NPR boss Katherine Maher opposed ‘free and open’ approach at Wikipedia: ‘White male Westernized construct’

Katherine Maher, the newly installed chief executive of National Public Radio, said she sought to crack down on the “free and open” ethos at her previous job running Wikipedia because it was based on a “white male Westernized construct” that led to “exclusion of communities and languages.”

Maher, whose “woke” social media posts came to light following the damning essay written by former NPR journalist Uri Berliner about rampant liberal bias at the outlet, made the comments in a video unearthed by Christopher Rufo, an author and researcher at the Manhattan Institute.

Berliner, who penned a lengthy indictment of NPR last week in Bari Weiss’ online publication The Free Press, resigned from NPR on Wednesday after he accused Maher of having “disparaged” him while espousing “divisive” views that “confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.”

Prior to her being named CEO at NPR late last month, Maher, 41, was CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, the free, open-content online encyclopedia which is one of the most visited web sites in the world.

In an interview that was cited by Rufo, Maher said that the idea of “free and open” was “recapitulating many of the same power structures and dynamics that existed offline prior to the advent of the internet.”

Maher said that the “free and open” approach was problematic because it resulted in the “exclusion of communities and languages” where “the idea of a written tradition is [not] particular [to them].”