Katherine Maher knew that running NPR was going to be difficult. But since taking over as chief executive last year, she has confronted one crisis after another.
Right-wing activists dredged up her old posts on social media and tried to get her fired. Congress stripped more than $500 million in annual funding from public media.
She has become a target not just of NPR’s traditional opponents on the political right but of some within the tightknit world of public broadcasting, who wanted her to take a more pragmatic tack. At one point, the chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, one of NPR’s biggest supporters, told Ms. Maher she should quit.
Her predecessors were accused of bringing a tote bag to a knife fight during political attacks on the organization. Ms. Maher, by contrast, has been more aggressive, refusing to compromise with Congress and taking the Trump administration to court, along with a key ally.
Ms. Maher, 42, stood by her strategy.
“The government targeted public funding to punish specific editorial decisions it disagreed with,” she said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “That’s not a funding dispute dressed up as a constitutional case; that’s textbook First Amendment retaliation.”
Ms. Maher’s stance brought support pouring in for her organization. NPR emerged from the biggest political battle in its history on firm footing, generating record donations.
But the loss of roughly $500 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been devastating for other parts of the public media universe. Many local stations, which pay dues to NPR and PBS, are laying off employees.
In other words, Ms. Maher and NPR have managed to hold on to their influence over public broadcasting this year, even as that system was dealt a terrible blow and is far weaker overall. Yet there are emerging challenges to NPR’s sway over public radio. In the wake of the funding fight, a coalition of public media organizations has teamed up to form Public Media Infrastructure, an organization that could eventually provide an alternative to a radio distribution system managed by NPR.
“When I came into this organization, we talked about the first 50 years of public media and the next 50 years,” Ms. Maher said in the interview. “Nobody expected there to be quite as fine a point on it as this moment in time.”
‘She Had Done Her Homework’
Running NPR is a notoriously difficult job. It’s one part politician, managing relationships with hundreds of stations; one part turnaround artist, trying to expand a business with roots in traditional radio; and one part fund-raiser, appealing to foundations and other donors. And NPR’s most important product is its journalism, which its chief executive has no direct control over.
Further complicating matters: NPR is a nonprofit with a majority of its board of directors from local stations, who occasionally have diverging interests.
Over the last 15 years, NPR has had seven chief executives.
NPR’s board members were excited in the fall of 2023 when they found Ms. Maher. She had worked for the World Bank and HSBC. As the chief executive of the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, she oversaw a sprawling, complicated community of volunteer editors. And she was prepared.
“She had done her homework,” said Jennifer Ferro, the former chair of NPR’s board who led the search committee.
In some ways, Ms. Maher was an unusual pick. She had no experience running a professional news organization. And unlike NPR’s recent top leaders, who were media executives in the twilight of their careers, Ms. Maher was relatively young and knew the tech world. She was also telegenic, eventually breezing through interviews with late-night hosts like Stephen Colbert and Jordan Klepper. (“I barter these for groceries,” she said, presented with a “Daily Show” tote bag.)
During one of the most consequential times in NPR’s history, Ms. Maher has been a highly visible C.E.O., holding conference calls with station leaders and delivering direct-to-camera fund-raising appeals.
Clad in bright blazers and sprinkling tech argot into her conversations, Ms. Maher has been crisscrossing the nation to visit NPR’s stations, with recent trips to Bloomington, Ind., and Thousand Oaks, Calif. (“It’ll take me five years to get to all of them,” she said.) While she is out on maternity leave, NPR’s chief financial officer, Daphne Kwon, will fill in as interim president.
In early April 2024, two weeks after she started, Ms. Maher and NPR faced an unexpected crisis. Uri Berliner, a senior editor at NPR, published an essay in The Free Press accusing the network of a liberal bias in its news coverage.
The crisis deepened a week later. Chris Rufo, the conservative activist who ran social media campaigns against figures including Claudine Gay, the former Harvard president, circulated years-old social media posts from Ms. Maher that criticized Donald J. Trump and supported liberal causes. (“Also, Donald Trump is a racist,” read one.)
NPR’s critics seized the moment. In early May, Republicans in Congress called on Ms. Maher to testify on allegations of bias. Compounding the situation: Some at NPR were surprised by Ms. Maher’s social media posts; she told The Times that the board hadn’t asked her about them before she was hired.
Steve Inskeep, a host of “Morning Edition,” published a rebuttal to Mr. Berliner’s essay, accusing him of errors. NPR noted in a statement that Ms. Maher wrote her posts before she joined the news industry.
Did she consider quitting? “I really don’t like bullies,” she said. She remembered thinking, “My view is that the overall goal of what I was brought in to do was far greater than that five-week mark.”
Ms. Ferro, who was in touch with Ms. Maher frequently during that period, was determined to keep her at NPR. She was the right leader, she said. And she believed getting rid of an executive because of political pressure 40 days after she joined would only weaken the organization.
The furor surrounding her posts subsided. But they would come up again a year later.
An ‘Asteroid’ Looms
In November 2024, weeks after President Trump was elected, an ominous memo on the impact of federal defunding written by two public media leaders began circulating among station directors. It raised the possibility that Congress could eventually claw back all funding for NPR and PBS.
“This is a scenario akin to an asteroid striking without warning,” the report said. It included a diagram showing that money from Congress is allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which then doles it out to NPR, PBS and local stations across the United States.
For NPR and PBS, defunding would be survivable. Most of NPR’s revenue comes from membership dues, sponsorships and donations. But for local stations, many of which rely on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for a majority of their budget, this was catastrophic.
In March, Ms. Maher and Paula Kerger, the chief executive of PBS, were called to testify before Congress in a hearing whose title seemed to presage its conclusion: “Anti-American Airwaves: Accountability for the Heads of NPR and PBS.”
The hearing was predictably divided along partisan lines. The Republicans, who argued that NPR and PBS were outmoded, a waste of taxpayer money or liberally biased, interrogated Ms. Kerger and Ms. Maher, asking the NPR chief executive about her social media posts and the network’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop. The Democrats praised NPR and PBS and mocked the proceedings (“Is Elmo now, or has he ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”).
The hearing made it clear that Republicans in Congress, which had tried to pull NPR’s funding for a half-century, might finally make good on their threat.
‘How Big of a Cut Could We Tolerate?’
In April, as Congress was gearing up to claw back funding from the public media system, America’s Public Television Stations, an influential nonprofit advocacy group, sent a document to leaders of NPR, PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The document listed several scenarios that might allow NPR and PBS to save funding for local stations by agreeing to give up money for national programs. It even included a “save-face rationale” for some Republicans in Congress who wanted to justify their support of public media.
“How big of a cut could we tolerate?” the document asked.
At a meeting soon after, Ms. Kerger and Ms. Maher expressed support for such a compromise. It seemed, briefly, like the heaviest hitters in public broadcasting were on board with the plan.
But there were also signs of major strain.
On a call this spring, Patricia Harrison, the chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, asked Ms. Maher whether she would be willing to say anything to members of Congress or the press to acknowledge concerns from listeners who viewed NPR’s reporting as biased, according to two people familiar with her remarks.
Ms. Maher rebuffed that suggestion. She didn’t believe that NPR was biased, and she thought saying so would undermine the organization and fail to placate those who were critical of the network, according to a person familiar with her thinking. After she refused, months of simmering tension between the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR came to the surface. Ms. Harrison told Ms. Maher she should resign her position for the good of public media.
Things got more tense when, on May 1, Mr. Trump issued an executive order banning government funding of NPR and PBS. NPR sued the White House, arguing that the order violated the Constitution. And it added the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as a defendant, since Mr. Trump’s order directed it to deny NPR funding.
NPR also changed its position on the funding compromise: It now viewed any cuts as a violation of the First Amendment, essentially arguing that cuts amounted to government discrimination against NPR based on its viewpoint.
Ms. Maher said that once the Trump administration attempted to tie the organization’s ability to receive federal funding to its editorial decisions, the compromise “was no longer an option.”
In July, the Senate officially voted to defund public media, 51 to 48. In a somber meeting with employees days after the vote, Ms. Maher said NPR and its member stations had waged a “David-and-Goliath-style” fight that included 191 meetings during a trip to Washington, D.C., 40 of which were directly with elected officials.
“We put up a really good fight as a team, as an organization, as a network, and we should be damn proud of it,” she said. She also appeared in a fund-raising appeal from NPR. “We need your help,” she said. Donations poured in.
Then the Corporation for Public Broadcasting took a step that ratcheted up tension with NPR. For years, the corporation had funded a radio distribution system managed by NPR.
Instead, in September, it announced it was awarding a major grant to Public Media Infrastructure, the new entity formed by a group of five public media organizations including WNYC, PRX and the Station Resource Group.
After that, the legal battle between NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting erupted.
‘Mom and Dad Are Fighting’
In late September, NPR’s board of directors gathered on a video call to discuss a highly unusual move championed by Ms. Maher: seeking a restraining order against public radio’s biggest supporter.
The situation was complicated. NPR had already sued the Corporation for Public Broadcasting alongside the Trump administration, but the restraining order went a step further. In court, NPR would argue that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting had changed its mind about funding a radio distribution system managed by NPR because Mr. Trump issued his executive order in May — essentially helping him violate the First Amendment. The restraining order sought to keep the funding from going elsewhere.
The corporation, for its part, argued that it had funded the new entity because NPR had a monopoly over its radio distribution grants, and it wanted those efforts to be more independent. It also told a judge it was acting on an independent recommendation that predated the funding fight.
At stake were millions of dollars and the possibility of widening the rift between NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As one public media executive put it at the time: “Mom and Dad are fighting.”
In the end, only three members of NPR’s 23-person board of directors voted against the restraining order or abstained from voting. Ms. Maher had rallied the board with an impassioned speech about the importance of standing firm on First Amendment issues.
The legal action inflamed a painful internecine battle, as emails from NPR and the corporation became public in discovery. “There is a dream scenario — we get the money and CPB goes away by the action of Congress,” wrote one NPR executive, referring to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in April.
In one email, an executive with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting suggested that the organization hadn’t funded an NPR project because of the “political challenges” that came with doing so, although they couldn’t “own it” in public.
In November, the two sides reached a settlement, with the corporation agreeing to direct some of its remaining funding toward the satellite system managed by NPR and declaring Mr. Trump’s executive order unconstitutional. Both sides issued statements declaring victory, with NPR citing a judge’s remarks stating that the organization had made a “very substantial showing” to support its argument.
In tandem with the settlement, Ms. Maher decided that NPR would give stations relief on some of their fees, earning her some goodwill among station managers across the country.
But a bigger chunk of money was never coming back. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is scheduled to wind down in January.
‘You Have to Make a Decision’
Though the public broadcasting system is reeling, NPR’s business remains stable. Ms. Maher said NPR was expected to generate record donations this year and would deliver $22 million in financial support to members of its network, which has around 200 newsrooms. (Local stations’ fund-raising has also increased.)
While web traffic to NPR.org has declined this year, according to Comscore, a spokeswoman for NPR said the network’s total digital reach was up, factoring in platforms like YouTube, where NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts are popular. And NPR’s broadcast audience has increased roughly 8 percent this year, according to Radio Research Consortium.
The end of government support has raised questions about the future of public radio, with some stations choosing to disaffiliate with NPR and PBS entirely. Ms. Maher borrowed an analogy from a station manager, comparing public broadcasters to a family that now has to figure out where to host Thanksgiving after the loss of a parent.
“Now you have to make a decision as a family: Do you still want to come together every year for the dinner party?” Ms. Maher asked.
Benjamin Mullin reports for The Times on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact him securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or at [email protected].
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