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 previous chief executive of the Wikimedia Foundation — the nonprofit behind the web encyclopedia — posted on Twitter in 2018, based on a snapshot of the tweet on the positioning 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.”
In line with media bias rating agency AllBias, nevertheless, 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 prior to now.
She once justified the shoplifting epidemic in Los Angeles on the sins of slavery.
“I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. Nevertheless 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 very same yr that “white silence is complicity.”
“If you happen to are white, today is the day to begin a conversation in your community,” she urged.
Nevertheless, she had admitted shortly prior to using “that hysteric white woman voice.”
“I used to be taught to do it. I’ve done it. It’s a disturbing recognition. While I don’t recall ever using it to deliberately expose one other person to immediate physical harm alone cognizance, it’s not inconceivable. That is whiteness,” Maher posted.
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 used to be from New England and my a part of the country didn’t have slaves, or so I’d been taught,” Maher added within 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 little bit of the economy of New England, including my home coast of Connecticut, was built on the backs of plantation labor.”
Representatives for NPR didn’t immediately reply to The Post’s request for comment.
After leaving her hometown of Wilton, Conn., Maher went on to check on 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 number of industries, including banking and communications for the likes of HSBC, UNICEF and The World Bank, before landing the CEO role on the Wikimedia Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia.
Maher is poised to succeed John Lansing as NPR’s CEO.
After 4 years on the helm, Lansing announced his retirement.