The Right-wing media attack on NPR and CEO Katherine Maher, Wikipedia, and the Signal App
Second in a series investigating the current right wing culture war aimed at liberal institutions and their leaders
In my last post I documented Republican efforts almost since public broadcasting began in America to cut back or eliminate federal funding for NPR and PBS. These efforts continued during much of the Trump administration with right-wing activists launching another #DefundPBS campaign on social media in 2023. Then, as Tim Karr wrote for FreePress.net, that triggered right wing influencers because PBS used this descriptive chyron for a Trump speech.
Last month, in a coordinated attack on National Public Radio (NPR), Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee opened an inquiry into the public radio network after a former staffer claimed that NPR had seen a decline in conservative listeners in large part because, he said, the network is biased and serves a largely progressive audience. At the same time Congressman Jim Banks (R-Indiana) introduced the Defund NPR Act while others on the right joined the increasingly louder and coordinated personal attacks on NPR CEO Katherine Maher while others suggested Congress should track the political affiliations of NPR employees.
Katherine Maher has a very long resume of working in media, international development and foreign policy, and has had various advisory, NGO and board director roles. She was the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation which publishes Wikipedia, and is Chair of the Board of Signal Foundation, responsible for the secure, private Signal Messenger app. She is Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council for democracy and technology, a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and from 2022 to 2024 served as an advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board regarding issues of technology, governance and human rights.
Ms. Maher also is not shy about sharing her personal opinions and experiences and has a long history of tweets that demonstrate her personal political beliefs and support for Democratic Party candidates and policies.
For many years the CEO of the Corporation For Public Broadcasting was the former chairperson of the GOP. Republicans have also been appointed to positions at PBS and NPR.
So at the same time that those on the right are again trying to defund NPR, Maher herself has now been targeted by those on the right – she’s being accused of being a ‘regime-change agent,’ a ‘CIA spy,’ ‘an anti-truth propagandist,’ a tool of the national security apparatus, and to top that off she’s being accusing of ‘systematically silencing’ and censoring conservative points of view on Wikipedia.
Enter conservative writer/activist/filmmaker and culture warrior Christopher Rufo, who recently has posted stories alleging issues with NPR, Wikipedia, the Signal app and Katherine Maher.
On his website, Rufo is not shy about his intentions.
My work is organized around a simple mission: to challenge and then overthrow the left-wing ideological regime that has dominated American life for a generation. During the 1970s and 1980s, conservative intellectuals started a revolution, pioneering free-market economics and successfully implementing those ideas during the Reagan boom. Today, however, we are faced with a new challenge: to defeat an ascendant activist class that has sabotaged America’s institutions with a toxic combination of socialist economics, cultural chaos, and identity politics.
Mr. Rufo has written extensively on the subjects of critical race theory, Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and gender theory.
And now, with his investigation into Maher, he suggests she is a “regime-change agent, both foreign and domestic. She has brought the Color Revolution home to America. The NPR boss is a symbol of regime change—foreign and domestic.”
The Color Revolutions were a series of mostly non-violent protests and demonstrations in favor of pro-democracy social change in post-Soviet states (Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and the republic of Yugoslavia) in the early 21st Century. Those mostly critical of Color Revolutions are in Russia and China. According to Wikipedia itself:
The movements were openly supported by Western governmental agencies and NGOs. In 2012 during the Obama administration Maher worked in connection with a government funded agency for a year, The National Democratic Institute (NDI was a government funded NGO which unsurprisingly, has some affiliation with the Democratic Party. There’s a similar body, The Republican Institute. Mr. Rufo suggests that she took on the role of an intelligence operative when she wrote about in a blog post having inquired about providing internet to US backed rebels in Libya that year.
While initially some distance supposedly existed between NDI and the intelligence services, that relationship has devolved back to “the gray zone,” per Waller, and it appears that they often work in concert. “NDI is an instrument of Samantha Power and the global revolution elements of the Obama team,” Waller explains. “It has gone along with, and been significant parts of, color revolutions around the world. It is very much a regime-change actor.” – Christopher Rufo, Katherine Maher’s Color Revolution
Mr. Rufo resurfaces a claim made on Twitter in 2016 made by a contact of Mahers who was in Tunisia’s transition government: “Katherine Maher is probably a CIA agent,” and concludes:
The new CEO of NPR, then, is a left-wing ideologue who supports wide-scale censorship and considers the First Amendment an impediment to her campaign to sanitize the world of wrong opinions. – Christopher Rufo
![tweets March 13-16, 2016](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F24d81b1e-b6b8-47a3-8aad-3aff6a5903a5_1132x998.png)
![tweets March 13-16, 2016](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd4ee9ff9-dc52-4620-99ab-0af373e4db51_1108x1398.png)
Mr. Rufo alleges that Wikipedia “launders mostly left-wing political ideologies into the discourse, under the guise of ‘neutral knowledge,” and claims she has “advanced a policy of censorship under the pretense of fighting “disinformation.” and he claims that “she has collaborated with government officials to censor dissent, and spurned the concept of objective truth altogether, in favor of left-wing relativism.”
And he transparently states what is clear: his work isn’t journalism at all rather, an ideological ambition to challenge all forms of ‘left-wing orthodoxy,’ wherever he finds it..
He has three-quarters of a million followers on X and has many fans and supporters:
“Christopher Rufo is in fact one of the most effective journalists and filmmakers in the country.” –Tucker Carlson
“The most important and effective conservative activist in the country.” –Bari Weiss
“The most important intellectual entrepreneur on the political right today.” –Vox
Now, remember that Ms. Maher is also currently the board chair of Signal Foundation, responsible for the Signal messaging app. Mr. Rufo and Elon Musk to infer that there are problems with Signal – it “may be compromised and According to Musk has “known vulnerabilities.”
![Christopher F. Rufi @realchris • May 6 EXCLUSIVE: NPR CEO Katherine Maher is chairman of the board for Signal messaging app. But her history as a US-backed regime change operative and her opposition to a "free and open" internet have led some critics to fear that Signal may be compromised. Signal Signal's Katherine Maher Problem From city-journal.org • 231 21.4K 5.1K lil 678K](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Feb437e06-2022-4ba1-aaf7-2aaabb229643_942x1048.png)
![Christopher F. Rufi @realchris • May 6 EXCLUSIVE: NPR CEO Katherine Maher is chairman of the board for Signal messaging app. But her history as a US-backed regime change operative and her opposition to a "free and open" internet have led some critics to fear that Signal may be compromised. Signal Signal's Katherine Maher Problem From city-journal.org • 231 21.4K 5.1K lil 678K](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7b10d94b-a4bf-4218-91a4-046e6d948492_1762x1460.png)
Mr. Rufo has politically weaponized a coordinated social media attack on NPR, it’s CEO, Wikipedia and Signal as part of his mission to rid the world of public broadcasting and reliable sources of communication and information that he mistrusts, “under the guise of neutral knowledge.” While there may be issues for discussion in some of the events he writes about, there’s no journalistic attempt to balance his reporting.
The Signal app currently has about 40 million users, many of them in the west. The English Wikipedia has about 47 million registered users and the website says it receives 7.5 billion page views per month. NPR says its audience is 42 million listeners. All of these organizations are trusted forms of media and communications that the right now wants to see defunded or dismantled.
Mr. Rufo’s assertions are repeated by the right-wing media ecosystem as fact – attacks on Maher have been picked up in the New York Post, The Daily Wire, Fox News, and nowhere is there any objective intent to have Maher or any of these companies respond to these fuzzy claims. Again, it’s almost humorous that Mr. Rufo omits any objective analysis in his writing while accusing his targets of censorship and bias.
Molly White is a researcher, software engineer, writer, and prominent critic of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based projects, and is also a Wikipedian.
This then, is what right-wing media currently creates - hyperpartisan meme warfare, weaponized on social media, as part of their attack on these long-trusted forms of media, communications, and technology. And yes, there are many liberal culture warriors.
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