This time the pro-NPR/PBS propaganda is not working, and that in itself is a testament to how much the MSM environment has changed. The Internet and Social Media has totally smashed through the front line of the MSM and thus their ability to craft an impenetrable narrative, which means the Democrat Party-Washington Bureaucrat Class-MSM armies are now, finally, in retreat. There’s also the fact that such revelations mean they’re increasingly not trusted.
The similarities between the first two state-owned NZ MSM outlets and the two state-owned US ones grow with every passing news story. For example here’s the MSM situation regarding some problems that a Green MP has run into recently:
After days of online pressure and growing attention on social media, three of New Zealand’s largest news outlets — Stuff, RNZ, and the New Zealand Herald — published near-identical coverage of the controversy on Monday morning, within the hour. Their message: Doyle is a victim and the real story was not Doyle’s deleted posts, but the backlash.
None of the reports were bylined. All focused on alleged death threats and abuse directed at Doyle, shifting attention away from the original content. In a rare moment of synchronous messaging, the outlets echoed the Green Party’s framing — citing “disinformation,” “dangerous conspiracy thinking,” and “attacks on the rainbow community.”
No article questioned what “Bussy Galore” meant in the context of a child’s image. None addressed the deletion of 52 posts. None questioned the judgement of an MP overseeing early childhood education who used sexual slang in visible captions. Instead, the public were told the real threat lay in asking questions.
Compare this to how PBS and NPR treated the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020:
Especially if those stories could hurt the Left and especially a political party the Left support (however reluctantly in the case of the Democrat Party).
But in Congressional testimony the other day the CEO of NPR, Katherine Maher admitted to a change of heart on the matter:
I do want to say that NPR acknowledges we were mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively or sooner….Our current editorial leadership thinks that was a mistake, as do I.
Easy to say now after she and the rest of the Left and the MSM got the result they wanted in 2020, but it’s not even a mea culpa. She wasn’t in charge of NPR at the time. But she would have made the same decisions because she’s those people, as I pointed out when she got the CEO role:
She’s a vegetarian. She hates cars. And white men flying on planes. She supports race-based reparations, rioting, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She believes“America is addicted to white supremacy.”
She doesn’t want to become a mother because “the planet is literally burning.” She uses phrases such as “CIS white mobility privilege” unironically. She admits to growing up “feeling superior … because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves.”
…
You see, it turns out that Katherine Maher is no ordinary ascendant progressive media executive. No, this woman’s social-media history reveals her to be the Kwisatz Haderach of white wokeness, presumably bred through generations of careful genetic selection to be the supernaturally perfect embodiment of Affluent White Female Liberalism.
That last paragraph is not really that hyperbolic when you look at her Wealthy White background in a Wealthy White suburb of NYC, followed by the best education she could get at American University (Egypt), Institut français du Proche-Orient (Syria), and back to New York University, followed by internships with the Council on Foreign Relations, the Eurasia Group in London and Germany, a job in New York City at UNICEF, together with stops along the way with the National Democratic Institute and the World Bank, among other global nonprofit groups, before rising to become the CEO of Wikimedia in 2019.
It would be impossible to create a resume of a person more disconnected from Americans and more intertwined with the wealthy, urban, globalist elite who run the largest banks, media companies, and nonprofit groups in the United States. In other words, Maher has the perfect resume to run NPR.
But read the whole link as various actual journalists like Matt Taibbi and Christopher Rufo take a bite out of her pretensions (Rufo’s link explores her archive of 29,400 tweets) as she vomits up her beliefs in various social media forums about race, gender and that shitty US Constitution, especially the bit about free speech which, as Dan McLaughlin said, is best read “…in the voice of a Stasi officer speaking to a dissident newspaperman who is tied to a chair.”
Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.
Given all this, her humiliation in the Congressional hearing was richly rewarding to watch – and there was a lot of humiliation of the Affluent White Female Liberal (AWFL):
So either she was lying to score virtue points in 2020, or she was lying to Congress in 2025 to avoid looking like a mindless Robin DiAngelo clone. Congressman Jim Jordan explored more internal NPR history in this 5 minute clip.
More such videos, with transcripts here, and here.
‘Let’s walk through some of your statements so the public can understand your personal views’…’Your fellow Americans selected Donald Trump as president again this past November – you called him “a deranged, racist and sociopath.”… You posted on X that America is “addicted” to white supremacy‘,…’You’ve publicly chastised using the phrase “boy and girl”, which you said “erases the language for nonbinary people”….’In 2021, you called the First amendment the “number one challenge” in American journalism because it makes it hard to crack down on bad information,’
It was relentless and the best that Maher could do was bleat out that she now regrets those comments.
But how different is she really from the rest of NPR, and for that matter PBS whose CEO, Paula Kerger also testified? The following description of NPR’s political coverage covers more than just Maher’s time at the helm:
I listen to a lot of NPR and my favorite tic of theirs is what I like to call Two Good Facts/Two Bad Facts.
Once you hear it you can’t unhear it. If it’s a Dem policy or politician, they get Two Good Facts. “Kamala Harris, who is (1) gaining in the polls, has a new proposal to (2) do a good thing.”
…
GOP stuff gets Two Bad Facts. “Legislation x, which has (1) been criticized by the National association of sympathetic figures, is (2) losing support among key members of the committee to do things.”
Also this…
Back in the 1990’s, and again in the 2000’s the GOP tried to defund NPR-PBS and were beaten back by a relentless wall of propaganda about how much they must hate Big Bird and the rest of the loveable Sesame Street crowd. I recall the former especially well, as that narrative slipped into everyday conversations of people who didn’t follow the whole thing closely (as with much of D.C.’s world).
This time the pro-NPR/PBS propaganda is not working, and that in itself is a testament to how much the MSM environment has changed. The Internet and Social Media has totally smashed through the front line of the MSM and thus their ability to craft an impenetrable narrative, which means the Democrat Party-Washington Bureaucrat Class-MSM armies are now, finally, in retreat. There’s also the fact that such revelations mean they’re increasingly not trusted.
When even uber-Lefty Bill Maher (no relation) has had enough you know that they’re done:
They’re crazy far left … We’re so polarized — these outlets became popular at a time when Republicans and Democrats didn’t hate each other and weren’t at each other’s throats and didn’t think each other was an existential threat. In that world, you can’t have places like this, I think, anymore. They have to be private.
Finally there was this news that broke soon after her disastrous Congressional Hearing: you may heard of Signal recently :).
It raises all the same questions about NPR and the general MSM environment, as Matt Taibbi points out:
She was CEO of Wikimedia when the company was (like Twitter) being invited to election tabletop exercises at the Pentagon and “Industry meetings” with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. She also scored the rare personal triumverate of being a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum young global leader, and a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Labs.
She was also a member of the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, an expert panel established in 2011 by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to advise U.S. officials.
Great, so we have someone who runs a supposedly “neutral” public broadcasting network while simultaneously serving on the board of a secure communications platform used for sensitive government operations and hooked into Hillary Clinton and the entire Public Sector (esp Foreign Policy) “blob” of Washington D.C.
Not only that but the “Signalgate” security breach controversy exploded right around the same time Maher was embarrassing hereself congressional testimony. Coincidence? In Washington? After her testimony about how they dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Naturally the rest of the MSM isn’t giving this story the attention it would get were it a Republican head of NPR (I know, I know, it could never happen). That’s because it would just shine further light on the comfortably close relationships that exist between left-wing MSM people, from executives to lowly reporters, technology platforms, and government operations.
Pity we don’t have anybody digging into the backgrounds of RNZ and TVNZ reporters and managers, or conducting Parliamentary investigations of them. Instead we just get endless whinging from National Party people about how unfair and unbalanced RNZ/TVNZ are – see DPF’s posts, Equality of suffrage seen as bad by Radio NZ (Katherine Maher would approve) and Radio NZ has done over 100 stories on school lunches!.
The real question is how much longer National is going to put up with these endless MSM hit jobs on the them before pulling the plug on RNZ/TVNZ? My prediction is that National won’t, instead begging, pleading, crying,… appealing to the decency of RNZ and their reporters and editors for fair and balanced reporting.
Stop whinging, for they won’t change. Stop whinging and shut them down.
Kill the organisations. Die MSM, Die
No Minister 
MSM in NZ is only for the gullible these days. There are plenty of other places to look to get objective views on current events.
Another excellent story. Thank you.