Can someone who donated to an organization spreading falsehoods about stolen elections be the CEO of a credible news organization?
Imagine what it would say about ABC News’ 2024 election coverage if it were discovered network president Kim Godwin had donated to Donald Trump after Jan. 6.
The journalism world would have a fit, and Godwin wouldn’t last a day in the job.
Well, now the Louboutin is on the other foot.
National Public Radio CEO Karen, er, Katherine Maher is a donor to Stacey Abrams’ election-denying political action committee, Fair Fight.
Abrams, you may recall, spiraled down a conspiracy rabbit hole after losing Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race.
Maher donated $500 to Fair Fight PAC in 2020, her second-largest donation among 19 to Democrats and their allies between 2016 and 2022, as I reported for The Center Square.
This was before she became NPR’s CEO.
That donation came after:
- Abrams refused to concede the governor’s race (she never did);
- Abrams concocted false allegations about voting machines switching votes;
- Abrams’ PAC filed a bogus lawsuit contesting the election.
The lawsuit was eventually dismissed, and Fair Fight was forced to pay the state’s legal fees.
The double standard here is shocking.
After Trump’s lawyers made similar election-machine allegations and fared equally poorly in court, their credibility was shattered.
But Abrams makes these same transparently false allegations and is worthy of a donation from someone as prominent as the then-Wikimedia Foundation CEO?
I asked NPR repeatedly if it knew about the donation before hiring Maher in January and if it thinks a court-adjudicated election denier is an appropriate CEO, but it did not get back to me.
Maher is already under fire for weirdly woke tweets that mesh with allegations of top-to-bottom progressive groupthink at the publicly funded news organization by a now-departed 25-year NPR veteran, Uri Berliner.
Among the more eye-popping is a tweet justifying 21st-century looting as a response to 19th-century 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.”
Her views are being widely mocked as exactly matching what a woke artificial intelligence would produce as an NPR executive’s beliefs.
And her TED Talk — in which she said: “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction” and “We all have different truths” — has sparked derision from critics and journalists alike.
More than likely, it’s spawned confusion among NPR journalists who, like many of us, fancy themselves as truth-seekers.
Indeed, her view that the First Amendment is an impediment to fighting “disinformation” and differing opinions should be silenced — she declared Sen. Tom Cotton’s “Send In the Troops” New York Times op-ed “misinformation” that never should have been published — would be anathema to previous generations of journalists like Berliner.
Now we learn she funded the election-denial schemers who provided a model for Trump’s 2020 shenanigans, perhaps giving him the impression he could try to overturn an election and walk away with his reputation untarnished.
NPR’s leaders have to decide if this donation to a Democratic election-denier is the last straw.
Maher shouldn’t wait for them.
Her reputation for nonpartisanship is out the window, and her credibility is seriously in question.
She should resign.
David Mastio, a former USA Today editor and columnist, is a regional editor for The Center Square.
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