Harper’s Magazine is honoring NPR CEO Katherine Maher with its “First Amendment Award” despite Maher’s apparent past criticism of the very same First Amendment.
Katherine Maher is set to receive the “James C. Goodale First Amendment Award” from Harper’s on Oct. 26, the magazine announced in a press release. In justifying its selection of Maher as the award’s second-ever recipient, the magazine cited the NPR boss’ actions in the face of President Donald Trump’s May 2025 executive order targeting NPR and PBS’ taxpayer funding.
“Maher has led the nation’s most trusted public media institution through a period of heightened scrutiny and challenge, including successfully battling Trump’s 2025 executive order aimed at terminating federal funding for NPR and PBS,” states the release from Harper’s Magazine. “Maher’s leadership ultimately resulted in a U.S. district court ruling against the White House, with NPR’s attorney stating, in part, that ‘the First Amendment draws a line, which the government may not cross, at efforts to use government power — including the power of the purse — to punish or suppress disfavored expression by others.’”
Judge Randolph D. Moss of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, appointee of President Barack Obama, ruled in NPR’s favor in March.
Maher has led NPR since 2024 and previously served as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia.
In a 2021 Atlantic Council panel discussion on how the NPR CEO combatted concerns about the COVID vaccine and objections to the 2020 presidential election on Wikipedia, she called the First Amendment the “number one challenge,” The Daily Mail reported. She said this was because it makes it “a little tricky to address some of the real challenges of where bad information comes from.”
The James C. Goodale First Amendment Award is meant 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,” according to the news release from Harper’s.
This is the second time the magazine has given out this award, which is named for the former vice chairman of The New York Times. Harper’s gave its inaugural First Amendment Award to A.G. Sulzberger, the current Times chairman in November 2025.
The magazine and Maher each did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
Trump’s executive order “targets NPR and PBS expressly because, in the President’s view, their news and other content is not ‘fair, accurate, or unbiased,’” NPR’s attorney argued in a lawsuit against the White House, the outlet reported. This action constitutes “textbook retaliation” which Maher claimed was “viewpoint-based discrimination in violation of the First Amendment,” she said in a statement to NPR.
The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the law commissioning the Corporation of Public Broadcasting which funds NPR and PBS, is established on “principles of impartiality,” the White House argued in Executive Order 14290.
“Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage,” the order stated.
Maher has faced allegations of supporting censorship in the past from congressional Republicans during a 2025 House subcommittee hearing.
“You’ve publicly chastised using the phrase ‘boy and girl,’ which you said ‘erases the language for nonbinary people,’” then-Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said during the hearing.
“Who do you think should be charged with cracking down on so-called bad information? Is it NPR? Is it the government? Is it you, Miss Maher?” Greene asked at the time.
The NPR CEO answered that none of the entities should engage in censorship asserting that she is a “very strong believer in free speech.”
Maher has also previously said “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done” in a 2024 Ted Talk..
Furthermore, NPR has come under fire previously for its apparently partisan Democratic views despite its publicly funded status — including its refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 presidential election.
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