The embattled National Public Radio president, who once called truth a ‘distraction,’ has agreed to testify before Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) congressional subcommittee.
On Monday, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the DOGE subcommittee chair, called on the National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) bosses to testify on Capitol Hill to defend the government funding they use to share ‘systematically biased content.’
The subcommittee’s letter to NPR specifically called out a Ted Talk company president Katherine Maher gave in 2022 while she was the CEO of Wikipedia.
During a section of the speech titled ‘What Wikipedia Teaches Us About Balancing Truth and Beliefs,’ Maher called the truth a ‘distraction.’
‘That perhaps for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth and seeking to convince others of the truth might not be the right place to start,’ Maher said.
‘In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.’
Musk posted a similar clip of Maher to X on Tuesday with the caption, ‘Defund NPR. It should survive on its own.’
‘I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done,’ Maher said in the undated video.
The embattled National Public Radio president Katherine Maher (pictured) has agreed to testify before the DOGE congressional subcommittee
The subcommittee’s letter to NPR specifically called out a Ted Talk Maher gave in 2022 while she was the CEO of Wikipedia where she called truth a ‘distraction’
NPR responded to the summons, stating the company ‘welcomes the opportunity’ to testify and prides themselves ‘to the highest standards of journalism.’
‘Our President and CEO Katherine Maher received a request to testify before the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency in March,’ the outlet said.
‘We welcome the opportunity to discuss the critical role of public media in delivering impartial, fact-based news and reporting to the American public.’
Greene said that the department plans to address its concerns about the station’s ‘blatantly ideological and partisan coverage’ at the hearing, scheduled for either the week of March 3 or March 24.
The letter sent to Maher cited NPR’s decision not to report on a laptop belonging to the former president’s son, which contained data critics claim implicates members of the Biden family in a corruption scandal.
The subcommittee then cited a statement made by NPR in October 2020 in regarding the laptop, stating: ‘We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.’
DOGE also mentioned a scathing essay penned by Uri Berliner, former senior business editor for NPR.
Berliner, who worked for the outlet from 1999 until April 2024, blasted NPR for its far-left political bias while referring to the outlet as ‘an assembly line.’
NPR responded to the summons, stating the company ‘welcomes the opportunity’ to testify and prides themselves ‘to the highest standards of journalism’
‘There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed,’ Berliner wrote at the time.
‘It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.
This is just one of the many recent moves made under Trump’s administration and DOGE.
On Monday, staffers working for the Agency for International Development (USAID) were instructed to stay out of the agency’s DC headquarters after Musk announced that the president had agreed to shut it down.
The billionaire ‘first buddy,’ who is leading a civilian review of the federal government through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has claimed the agency is a ‘criminal organization.’
‘It became apparent that it’s not an apple with a worm in it,’ Musk said in a live session on X Spaces early Monday. ‘What we have is just a ball of worms. You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair.’
‘We’re shutting it down.’
USAID, whose website vanished Saturday without explanation, administers billions of dollars in humanitarian, development and security programs in about 120 countries.
