“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”
—NPR CEO Katherine Maher
Elon Musk posted the video of Maher saying this…
I can’t find the date of that speech or the context of the quote, but what possible context could justify it? If that isn’t pure Big Brother, what is? “Can’t let the truth get in the way of progress!” This is the totalitarian mindset that (I hope) was one of the things enough voters rejected a week ago. This is the ends justifies the means ideology embraced by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, including the news media that lied, dissembled, covered up and broadcast false narratives during the campaign and, of course, long before.
Musk is uncharacteristically mild in his reaction. No, of course NPR shouldn’t be supported by tax dollars when it is run by people who think like Vladamir Lenin. But the fact that Maher wasn’t booed off whatever stage she was speaking on, and that she wasn’t fired within the hour of making that claim, is cause for alarm. So is the fact that the statement wasn’t immediately a media scandal story whenever it happened. So is the fact that a CEO of any journalism organization would feel comfortable saying that in public.
It was April when Ethics Alarms posted “How Can NPR Maintain Even Its Current Diminished Level of Credibility If It Keeps Katherine Maher As Its CEO”? That was seven months ago, and she’s still there, encouraging and overseeing her news organization to ignore the truth. The post reported on the fallout from a whistleblowing NPR veteran, Uri Berliner, revealing the overwhelming progressive bias at NPR. Maher shrugged off the whole affair, saying, in conclusion to a long memo that could be summarized as “We’re wonderful!”, “We recognize that this work is a public trust, one established by Congress more than 50 years ago with the creation of the public broadcasting system. In order to hold that trust, we owe it our continued, rigorous accountability. When we are asked questions about who we serve and how that influences our editorial choices, we should be prepared to respond. It takes great strength to be comfortable with turning the eye of journalistic accountability inwards, but we are a news organization built on a foundation of robust editorial standards and practices, well-constructed to withstand the hardest of gazes.”
How can the status of a “public trust” be squared with the belief that “reverence for the truth” distracts from “consensus” and “getting things done”?
Rhetorical question. It can’t. I hereby grant a one post reprieve to all the leftist trolls I banned from Ethics Alarms this year to offer a defense of her statement. I need a good laugh.
I don’t want to call on Geena very often. Being afraid isn’t productive, but recognizing a genuine danger is. That the CEO of PBS would say this in public at all illustrates how embedded totalitarian goals are in some of our institutions, and how confident these enemies of democracy are that they not only will prevail, but are prevailing.
Ethics Alarms 
“I hereby grant a one post reprieve to all the leftist trolls I banned from Ethics Alarms this year to offer a defense of her statement.”
Heh!
In my best Noah Cross (John Huston in Chinatown) voice: “You’ve got a nasty way of making a point, Mr. Marshall, I like that!“
PWS
Thank you, thank you, thanks everybody!
What Wikipedia Teaches Us About Balancing Truth and Beliefs | Katherine Maher | TED
https://youtu.be/r2gsj0EEE3I?si=a8KPx920_fB89DhP
3:24
Except the point she’s making isn’t that reverence for truth is a distraction.
It’s another veiled comment where she wanted to say “ho hum here we far more intelligent people than you rubes are stuck with loving the truth as we demonstrated with our support of everything progressive but we forgot our governing system means we also have to pay attention to the utterances of you uneducated yokels”
Remember, for NPR, truth is a product of Western European Culture and should be viewed with suspicion and distrust.
Of course, our concept of an absolute truth is rooted in Western Civilization and specifically in Christianity. The concept of a creator God who created everything that exists results in the concept of an absolute reality that everyone experiences. If there is an absolute reality, then things in that reality are true for all people at all times. Other cultures do not believe in such concepts, they believe in relative truths, they believe in ‘my truth’, etc.
The Western European concept of absolute truth is incompatible with these other views of relative ‘truth’ that causes so much problems for outlets like NPR. In Western European truth view, milk is a liquid produced by mammals to feed their young. For leftists ‘milk’ is any white suspension because they arbitrarily decided not to consume animal products and they need something to pretend is milk in recipes and to put in their children’s cereal. Milk is anything they call milk.
I could see the argument that the Bible is one of the most common reasons people become obsessed with being on the side of absolute truth versus evil falsehoods. The progressive Left does often resemble Christianity, with its emphasis on dogma and original sin, although it’s possible that Leftist fanaticism is culturally independent of any Christian sect and is just something that happens to humans sometimes when they crave the feeling of certainty and belonging to a superior group.
It’s ironic that Christianity puts so much emphasis on “absolute truth”, given the hoops it jumps through to try and reconcile parts of the Bible with each other and with our own observations. The Bible needs so much interpretation to make any sense that it is useless as a source of truth about any practical subject.
By the by, “milk” has referred to plant extracts for centuries (https://www.etymonline.com/word/milk#etymonline_v_16158) and “milk of magnesia” has been around since the late 19th century. If you want to criticize people for having a loose relationship with truth, you’ll need to be a bit more conscientious than that.
Calling any religious tenet “truth” is a main reason I have no tolerance for organized religion. What one believes out of faith cannot by definition be called objective truth.
In any event, progressivism and progressive politics have become the replacement for organized religion. They are the new religion. So funny given how anti-organized religion progressives are but they are true believers in all the tenets of progressivism, the Credo for true believers that government can bring us heaven on earth and the closest thing to eternal life on offer. Imagine.
National Public Radio and all other organizations that engage in “news” should be completely and permanently removed from the public tit over the next four years, and if it takes a law being passed via Congress to make that happen, then I’m all for it. Absolutely no “news” organization should ever be funded, or partially funded, by the United States of America taxpayer dollars either directly or indirectly. The USA government should make absolutely sure that companies that get taxpayer funding are not funneling any of those tax dollars to news organizations. Either news organizations are able to survive in the free market or they’re not, period.
DEFUND THE NEWS!!!
“…what possible context could justify it?”
I can’t guarantee that Maher meant what she said in a benign sense, but such a sense does indeed exist.
Allow me to rephrase the statement in question:
Before: “I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”
After: “I think our obsession with forcing everyone to agree with our interpretations of the available evidence interfered with us finding enough relevant points of agreement that we could establish mutually acceptable approaches on important issues.”
The confusion lies in the conflation of “truth” to mean three different things:
I looked up the context, and USA Today appears to provide more details on Maher’s message: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/05/08/npr-ceo-katherine-maher-congress-media-bias-uri-berliner/73597888007/. (After reading the article, I realized it was written by one of the major figures in Braver Angels. I’ve listened to him speak at many events and I trust his assessment of the situation.)
I think that Maher has good intentions, and while I can’t recommend that she do research in the academic field of epistemology, as it is full of pretentious nonsense, I would recommend that she put a bit more thought into the words that she uses to functionally define and talk about people’s beliefs before she goes out and talks about “facts” and “truths”. (For example, I don’t use the word “truth”, although I do use the word “true”.) The rationalist community has some good sequences of articles on epistemology.
This may be a sign that humans are ready to learn from my practical epistemology skills. Remember, you heard it here first: Facts are predictions; predictions are risks.
I’m sorry, EC, but I have to rate your friend’s defense of Maher’s statement pure spin and sophistry. That is particularly true (TRUTH) in light of her dishonest defense against Berliner’s complaints. ‘She warned, “For our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth, and seeking to convince others of the truth, might not be the right place to start.” Swell, but in the statement at issue, she wasn’t talking about arguing about what is true. She literally said that “reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction.” That means a high regard for the truth is a distraction. That means, in turn, that sometimes it’ss necessary to ignore or distort the truth for the greater good. Which is a rationalization for unethical journalism. That was Dan Rather’s excuse for fabricating evidence to show George Bush had strings pulled to get him out of the military. Only #1 in your list is what truth means. For a journalist (or a Wikipedia exec!) not to use the word correctly is horrifying.
And I can’t believe you actually used the “good intentions” rationalization. Getting into epistemology just gets us further and further away from the issue at at hand. I could, if I chose to, defend the false stories JD Vance and Trump spread about Haitian immigrants eating cats with this same logic: yes, the story was false, but it was a good way to raise the problem of large numbers of immigrants from other cultures moving into towns and cities that can’t assimilate them….and it did. To which I say, so what? It was a lie, false, a rumor and NOT TRUE. Find another way to point out a phenomenon without lying. The climate change propaganda is completely in thrall with Mayer’s mindset. Well, yes, we can’t really prove what’s going to happen, but insisting on that gets in the way of the virtuous policy we need. Trump uses his version of “truth” exactly this way, and Mayer and her allies/fellow travelers attack him, then rationalize their own distortions.
You know, at some point we have to say: NO, this person is untrustworthy, has flawed values, and has no business in a business requiring trust like journalism.
Comment of the Day, by the way.