Politics

WATCH: NPR CEO Squirms When Pressed On The Outlet’s Failure To Cover Hunter Biden’s Laptop

Published

4 days ago

March 27, 2025

A committee hearing on the future of federal funding for NPR became a viral hit in the conservative mediasphere after U.S. House Republicans challenged the station’s 41-year-old CEO to explain why NPR’s tagline—”All Things Considered”—didn’t apply to Hunter Biden’s laptop.

For six painful minutes, Katherine Maher squirmed while Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX) laid out a litany of offenses he accused NPR of committing during the first Trump and Biden administrations. Many of those were highlighted in a 2024 essay by Uri Berliner, a former editor who was suspended after he went public with his complaints that NPR’s reporting is being hamstrung by liberal bias.

Although NPR has lost nearly a quarter of its entire audience since 2019, executives chose to bring in Maher in May of 2024 despite her “history of commentary of promoting Marxist ideology.” Maher has espoused “critical [race] theory, has said we should not use the terms ‘boy’ or ‘girl'” and “has called our president a deranged racist sociopath,” Cloud noted in his opening statement.

Maher countered that she was proud to help NPR recover 2 million listeners after just a year on the job. However, she couldn’t deny that NPR was “mistaken” in failing to cover the discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“I do want to say that NPR acknowledges we were mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively or sooner,” Maher told the committee.

Rep. Cloud referenced the lap leak theory about the origin of COVID-19, which has since become the foremost hypothesis of U.S. intelligence officials. At the time, NPR downplayed the likelihood that gain-of-function research at an unsecured laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the source of the 2020 global pandemic.

“We recognize our reporting at the time, but we recognize that the new CIA evidence is worthy of coverage and have covered it,” she replied.

Both stories rocked the 2020 presidential election, but it was the media’s insignificant coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and baseless partisan claims of disinformation, that President Trump insisted had contributed to his loss.

During the Biden administration, evidence from the laptop was cited by special counsel David Weiss when he charged Hunter Biden with lying under oath when purchasing a handgun as an active drug user. House Republicans extracted emails between Hunter and his father as evidence that the former vice president was selling access to overseas interests, allowing members of his family to collect millions of dollars in lucrative business deals.

The hearing served as a prominent opportunity for Republicans to lambast the liberal leadership of both NPR and PBS, which receive hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding intended for nonpartisan broadcasting. However, surveys and reporting by Berliner, the disaffected former editor, reveal that a plurality of its audience identifies as registered Democrats; in the station’s Washington, D.C. bureau, Berliner revealed that of its 100 employees, 87 are Democrats and zero are Republicans.

Asked about Berliner’s accusation, Maher shot back, “We don’t track voter registrations.”

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