The Times tried to frame Maher’s troubles as partisan dispute about her ability to provide fair political coverage given her views. A pair of passages were offered in her defense:

Ms. Maher, who had not worked in the news industry before joining NPR, was the chief executive of the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit that supports the popular online resource Wikipedia, when she wrote many of the posts that were now being criticized.

An NPR spokeswoman, Isabel Lara, said in a statement that Ms. Maher “was not working in journalism at the time and was exercising her First Amendment right to express herself like any other American citizen.”

Talk about burying the lede. It’s true Maher was not working in journalism when she posted the controversial messages. In fact, she’s never worked in journalism, which is very obviously the bigger problem when examining someone’s fitness to run a public news network with over 1000 member stations.

Maher’s been a WEF global leader, board member at Signal, banking manager at HSBC, a member of the Foreign Affairs Policy Board (FAPB) at the State Department, a fellow at the Truman National Security Project — pretty much everything but a journalist. The closest thing to a journalism job Maher held was chief communications officer at Wikimedia.