A First Amendment Award for a First Amendment Opponent

“The number one challenge that we see is the First Amendment in the United States,” said Katherine Maher, now CEO of formerly government subsidized National Public Radio in a 2021 video interview with the once prestigious Atlantic Council. Maher, who had just stepped down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation at the time of her free speech-blasting interview, also referred to our Constitution’s foundational guarantee of free speech and expression as “a little bit tricky” and claimed that “influence peddlers” abuse it to promote what she called “bad information.”

Maher’s free-speech record at NPR, where she took the helm in 2024, was hardly more inspiring. Within weeks of taking over, she suspended senior business editor Uri Berliner without pay after he wrote an article for the Free Press criticizing NPR for extreme leftist bias, alleging that his employer had “lost America’s trust.” Berliner subsequently resigned after 25 years on the job.

Maher then created an in-house board of six senior editors whose work was funded by an anonymous donor to monitor all NPR content prior to publication under the unpromising name “Backstop.” Congress took an interest and investigated NPR in hearings that Maher refused to attend, citing a scheduling conflict. In 2025, new hearings titled “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable,” probingly questioned Maher about her anti-free-speech statements and her outfit’s alleged biases. President Trump subsequently removed NPR’s funding by executive order, and Congress defunded virtually all public broadcasting in annual appropriations.

You may well think that Katherine Maher, who publicly decried the First Amendment as a “challenge” and “tricky,” suspended a prominent colleague after he criticized NPR in an act of journalism, and then set up a secretly funded internal prepublication regime to review everything his worried remaining colleagues present to the public, is more like an ideological censor than anyone’s idea of a free speech champion. The cynics at Harper’s Magazine, however, would disagree with you. Last week, they heralded Maher as the second recipient of the James C. Goodale First Amendment Award, an annual prize created in 2025 to recognize “individuals who have demonstrated a clear and consequential commitment to the principles of a free press and the constitutional protections that sustain it.”