Irony Alert: NPR CEO Who Said First Amendment is a “Challenge” to Receive ‘First Amendment Award’

In 2025, The Gateway Pundit reported that during a House Oversight DOGE subcommittee hearing, Republicans on the committee grilled NPR CEO Katherine Maher and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) CEO Paula Kerger over their anti-Trump bias and the extreme, woke programming on the stations.

This includes documentaries about transvestites and transitioning, “Racist Trees,” and exposing young children, including toddlers, to so-called educational programming that featured a cross-dressing freak.

Even more embarrassingly, in 2021, when she was the CEO of Wikimedia, she claimed the First Amendment was a “challenge” when it came to efforts to combat “disinformation,” and ‘reverence for the truth’ a ‘distraction.’

Maher stated, “The number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States. [It] is a fairly robust protection of rights and that is a protection of rights both for platforms, which I actually think is very important that platforms have those rights to be able to regulate what kind of content they want on their sites.”

NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher: “Truth is a distraction from getting things done”

Our tax dollars fund this, @DOGE https://t.co/N60gECG3zO

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 24, 2024

Now, someone who considers the First Amendment a “challenge” is receiving a “First Amendment Award” from Harper’s Magazine.

Per Fox News:

“As president and CEO of NPR, Katherine Maher has guided one of America’s most important public media institutions through a period of extraordinary political, legal, and financial scrutiny, reaffirming journalism’s essential role in a democratic society,” the magazine said in a press release earlier this year about Maher receiving the James C. Goodale First Amendment Award on Oct. 26.

Harper’s Magazine also claimed that Maher led NPR “through a period of heightened scrutiny and challenge” along with “successfully battling” President Donald Trump’s efforts to defund NPR, though Congress still rescinded $1.1 billion in federal funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2025.

Maher will be honored at the Foundation’s annual awards ceremony on October 26, 2026, in New York City.

Maher said about receiving the award, “Public media exists to serve the public interest, and I can think of no greater service to the public than the defense of the First Amendment.”

“The freedom, imagination, and initiative of all Americans flourish with its protections, so that we may better understand the world and one another. The compact of citizenship asks that we each step up to defend our constitutional rights if they are threatened. On behalf of NPR and the NPR Network, I am deeply honored to accept this award.”

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