NPR over the past decade was, as I’ve suggested, effectively a resignation letter.
Wednesday morning came his announcement:
I am resigning from NPR, a great
American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don’t support calls to
defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive
and do important journalism. But I 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.
So score one for me on that account, I guess. But what I
also noted is that the final paragraph of Berliner’s cri de coeur read
rather clearly as calling in an airstrike on his own position right before
moving to vacate it: He practically begged people — the sorts of cynics who
would eagerly read a 5,000-word exposé on the internal workings of NPR — to
look deeper into the background of NPR’s new chief executive officer, Katherine
Maher. Cue Christopher Rufo, always listening for signals from behind enemy
lines, who began dropping massive ordnance on Maher’s remarkable
Twitter history this week.
To give you a sense of Maher’s hilarious and “always on”
wokeness, let me simply point out that this is a woman who actually wrote, “Whenever people ask me what I want for
Christmas, all I ever say is carbon credits,” and was not, apparently,
joking. Rufo has moved on from the tweets to circulating clips from her
various appearances. (A TED talk here,
an Atlantic Council Zoom chat there — the woman certainly knew how to score all
the right prestige speaking gigs in the nonprofit sector.)
And it is at this point that one understands more clearly
why Berliner decided he needed to sound the alarm now, after three months of
Maher’s leadership at an NPR already spiraling out of control. Watching her
promote her worldview back before she took the NPR job is a deeply unnerving
experience. Lest some accuse me of relying only on Rufo’s cherrypicked
excerpts, I will state that I have inflicted the full exposure upon myself, and
all in the name of journalism: Over the past day I have
watched every minute of Katherine Maher speaking that can be found on
YouTube. It is easy enough to mock her performative wokeness (and I have). But
I think Charlie Cooke was perhaps closer to the mark yesterday when he
suggested we should instead be afraid, very afraid.
For Maher turns out to be quite ideologically coherent in
her own way — except that her ideology is repulsively antithetical to any
institution with pretensions of objective news-gathering and reporting. The
tone of her speeches is notably more controlled than that of her social-media
feed; she presents reasonably well, which will always get you far in corporate
America (particularly provided you also have incredibly wealthy and
well-connected parents in New York City finance). But the same dead-souled, robotically
woke relativism haunts her every assertion and underlies all her premises. No
wonder Berliner spit the bit at this woman bringing her ethos explicitly to
National Public Radio.
Maher’s TED talk is titled “What
Wikipedia Teaches Us about Balancing Truth and Beliefs,” and if you have 15
minutes to set aside as a calm-voiced Stasi interrogator gently jabs a
screwdriver into your eardrums, it’s worth listening to in full to get a sense
of her Orwellian worldview. Her primary takeaway from her experience running
the Wikimedia Foundation (which oversees Wikipedia) during “a global crisis of
fake news and disinformation” is that, since “your” truths are purportedly as
valid as “my” truths, truth and facts are therefore illusory: We should instead
work with experts to create a “minimum acceptable truth,” a process governed by
a social consensus that substitutes for the real thing. (The example she uses
to illustrate this, naturally, is how “disinformation” about climate change
prevents people from realizing the “truth” that governments need to implement
radical economic and social reforms to end carbon emissions in the West. I am
not kidding. She is nothing if not perfectly predictable.)
Some of the videos out there that haven’t yet
gone mainstream on social media are even more bone-chilling. Watch here,
as Maher smilingly explains why Wikipedia is so great:
The thing that Wikipedia focuses
on is not truth nor facts, it’s reliable verifiable information. And what we
would say is that as the world’s consensus changes about what is reliable
verifiable information, the information for us will change too. . . . So we’re
not really in the business of truth or facts, we’re in the business of what is
known, and what has been determined through consensus — scientific consensus or
otherwise.
Read that again and realize it is an open prescription
for madness, as well as a complete refutation of the principles any objective
news organization could ever claim to stand for. That final sentence may well
have been the one that set Berliner’s neck hairs on end. Remember that the core
complaint in his piece was about a devotion to racial and sexual diversity and
complete indifference to ideological diversity. (Out of 87 Washington-based
members of the NPR editorial staff, he found exactly zero registered
Republicans.) Along comes Katherine Maher, who explicitly takes a Pilate-like
“What is Truth?” position and says, “Let’s throw it to the wisdom of the
masses.” She seems to sincerely believe that actual truth is arrived at
collectively, through social and “scientific” consensus rather than
experimentation or observation of fact. (Interpretation is of course an
altogether different question.) It is not merely a recipe for intellectual
incuriosity, it’s a program of social control. Those of us who understand how
knowledge is “constructed” in both academia and the media these days know that
down this road lies such “consensus” truths as that the lab-leak thesis was a
crazy conspiracy theory, or that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian
disinformation.”
I’ve seen this being described as a “relativistic”
argument, but that gets it exactly backwards. Read it more carefully, and in
conjunction with who she revealed herself to be, erm, outside working hours:
She knows there is One Truth out there — or at least one approved list of
consensus progressive bien–pensant positions on topics
ranging from race to sex to politics to economics to science — and she is well
prepared to sell it as a priority. The fundamental questions have already all
been answered, so “viewpoint diversity” to her is just another way of saying
“giving in to mindless right-wing trolls.” (In one talk, she likens the truth
of heliocentrism to the “truth” of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.)
This is a particularly insidious mode of authoritarianism: Instead of directly
enforcing a party line, one merely suppresses the existence of any credible
opposing viewpoint. Noam Chomsky would laugh: She is proudly in the business of
manufacturing consent, so honestly committed to it that she can’t stop telling
anyone willing to foot the bill for a speaker’s fee.
This morning, the editors of National Review called (once
again, with feeling) on Congress to defund NPR. I agree with it in full — it is
obscene that federal taxpayer money, whether directly or indirectly, should
fund an organization so openly committed to an explicitly partisan and
totalizing worldview designed to exclude half the nation from the conversation.
Nevertheless, it will not happen, at least not in the foreseeable future. NPR
cannot be defunded legislatively, not during this session of Congress or any
other where the GOP fails to control both houses as well as the presidency, and
is also willing to suffer through endless media bleats about “slaughtering Big
Bird.”
Furthermore, nothing in theory prevents Katie Maher from
retaining her job. One imagines she currently has the newsroom and editorial
staff’s allegiance as (from their perspective) the wronged party in this
affair. Since their purse strings cannot be reached, only a sense of
professional shame could possibly motivate NPR to oust her, and as Charlie
points out, these sorts of people generally do not seem much in the market for
the kind of self-reflection that leads to shame.
I’m not sure what difference it would make, anyway. After
all, you have to ask yourself: Who are the people who hired Katherine
Maher in the first place? Are they going to fire themselves as well? (A writer
can dream.) They will still choose the next CEO, if and when
it comes to that, and they’ll just find someone with similar views and a
better-managed posting history. The heart wants what it wants, and NPR’s heart
is currently devoted to telling the preponderant mass of America just how useless
and unworthy of notice their non-progressive, non-ruling-elite views are.
So I end fearing that Charlie is right: She is at one
with her terrifying ideology. Watching Katherine Maher speak about seeking and
enforcing a consensus truth — her consensus truth, of her people
— as the proper approach to gathering facts and reporting information, and
understanding that she is only one of many in the tech and journalism
industries who feel the same way, I’m reminded of a particularly brutal
conversation from Ridley Scott’s Alien. We still don’t understand
what we’re dealing with when it comes to Maher, do we? She is, in many ways,
the perfect woke organism, her structural perfection matched only by her
hostility to any worldview outside of the humorlessly dogmatic progressive one
she flaunts at every opportunity. One almost admires her purity — a survivor,
unclouded by conscience or inklings of valid alternate moralities.
I can’t lie to you about our chances in the media
ecosystem against someone like this, but . . . you have my
sympathies.
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