For decades, NPR clung to the fiction that it is committed to serving “Americans across the political spectrum.” That’s how CEO Katherine Maher put it during the network’s losing battle to hold on to taxpayer funding.
It was a tough sell coming from Maher, who has described President Donald Trump as “a deranged racist sociopath.” When the Trump administration and congressional Republicans choked off $1.1 billion in public broadcasting funds, Maher celebrated NPR’s liberation from the “Congressional funding Sword of Damocles over our heads.”
It’s true. Thanks in part to Maher’s disastrous stewardship, the sword fell, the head was chopped off, and now the corpse is out congratulating itself: Maher said she’s seeing a spike in donations. Hooray.
Semafor tells us that Maher is out on a fundraising tour—not among listeners in the heartland for whom public radio is allegedly a lifeline—but in San Francisco, from left-wing donors. She addressed NPR staff at the Hewlett Foundation’s headquarters in Menlo Park, where white-collar workers make up 95 percent of the population and the median income is over $200,000. The Hewlett Foundation spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year bankrolling left-wing causes—it recently sent Gavin Newsom to China to hobnob with CCP officials—and already supports NPR. So does George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
NPR has always operated as a de facto arm of the Democratic Party, and now, thanks to the Trump administration, the network’s audience will pay for it. Perhaps on her next fundraising trip, Maher will leave Silicon Valley and drop in on NPR’s San Francisco affiliate, which is situated three blocks away from a parking garage known for sheltering fentanyl smokers—or drop the pretense altogether.