NPR’s Katherine Maher Called the First Amendment a ‘Challenge’ — Now Comes the Trophy

NPR CEO Katherine Maher once called the First Amendment the "number one challenge" to regulating online information. Harper's Magazine Foundation is giving her a First Amendment award. She'll accept it in New York on October 26.

James C. Goodale defended the New York Times' right to publish the Pentagon Papers. Harper's named an award after him, then gave it to Maher. NPR's announcement pointed to her legal fight against Trump's 2025 executive order targeting federal funding for NPR and PBS. The court victory impressed the foundation. Her 2021 remarks about government regulation apparently did not. 

Maher accepted:

"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."

NPR had already given Americans a reason to doubt its judgment about which stories deserved their attention. Hunter Biden's laptop surfaced before the 2020 election. NPR declined to pursue it. Maher wasn't responsible for that decision, having joined in 2024, but the acknowledgment eventually came from her 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.”

Five years. NPR needed five years to acknowledge that it should have pursued reporting about the family of a man running for president. Keep that record in mind when Maher discusses bad information and what government might do about it.

Her TED Talk took place in 2021. She discussed how Wikipedia's editorial purpose differed from an open platform for expression, and addressed government regulation, where the First Amendment limited the available options.

Here’s what she said at the time:

“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 identified political advertising as one possible opening for regulation. More generally, constitutional protections made confronting bad information and those profiting from it "a little bit tricky." The trouble was where that left the regulators.

NPR’s laptop decision shows why Americans shouldn’t simply defer to an institution’s confidence in its own judgment. A newsroom can decline a story and later admit the mistake. Government restrictions would give those judgments consequences beyond one outlet’s coverage. Maher’s award celebrates a protection that keeps officials from acquiring that power.

In April 2024, longtime NPR editor Uri Berliner publicly detailed the network's liberal bias. NPR suspended him for five days without pay, and he resigned. Maher described his assessment as “profoundly disrespectful” and “demeaning,” particularly to staffers of color. Berliner raised questions about the journalism; Maher answered with an accusation about his treatment of colleagues.

Harper’s has every right to give Maher a trophy. Readers have her words, NPR’s belated laptop admission, and its response to Berliner. They can judge the First Amendment credentials without waiting for the acceptance speech.

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