New York Times Joins Chris Rufo In Mean Girls Finger-Snapping At NPR CEO
The stupidest rightwing outrage of 2024 (so far) gets even stupider.
OK, fine, we’re going to talk about the stupid fucking NPR thing, because no matter how shallow it is, it also doesn’t seem to have a bottom to it. Here are the basics of the stupid fucking NPR thing:
A longtime NPR editor, Uri Berliner, got a hair up his ass about what he considered pervasive liberal bias at the network, and published a really dumb essay about it at Bari Weiss’s Internet Grievance Palace. According to Berliner, NPR became too devoted to diversity, and to unfairly attacking Donald Trump, so now nobody, not even Black and Latino people, listens to NPR anymore. Too much wokeness! More on the essay itself in a bit.
Rightwingers called for NPR to be defunded.
NPR staff responded to being shivved by saying no, NPR is driven by journalism and blandness, not by partisanship, and Berliner made the rounds of rightwing media to get eyeballs on his article.
See #2.
Professional rightwing shit-stirrer Chris Rufo took to Twitter to say “hey, watch me get NPR CEO Katherine Maher fired over her old tweets,” because — before joining NPR — Maher posted a number of liberal opinions, which are supposed to be shocking.
See #2.
The New York Times dutifully ran a story Monday about Maher’s old tweets (gift link) that Rufo dug up to try to get her fired, complete with an interview with Rufo.
Rufo then pointed at the Times story about the tweets he dug up to get Maher fired, and proclaimed “we are driving the narrative.”
See #2.
Rufo continues dredging up even the most mundane tweets by Maher and framing them as if they were insanely radical. Why, she even posted on International Women’s Day in 2021, that crazy lady.
Rightwingers continue calling for NPR to be defunded.
N U D E S I N B I O
As Georgetown public policy prof Dan Moynihan tweeted on Bluesky yesterday, the editors of the Times “are not falling for [Rufo’s] game, they are co-producing it.”
Don’t worry, we’re not going to detail every part of that here. Especially not that last one.
Berliner’s Stupid Essay
The whole foofaraw started when Uri Berliner, who’s who until this morning had been a business editor at NPR for 25 years, wrote a very public grump at Bari Weiss’s Grievance Playhouse about how NPR has gone from being a thoughtful source of journalism that always leaned a bit crunchy-granola Prius-driving liberal, to all-consuming leftwing bias. In the process, he claims, “An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.” Berliner laments that NPR, “which purports to consider all things,” has lost its way. See what he did there?
But how did this pervasive leftist bent take over? Easy: it was the challenge of covering Trump. In its zeal to provide “tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president,” Berliner frets, it all too soon “veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.” As evidence, Berliner points to NPR’s coverage of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, or at least “rumors” of it, and claims that NPR “hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff,” who constantly “alluded to purported evidence of collusion.”
Ah, but then, in Berliner’s telling:
[W]hen the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.
There’s only one little problem with Berliner’s account of how NPR covered the Trump-Russia story. It’s oversimplified bullshit, and very easily debunked, like so many Just-so Stories conservatives tell themselves.
In an entertainingly thorough Twitter thread, Aaron Fritschner, a congressional staffer, takes Berliner’s claims apart one by one, noting, for instance, that in 25 NPR interviews, Schiff only mentioned “evidence of collusion” once — and when he did, he referred to publicly available evidence. As for NPR’s “sparse” coverage of the Mueller report, Fritschner points to two detailed stories from March 24, 2019, the day former attorney general Bill Barr summarized the report (misleadingly), as well as considerable follow-up coverage.
Why, NPR even covered — many times! — the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, which did indeed find evidence of contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign. Odd, Berliner didn’t mention that, instead leaning on the GOP talking point that Mueller exonerated Trump.
And so on. We won’t even get into Berliner’s two other bogus claims — that NPR suppressed the Hunter Biden’s Laptop story, or that it deliberately ignored the Wuhan Lab Leak theory of COVID origins — because they’re demonstrable bullshit. (We’ve linked to Fritschner’s debunkings of each).
Ultimately, Berliner insists that NPR went all lefty after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, and the “message from the top” of NPR was that “America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.”
Then the whole network became a den of PC groupthink and identity politics, with an obsessive emphasis on “race, gender, and ethnicity,” allegedly to the exclusion of doing good journalism. The rest of the essay is a bog standard catalogue of “look at what those crazy liberals care about now!” complaints that have been with us through 40 years of culture war anxieties, and he just keeps piling on, mourning each addition.
Several of Berliner’s NPR colleagues have taken him to task for it, including Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep, who says that Berliner’s essay is “filled with errors and omissions,” which he details, and which he says he has discussed with Berliner, too. Inskeep also notes that it’s a shame that Berliner didn’t have a better editor, because if anyone did edit it, “they let him publish an article that discredited itself.”
UPDATE: On Tuesday, NPR suspended Berliner for five days for failing to request permission to publish work outside NPR, a fairly common part of media company contracts. Sorry, meant to include that! But then while I was finishing this monster piece, Berliner resigned from NPR and blamed CEO Katherine Maher for making it impossible for him to work there, because she mildly rebuked him (without naming him specifically) in an email to staff last week.
“Asking a question about whether we’re living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions,” Ms. Maher said in the note. “Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”
Berliner’s resignation letter, which he copied to Twitter, reads in its entirety,
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.
Disparaged. The poor snowflake.
Rightwingers are now calling for NPR to be defunded, harder.
The New York Times Colludes With Chris Rufo — Again!
Following up on the Berliner essay, rightwing culture wars gutter resident Christopher Rufo — who ginned up rightwing panics over “critical race theory” and the very existence of trans people, and a key player in getting Harvard President Claudine Gay fired earlier this year — turned his sights on NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who took the job in January of this year. Prior to that, Maher had been the chief executive of the Wikimedia Foundation, which publishes Wikipedia.
Rufo has spent the week reposting old tweets by Maher, pretending they are so shockingly biased that no one can possibly believe NPR is a credible news source. As has become a sad habit it needs to break, the New York Times followed that with a story yesterday about those very tweets, which are “controversial” (gift link).
So what are these unspeakably leftwing opinions, posted before she took the NPR job? Well, in one now-deleted tweet on January 11, 2018, she wrote “Also, Donald Trump is a racist,” and no sane person would ever say that, would they? Unless maybe they were responding to something in the news, maybe? As it happens, that was the day Trump blew up a meeting on a possible immigration reform bill with his complaint that immigrants were coming to the USA from “shithole countries” like Haiti, and the country of Africa too, and not from Norway.
No, the New York Times didn’t mention that. And obviously Rufo did not.
Even more scandalously, Maher posted a photo of herself doing Get Out The Vote door-knocking in Arizona prior to the 2020 election, while wearing a Biden hat!!!!!
Isn’t that horrifying? Such Bias! Obviously everything at NPR is now skewed to favor Joe Biden! The Times scrupulously notes — as Rufo never does — that in a statement, NPR spokesperson Isabel Lara said that Maher “was not working in journalism at the time and was exercising her First Amendment right to express herself like any other American citizen.”
Further, NPR pointed out that its CEO is “not involved in editorial decisions” and that Maher has “upheld and is fully committed to NPR’s code of ethics and the independence of NPR’s newsroom.”
But that’s what you’d expect them to say, right?
Somehow, we’re also supposed to be terribly troubled by the time Maher tweeted in 2020 about a goofy dream she had:
Had a dream where Kamala and I were on a road trip in an unspecified location, sampling and comparing nuts and baklava from roadside stands.
Woke up very hungry.
Clearly, NPR doesn’t have a shred of integrity left. And Baklava? Isn’t that what terrorists wear to conceal their faces?
To make matters worse, in the story about the old tweets Rufo dug up to get Maher fired, the Times also interviewed Rufo so he could say the tweets he dug up prove Maher should be fired. Yes really.
Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, called attention to many of Ms. Maher’s posts on X and shared a response from Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, who had responded to one of Ms. Maher’s posts that Mr. Rufo highlighted, saying, “This person is a crazy racist!”
“If NPR wants to truly be National Public Radio, it can’t pander to the furthest-left elements in the United States,” Mr. Rufo said in an interview. “To do so, NPR should part ways with Katherine Maher.”
Does the Times tell us why Musk considered Maher a “crazy racist”? Of course not. Just the link, to a July 30, 2020 tweet where she mentioned her “cis white mobility privilege,” and said that even though she could leave the US if she wanted, many people can’t, so “I’m staying and investing in ridding ourselves of this spectre of tyranny.” We aren’t quite sure what specifically prompted the talk of leaving the US, but we’ll note it was yet another day when Trump was yammering on about the “dangers” of mail-in ballots and also the “China virus,” and also maybe sending the National Guard to quell protesters in Oregon, who he called “terrorists.” But maybe it was something else.
Rufo replied to Musk, “Crazy, racist, and crazy racist. All of the above.”
After the Times story ran, Rufo promptly thanked the paper for its service to him, bragging that
We are driving the narrative. If you dream about sampling nuts with Kamala Harris, we will make sure America hears about it.
Because isn’t that the greatest threat the Republic faces?
[NYT (gift link) / Slate / Free Press / Differ we Must]
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I didn't get to half of the ugly shit Rufo is layering on to completely innocuous tweets by Maher, like his framing of a 2012 tweet in which she said she was excited that Elizabeth Warren was running. For Senate, but Rufo, the politics expert, got the year wrong, and created a whole weird fantasy about a pretty anodyne tweet.
Maher's entire tweet read: "With Elizabeth Warren running, there's finally a candidate for Dems to get excited about in 2012"
Rufo's take: " She got excited in 2012. She thought about big structural change. She imagined the first Native American president. She saw the glass ceiling shatter, raining down in little pieces, like a delicate snow. Ecstasy. Bold new taxes. She had a plan for that."
Don't you dare call that racist, he's the good guy calling out Warren's hypocrisy and doing the Tomahawk chop as loud as he can.
Link to my thread on what became this piece: https://twitter.com/DoktorZoom/status/1780402844895756630
Updated with a note on Berliner's resignation today. He says it was CEO Katherine Maher's fault.