by Patrick Delaney, LifeSite News:
National Public Radio’s (NPR) new CEO Katherine Maher has been facing a torrent of old comments coming back to haunt her which betray a significant hard-left world view amidst running complaints about the credibility of the publicly-funded news organization.
In a newly released video clip, the former CEO of Wikipedia appears to classify the necessity of “reliable sources” as “inherently limited” to the intentions for what the “free and open source” community was trying to achieve.
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EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says that she abandoned a “free and open” internet as the mission of Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a “white male Westernized construct” and “did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be.” pic.twitter.com/Ved9mgGvJH
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 18, 2024
“Wikipedia really rebuilt this idea of knowledge as a whole around… the Western canon. You see the exclusion of communities, of languages because of the ways in which Wikipedia is based on reliable sources,” she said, as “the idea of a written tradition… is particular to some cultures and not to others.”
Maher’s analysis continued with a taint of racism and sexism stating, “[t]he ways in which we ascribe notability often really comes from sort of this white male, Westernized construct around who matters in societies and who is elevated and whose voices.” And, thus, “some of these ideas of sort of this radical openness really did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be.”
In other statements which have recently surfaced, Maher framed the First Amendment as a “challenge” to fighting disinformation, complained about 2016 Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton inadvertently “erasing language for non-binary people” by referring to boys and girls, sympathized with looters on the theory that private property is linked to a “system of oppression,” expressed confusion at objections to politically-motivated violence, and more.
Last week, longtime NPR senior editor Uri Berliner excoriated the outlet for having “lost America’s trust” via a combination of “default[ing] to ideological story lines,” an “absence of viewpoint diversity,” obsession with identity politics, and general abandonment of conservative principles.
Berliner closed his piece by saying he was “‘rooting for” Maher, whose lack of a news background “could be an asset given where things stand.” However, within days such clips and social media posts surfaced indicating that Maher was more than a fit for NPR’s status quo.
Yet Maher also appears to acknowledge some of the same perspectives as other critics of Wikipedia arguing that while the “free and open” online encyclopedia had “the best of intentionality” what it ended up doing “was really recapitulating many of the same power structures and dynamics that exist offline prior to the advent of the internet.”
