Katherine Maher
speaker
51 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard May 2025
Katherine Maher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
This is about the First Amendment. It is our responsibility as a media organization, when the principle of the free press is challenged, to challenge back.
After the break, I'm Catherine Marr, and I'm the president and CEO of NPR.
So it's really important for folks to have the understanding that we chose not to do this over the funding issue. Funding is for stations. Funding is very important for local stations, and I'm happy to talk about that. We chose to do this because it is a First Amendment issue.
And what I mean by that is the executive order very clearly engages in what is called viewpoint discrimination, which is to say that The president has stated that NPR and PBS should not receive federal funding because he disagrees with our programming and our editorial choices in terms of the story selection that we cover or the way that we cover the news.
And therefore has said that federal funding shouldn't go to us because he accuses us of being unfair and biased. That is a matter of viewpoint discrimination. It is the action of withdrawing federal funding is retaliatory. And so this is a First Amendment issue.
Well, that is at odds with what we see in our data around who listens to NPR and who comes to our website and who downloads our podcasts. As we look at the data of our audience, we see that it roughly matches the spread across the nation in terms of political belief. And so our audience is roughly...
a third self-identified as conservative, a third self-identified as independent or centrist, and a third self-identified as liberal or left, which is more or less the American demographic in terms of political belief.
Public media steps into that gap and provides local reporting, local newsroom services, local programming, talk shows, local political affairs shows, in ways that serve those communities directly. And so it's important to differentiate
what people's response is to public radio as a whole and public media as a whole from the perception and conversation that's happening in a more politicized space about NPR.
Well, I think there are a number of different things sort of packaged up in that. Perception is an issue, and we don't like being perceived as liberal. If you look at our reporting, we are consistently found to be centrist in reporting. Some of our shows, programs that are produced that are non-news shows may feel as though they have a sort of cultural lens on them.
But I want to be very clear that we are a nonpartisan news organization and make every effort to ensure that we have representatives of both major political parties on our air as frequently as possible, including this recent administration, which we view as a transformative administration elected by the American people that we have a responsibility to cover and reflect. So, yes, that is a concern.
And I view that as something that needs to change in terms of that perception.
Oh, it's a great question, and I'm glad you asked it. I think it's so important that everybody listening understands public radio needs federal funding. Your local station needs federal funding. They are able, with those funds, to serve communities that would otherwise not be served by commercial media. They operate in communities that have lost their local newspapers in recent years.
They also serve a universal access imperative, which is that they serve 99.7% of the American population is covered by public radio signal, which has an extraordinarily important role to play in emergency broadcasting, in extreme weather alerts, and So from a national security perspective, that is tremendously important. NPR receives a tiny, tiny percentage of federal funding.
But without federal funding, that really impacts stations and their ability to serve their role as part of the civic infrastructure of this country.
you would start to see very large holes open up in the network if federal funding goes away. So some of those stations may have up to 50% of federal funding. You would see a significant impact on communities who have limited access or fewer options in terms of their ability to report and produce news.
Many other stations would be forced to either reduce their coverage area, meaning that universal access promise and that emergency resilience promise would dissipate because you wouldn't have that 99.7% coverage. You would see layoffs of journalists in local communities as well. And what ultimately that means is that...
Cities and towns that are already well served by commercial media options would continue to likely be served. But cities and towns that are not well served would be the first ones to bear the brunt of the loss of federal funding.
Well, when it comes to the lawsuit, we feel as though it's a really strong case. We are talking about fundamental First Amendment rights, in particular, the amount of precedent that is really quite robust in terms of finding in favor of private media organizations and private organizations in defense of those First Amendment rights around editorial point of view and the like.
I say that because we feel really confident in the substance of our case, and that is what we are focused on.
Showing 1–20 of 51 · page 1 of 3
Next →