NPR’s Folkenflik: Our New CEO ‘Seemed to Minimize the Concerns About Rioting’

On Wednesday’s broadcast of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik stated that “a lot of conservative activists online have dug up” new CEO Katherine Maher’s social media posts, including ones where “she seemed to minimize the concerns about rioting at social justice protests in 2020.”

The segment began with co-host Mary Louise Kelly saying that NPR has a “longstanding” policy of covering itself the same way they would cover any other news organization and that “no NPR corporate official or news exec. helped prepare this segment.”

While discussing the resignation of Senior Business Editor Uri Berliner, Folkenflik said, “Well, he cited a note that our new CEO, Katherine Maher, circulated late last Friday to staff in which he felt that she had denigrated him. He felt that she had associated him with criticizing the effort to diversify the workforce. He thought that was disparagement. In the meantime, a lot of conservative activists online have dug up some of her old social media posts, political posts that show her — I’m going to give you two examples: Her political outlook, she called Trump a racist a few times over the years, had a Joe Biden hat on, and that she seemed to minimize the concerns about rioting at social justice protests in 2020.”

In a 2020 tweet thread, Maher tweeted that “looting is counterproductive. But 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 added, “Also, reporting on extinguished shoe store fires is just lazy reporting.” And concluded the thread by saying, “I am not conflating provocateurs with protestors. Instead, saying this should not be the thing anyone sheds tears over. Cheesecakes are insured; the right to be black and breathe is without measure.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett