“Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction…” – NPR’s new CEO takes heat for old comments

NPR’s new CEO is making headlines and facing criticism over a quote about the “truth” – but it might actually be a bit more complex than people think. The new CEO is Katherine Maher and she used to lead the Wikimedia Foundation, so she’s familiar with technology and publishing, of course.

For NPR, many people see them as a more left-leaning brigade who’s slowly churning out more content focused on the progressive side of politics, rather than being a more centered outlet. I guess they just get more clicks that way, but in doing so – they tend to ignore some stories which might be truthful, but not aligned with their readers or listeners. It’s the same thing that right wing outlets do – they give their audience what they want to hear, not what they should hear – which is the truth, even if the audience doesn’t like it.

Maher did a TED Talk and she said that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done” and a lot of media outlets blew it up and out of proportion. But what does she really mean by that, and what’s the rest of the context?

Does Maher mean focusing only on the truth would get in the way of something? Something like getting more clicks from a left or right wing audience? If so, then yeah, that’s true. How many times does a partisan news outlet skip a story because it doesn’t fit their agenda? A LOT. It happens on both sides. I’ve worked in the media long enough to admit this. Even I do it on here, but at least we try to refrain from the blatant “bombshell” clickbait BS. You know what I mean. Guys like Sean Hannity will call every other story a “bombshell” and it’s more like a dud. He’s not the only one doing it. They do it on the right and left, non-stop, spoon-feeding the audience like babies. Very few stick to the full truth – which is sometimes hard to swallow.

But hey, they gotta get your attention and clicks somehow, right? Here’s one thing you need to know about Maher and her Ted Talk – and this is something that many other outlets may have ignored or left out, but it’s something you could have searched on your own – the Ted Talk was from years ago, not during her time at NPR. So her quote about truth had nothing to do with NPR.

And as some of you might trash her or NPR – and that’s perfectly fine if you don’t like them, but let’s tell people the truth. This isn’t from her time at NPR, so don’t mix them up. Let’s get it right and move forward with actual truth. Feel free to mock them or her all you want (this is her TED Talk), but make sure we all get the facts right. USA Today pointed this out:

One important note of context: Maher’s TED Talk was given several years before she assumed the leadership of NPR. She was not a journalist at the time, and her talk was meant to offer an approach for harnessing consensus across broad social divides. It was not a prescription for organizational culture in the newsroom, although it does have implications in that direction.

Yet, there were a couple of land mines in Maher’s presentation that opened the door for mischaracterization. She framed her position as finding fault with “our reverence for the truth,” which inhibits our ability to “find common ground” with one another. While narrowly defensible in context, this statement was both provocative and clumsy in framing Maher’s ultimate position.