NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher is set to receive Harper’s Magazine’s James C. Goodale First Amendment Award on Oct. 26, an honor that has drawn scrutiny given past comments in which she described the First Amendment as a complicating factor in efforts to police online speech.
In a press release earlier this year, Harper’s Magazine said Maher had guided NPR “through a period of extraordinary political, legal, and financial scrutiny, reaffirming journalism’s essential role in a democratic society.” The magazine also credited her with “successfully battling” President Donald Trump’s push to defund NPR — though Congress went on to rescind $1.1 billion in federal funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2025.
The award has reignited attention on remarks Maher made in 2021, when she led the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia. Discussing efforts to combat disinformation at the time, Maher called the First Amendment a “challenge.”
“The number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States. [It] is a fairly robust protection of rights and that is a protection of rights both for platforms, which I actually think is very important that platforms have those rights to be able to regulate what kind of content they want on their sites,” Maher said.
She continued: “But it also means that it is a little bit tricky to really address some of the real challenges of where does bad information come from, and sort of the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”
Maher was not named NPR CEO until 2024, four years after the network declined to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential election — a decision many critics viewed as an effort to shield then-candidate Joe Biden. Maher later acknowledged the lapse during congressional testimony in 2025.
“I do want to say that NPR acknowledges we were mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner,” Maher told lawmakers.
Tim Graham, executive editor of the media watchdog NewsBusters, told Fox News Digital that the award reflects a broader ideological bent. “Harper’s Magazine is demonstrating the usual liberal impulse, that being fiercely critical of Trump and the Republicans is what the First Amendment is all about. But NPR didn’t hold President Biden accountable. Instead, they insisted that covering corruption in Biden’s family was a ‘distraction,'” he said.
Graham also disputed the magazine’s framing of Maher as having fended off defunding. “Their explanation for this pride is that Maher courageously fought off defunding NPR, which, of course, is not true. They are defunded. Liberals believe depriving NPR of taxpayer subsidies is some sort of First Amendment violation. But it’s not a First Amendment violation for NPR to avoid having any Trump-supporting conservatives on their airwaves to push back on all their liberal bias,” he said.
He went further, pointing back to Maher’s 2021 remarks. “These people have no shame that Maher championed aggressive censorship of ‘bad information,’ just as European socialist countries have done. Maher said in a 2021 TED Talk that the First Amendment was a ‘challenge,’ a hurdle, something that makes censorship ‘a little bit trickier.’ How does that deserve a First Amendment award??” Graham asked.
NPR, for its part, celebrated the honor. Reached for comment, the network pointed to a statement Maher had previously given: “Public media exists to serve the public interest, and I can think of no greater service to the public than the defense of the First Amendment. The freedom, imagination, and initiative of all Americans flourish with its protections, so that we may better understand the world and one another. The compact of citizenship asks that we each step up to defend our constitutional rights if they are threatened. On behalf of NPR and the NPR Network, I am deeply honored to accept this award.”
Fox News Digital said it reached out to Harper’s Magazine for comment.
