NPR CEO who had previously called the First Amendment a "challenge" to receive the "First Amendment Award."
Katherine Maher, NPR's executive director, will receive Harper's Magazine's First Amendment Award, although she once called the amendment "challenging" in the fight against misinformation.
NPR Executive Director Kathryn Maher will receive Harper's Magazine's "First Amendment Award" later this month, despite her previous criticism of the amendment.
"As president and CEO of NPR, Kathryn Maher has led one of America's most important public media institutions through a period of extraordinary political, legal and financial scrutiny," the magazine said in a press release earlier this year about Maher receiving the James C. Goodale First Amendment A2 Award.
Harper's magazine also claimed that Maher is leading NPR "through a period of scrutiny and challenge" along with "successfully fighting" President Donald Trump's efforts to cut NPR's budget, although Congress still canceled $1.1 billion in federal funding to the public broadcaster through 2025.
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Although the magazine hails Maher as an advocate for journalism, Maher has not always supported the First Amendment as a whole.
In 2021, when Maher was CEO of Wikimedia, which oversees Wikipedia, he discussed efforts to combat disinformation, calling the First Amendment a "challenge" to that goal.
"The number one challenge we see here is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States. [It's] a fairly strong protection of rights, and it's a protection of rights for platforms, which I actually think is a lot. It's important that platforms have those rights to be able to regulate the kind of content they want on their sites," Maher said.
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"But that means it's a bit difficult to address some of the real challenges of where the bad information is coming from, and kind of impacting the peddlers that have built the real market economy around it," he added.
NPR has also had a history of questionable journalism. Most notably, NPR refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, which many critics saw as an attempt to protect then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Maher, who was not named NPR's executive director until 2024, later admitted that the publication had made a "mistake."
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"I want to say that NPR acknowledges that we made a mistake by not covering the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner," Maher said during congressional testimony in 2025.
Their explanation for this arrogance is that Maher bravely fought NPR's budget cuts, which of course is not true. They have decreased. Liberals believe NPR's exclusion of taxpayer subsidies is a violation of the First Amendment. But it's not a First Amendment violation for NPR to avoid having pro-Trump conservatives on its airwaves to push back all its liberal biases."
"These people have nothing. It's a shame that Maher advocated aggressive censorship of 'bad information', just as the socialist countries of Europe have done. In a 2021 TED talk, Maher said the First Amendment was a "challenge," an obstacle, something that makes censorship "a little bit more complicated." How does this award deserve a First Amendment award?” he asked.
"The public media exists to serve the public interest, and I cannot think of a greater service to the public than defending the First Amendment," Maher said in a statement. The freedom, imagination, and initiative of all Americans flourish with its support so we can better understand the world and each other. The citizenship pact requires us to step up each and every one of us to defend our legal rights when threatened. On behalf of NPR and the NPR network, I am deeply honored to accept this award."
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