How Public Radio Became the Enemy of the Public
Part I: Katherine Maher, Wikipedia’s Woke Warrior
Helen Of Destroy, May 24 2024
(note: this article appeared in partial form earlier this week on Progressive Radio Network. with apologies to regular subscribers for my lengthy disappearance. much more content coming soon)
It takes a truly staggering amount of narcissistic delusion to believe you not only know everything worth knowing but know everything about knowledge worth knowing. When NPR reporter Uri Berliner came forward last month to blow the whistle on his employer’s descent from beloved American institution into froth-mouthed partisanship and was quickly attacked and suspended by the organization he’d given 25 years of his life to, he unwittingly brushed up against a towering institutional hypocrisy that has come to saturate even the most trusted sources of information, a hypocrisy that threatens the very concept of “truth” in the western world.
i may have no experience in radio, but have you seen my TEETH?
While the Berliner affair at NPR may have been the general public’s first exposure to its new CEO Katherine Maher, her hire earlier this year was the culmination of decades of grooming by the ruling class political establishment, which raised her on the warm fuzzy feelings of American Exceptionalism via a who’s-who of western “civil society” – from the UN and the World Bank through the US State Department’s one-step-removed tentacles of plausible deniability pulling the levers of the Arab Spring to the helm of Wikipedia, one of the most powerful propaganda tools on the planet.
Maher’s intimacy with the Empire’s consent factories has long been a matter of public record: she is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a fellow of neoliberal-neocon think tank the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and only just recently stepped down from her membership on the US State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, presumably due to the flaming conflict of interest such a role might pose with her NPR appointment. After an internship with the Council on Foreign Relations, she worked for the World Bank, the National Democratic Institute, and UNICEF, using her linguistic skills (she majored in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University following a year in the American University in Cairo’s Arabic Language Intensive Program specializing in “colloquial Egyptian Arabic”) to carry out Washington’s directives in the Middle East in such a way that the locals thus targeted felt like the changes taking place were organic and coming from their peers (1).
Like NPR, Wikipedia – specifically the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the “people’s encyclopedia” and whose co-founder Jimmy Wales has been credibly accused of using it as his personal slush fund (2) – has weaponized its nonprofit status to deflect criticism, avoiding much of the distrust which has (justly) accumulated toward Big Tech among populations it ruthlessly exploits because it does not directly monetize their use of its service. However, the Foundation’s largest donors handsomely bankroll its operations to the tune of over $100m annually, despite server costs that amount to a rounding error next to its annual revenue. (3) Like NPR, which boasts of its funding by “Viewers Like You,” Wikipedia and its parent foundation are constantly begging their audience for donations, claiming to be funded by these small-dollar amounts despite massive corporations having dominated their finances for decades.
The aspects of NPR that so horrified Berliner (and many former members of its audience) will be familiar to anyone who has taken the time to peek under the hood of Wikipedia. Under Maher’s leadership, the “people’s encyclopedia” was virulently anti-Trump to the point of psychosis, even before his election to the US presidency in 2016 and despite insisting it was really a neutral platform. Neutrality is one of Wikipedia’s core “five pillars,” which despite the aura of finality the term implies are purposefully vague, culminating in the declaration that “Wikipedia has no firm rules” (4). Wikipedia’s elite editor class – the only ones allowed to edit volatile articles like Hillary Clinton’s biography or the article on Russiagate (which by 2018 had already spawned several side articles and by now could fill several books) – have never acknowledged that then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller was unable to prove Trump colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election, and countless editors have been banned from the “American Politics” topic or even from the entire site for attempting to correct Wikipedia’s (by then voluminously incorrect) record on the subject.
To maintain this and other political fictions soon required banning not only established editors but source material formerly seen as reputable. Britain’s most-read news site, the Daily Mail, was banned as a source from Wikipedia in 2017 with the full-throated support of Jimmy Wales (5) (while he himself was sitting on the board of directors of competitor The Guardian (6) – no conflict of interest there!). By 2020, most mainstream news outlets betraying even the slightest whiff of conservative political leanings were prohibited, as were Empire-averse sites like Russia’s RT and Sputnik and Venezuela’s Telesur, even while notoriously unreliable entities like the Anti-Defamation League remained permitted as sources (7). Wikipedia requires all content be sourced “reliably,” but editors may decide what constitutes a “reliable” source, discussions that can proceed for weeks until an administrator decides a consensus has been reached, and the criteria for reliability are strongly slanted in favor of the establishment-friendly outlets that have seen their public trust plummet in the last 20 years.
Wikipedia (and Maher) may stress that the site is not a democratic experiment (8), but like the inertia-bound American political system itself, Wikipedia’s bureaucratic morass appears designed to give the illusion that individual editors can make meaningful changes while preventing any such changes from actually taking place. Its value as a “trusted news source” lies precisely in how much it is perceived as a democratic experiment! Like the criminally-misnamed “free market,” in which the risk is socialized onto the populace while the leaders privatize the profit, Wikipedia takes collective credit for any positive mention in the media, but blames individual editors or some ill-defined “toxic editing culture” that is somehow separate from the encyclopedia itself whenever it receives even an iota of the negative coverage it is due.
Regime Change Roots
of course she wasn’t traveling around the Middle East with blonde hair, silly!
Maher did not personally supervise every bit of editing that went on during her tenure, any more than she now micromanages the content broadcast by NPR. But such fanatical devotion to maintaining the establishment narrative, even at the cost of an organization’s credibility, requires an equally fanatical leader. Maher proved her loyalty to the establishment during the Arab Spring – a period in her career which has curiously been erased from the public resume visible on her LinkedIn page (9) – putting her degree to use attempting to foment pro-American sentiment using the Trojan horse of social media.
Maher was ubiquitous in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, traveling to the Turkish-Syrian border and Libya in 2012 while working for the World Bank in a role she described as “specialist in information and communications technology-enabled good governance and citizen participation.” One can certainly not accuse her of insincerity – only a fanatical true believer in the Rules-Based International Order would have the gall to preach technology-enabled “good governance” to Libyans whose country had just been plunged back into the dark ages by barbarians armed and funded by her own government, or to Syrians still under attack by those barbarians. She would repeat the pattern across the Middle East, preaching the neoliberal tech gospel to ‘infidels’ in Tunisia, Lebanon, Egypt, and elsewhere across the region, many of whom had already been whacked by the neocons’ military Big Stick. By the time she arrived at the Wikimedia Foundation, she was clearly aware of the value of operating a platform seen by a target group as populated by “people like them,” coming armed with “civil-society” buzzwords and an impressive list of contacts at foundations like the Omidyar Network and the Open Society Foundations, whose bottomless pits of funding have Wikipedia sitting so pretty it could run for another 75 years even if it never received another penny (10).
While Maher was proud enough of her regime-change-enabling pedigree to feature its details on her LinkedIn page as recently as 2020, many of those details have since been removed without explanation. One engagement that seems to have been almost completely memory-holed was her experience co-founding an Arabic-language “citizen journalism” platform, Sharek961, in Lebanon ahead of that country’s 2008 election. Maher literally arrived in Lebanon three weeks ahead of that vote to launch the project, though there wasn’t much to do as the platform was essentially an Arabic copy of Kenyan “citizen activist” platform Ushahidi with even the translation of the foundational material performed by a third party, according to its page on the website of the Technology for Transparency Network (11), which funded the project and was in turn funded by oligarchic staples like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network, the latter of which would later employ Ushahidi’s founder (12). While Sharek961 only received 200 “citizen reports” on election-related issues during its short lifetime, it supposedly attracted organic interest from nonprofits in Jordan, Egypt and Iraq eager to make use of their platform. Like Iraq, Lebanon was one of the “seven countries” that former US General Wesley Clark infamously revealed had been targeted for regime change by the second Bush regime in the five years following the September 11 attacks (13).
It’s difficult not to see Sharek961’s focus on “first-person reporting” by non-professionals on a contentious election as a predecessor to the “citizen journalism” of the Arab Spring, which would soon unleash regime change all over the Middle East, especially because the platform was later adapted for Egypt’s November 2010 elections – though Technology for Transparency Network insisted an “independent group of activists” was responsible, rather than Maher and her co-founders. The supposedly-grassroots (yet easy to infiltrate and manipulate) “citizen journalism” that characterized Sharek961 and its peers, facilitating soft-power coups in countries that would have proven difficult if not impossible to take over via traditional military means, neatly parallels Wikipedia’s “anyone can edit” bogus appeal to populism. Indeed, Maher’s last position before joining Wikipedia was as CEO of Access Now, yet another “citizen-journalism” platform, which not only debuted amid the failed 2009 “Green Revolution” in Iran but had the chutzpah to hold an annual conference on the intersection of technology and human rights called “RightsCon.” Never was an event so aptly named.
Maher’s own pedigree – she was raised in a wealthy, very white Connecticut suburb by a Goldman Sachs banker and a Columbia-educated retail buyer turned serial do-gooder – ideally positioned her for the job of dragging American liberalism back into the dark ages. The obituary for her father, Gordon Maher, notes that his own father “may or may not have been a postwar spy” at IBM in Paris and describes Gordon himself as an “operations man” at work and at home with “a remarkable familiarity with the depth of the port of Aden.” (14)
While this in itself proves nothing, it provides interesting context for the accusations made against his daughter by former colleagues in the Middle East. Upon Maher’s appointment as Executive Director of the Foundation in 2016, Tunisian internet activist Slim Amanou tweeted that she was “probably a CIA agent,” pointing out that she was “constantly trying to get introduced in the activist social network” when she visited the country (repeatedly) during the 2011 Arab Spring uprising. Amanou, who would go on to serve in the transitional government after Ben Ali’s regime fell with the help of their online activism, had hosted Maher in his home during some of those visits, a fact she indignantly threw back in his face in her response on Twitter. While Maher denied being “any sort of agent” and warned Amanou not to “defame” her – a veiled legal threat – other commenters on the thread weighed in with their own suspicions regarding Maher’s background, particularly the amount of time spent in regional hotspots during the Arab Spring (15).
Demographic Shaming for Fun & Profit
In 2014, the year after Maher was first hired to run communications for the Foundation, Kate Garvey, Jimmy Wales’ wife and the former diary secretary of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, advised on a star-studded PR campaign to promote the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, a user-friendly adaptation of what was then the newly-official Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development that broke up the globalist playbook into 17 vague feel-good concepts that no one could rationally oppose without understanding their origins. From her position at the highest levels manufacturing consent for the British establishment, Garvey would have been ideally positioned to select Maher as the cream of the rising crop of globally-minded true-believers to sell Wikipedia – and by extension the Global Goals and anything else her cohort wanted to promote – to a populace eager for something to believe in. Maher was promoted after two previous female Executive Directors failed to shape the unruly, troll-infested bathroom wall of the internet into something that they could at least con the average establishment news organ into believing was both genuinely crowdsourced and passably woke – two goals that are mutually exclusive at best and neither of which Wikipedia has ever met.
wHaT cOuLd gO wRoNg?!/!?!/1one???
Maher has succeeded where her predecessors failed in addressing Wikipedia’s ultra-intractable “wokeness” problem – the demographic PR nightmare that was already rearing its head by the time Jimmy Wales was being squired around the World Economic Forum by U2 frontman Bono in 2006. Wikipedia editors have always been predominantly white and male, reflecting the user population of the internet itself circa the site’s founding in 2001. The site’s nascent bureaucracy and content requirements rewarded a quasi-autistic level of attention to detail, both in terms of rule obedience and in mastering the site’s own unique formatting language, as well as a level of obsession with the editor’s chosen topics that justified the amount of time required to build up articles about them (often from scratch) and then to tenaciously defend those articles from editors with opposing opinions. By 2008, the Wikipedia “gender gap” was so well-known that the site conducted a study (assisted by the United Nations University at Maastricht), revealing just 13.9% of editors were female.
So little progress was made on the issue by 2013 that another study attempted to conflate readership (which is more gender-balanced) with editorship, concluding (with no apparent scientific basis) that the original survey must have been wrong and that the number was really more like 16.1% (16). This wasn’t because the Foundation wasn’t aware of why female editors were leaving (or not editing in the first place). In a 2011 blog post, the Foundation’s then-Executive Director Sue Gardner wrote that her semi-exhaustive survey of talk pages, message boards, and the blogosphere had confirmed that the adversarial climate around editing (the “rampant jerkwad factor,” in one commenter’s words) – having to defend their contributions from persistent deletions and attacks which were not necessarily gendered in nature – chased women off more easily than it did men (17), and fully a quarter of the 2009 survey’s respondents said they didn’t edit because they were afraid of being pounced on for “making a mistake.” (18)
Gardner and her successor Lila Tretikov wrung their hands about the gender gap for years to no avail, but Maher shifted the focus to creating more articles about “notable” women, addressing a different (though still real) gender gap while giving male editors a chance to craft articles that might be featured on Wikipedia’s coveted front page or even in the “real” media (19), which pounced obediently every time Maher piped up about female underrepresentation. By shifting the narrative to the Foundation’s “victories” in increasing female representation in content, Maher deemphasized the lack of representation in edits (20). Wikipedia editors are technically anonymous, after all; men could still run the encyclopedia, so long as they didn’t flaunt their Y chromosome.
As for the adversarial editing climate? A “Universal Code of Conduct” was also adopted in 2022 in an effort to civilize the brutes, but leadership had previously, repeatedly asked the trolls to play nice to no apparent effect. One long-time editor and administrator, “Fram,” was banned by the Foundation without explanation in 2019 after clashing on Wikipedia with Laura Hale, a social-justice-warrior type who happened to be the girlfriend of one of the Foundation trustees. This in itself was unusual enough to be dubbed a “constitutional crisis” and a “power grab” by even normally-sympathetic media outlets (21). (while editors are banned from Wikipedia all the time, these bans are almost always agreed upon by a panel of administrators, who are supposed to be walled off from the decisions that happen at the Foundation level). Even though the Foundation’s Trust and Safety team agreed the edits that Fram had made were correct – when they finally got around to informing him for the reason of his star-chamber ban – and that it was Hale who seemed to be unable to grasp Wikipedia edit rules, many of Fram’s allies in the ensuing drama suspected management had seized upon the conflict as a chance to make an example out of the admin – a high-ranking (and, of course, male) editor who valued directness over civility, coherence over euphemism, and results over nepotism, and who thus represented the Old Wikipedia Maher and her allies were trying to replace (22).
It is hard to argue that Fram was not made an example of, whether through standard-issue nepotism or through some more malevolent star-chamber proceeding, in order to usher in a kinder, gentler Wikipedia, in keeping with the general societal trend toward wokeness (which Maher, being a WEF Young Global Leader, would have been on the cutting edge of). Maher’s tenure at the Foundation had already been marked by a steadily increasing number of nuclear-option Foundation-wide bans (previously unheard of except in cases where the user had uploaded child porn or otherwise egregiously broken some law) (23). The 21 administrators who resigned in protest against Fram’s ban were an added plus for the Foundation, as more ideologically-compatible editors were standing by to immediately fill their positions and the average Wikipedia reader had no knowledge of the “constitutional crisis” unfolding behind the scenes.
The masses of editors who remained, many of them social misfits whose primary achievement to that point had been attaining the rank of Wikipedia admin (or merely “respected editor”) were never going to desert the site that validated their existence, no matter how many “Women in Red” (so called for the red links indicative of a nonexistent Wikipedia page) edit-a-thons the gullible media were persuaded to slaver over as proof of a Wikipedia gone woke. For example, the British editor Andrew Philip Cross, made internationally notorious by UK MP George Galloway and a handful of other antiwar media figures whose biographies Cross had meticulously turned into smear pages over the course of sometimes hundreds of edits, was revealed to be a housebound autistic adult cared for by his parents – hardly the sort who was going to abandon his keyboard perch slinging mud on behalf of the British establishment, even when he was banned from editing contemporary British political biographies following heavy media pressure (a ban that critics argue was never truly meant to be enforced) (24).
Viewers (and Editors) Like You
The allure of a crowdsourced (or simply astroturfed) online encyclopedia for an Empire in decline trying to shore up its reputation among rivals or even foment a quiet coup in one of those rivals is obvious. The immediacy with which the average casual internet user believes a factoid they read on Wikipedia is sobering in the extreme given the slightest bit of information on how the Foundation actually functions. While even the most politically-oblivious social media user has likely figured out that their cousin Cindy’s endless tweeting about how the Bad Orange Man is going to end Our Democracy™ has a less than stable basis in truth, consuming the same baseless partisan hysteria wrapped in the respectable shell of an encyclopedia (and then again in the trusted trappings of the ‘wisdom of crowds’) can lay the groundwork for the kind of society-wide psychosis that gripped much of the world during the Covid-19 outbreak.
The Foundation’s nonprofit halo largely insulated its reputation from the credibility bonfire that engulfed most social media platforms following the publication of the Twitter Files last year (itself a limited-hangout version of the bombshell case filed the previous year by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration). Its rock-bottom operating costs and volunteer workforce allowed it to consolidate power during the Covid-19 shutdown that left so many “real” news organizations drowning in red ink, as isolation and a coordinated campaign of psychological terror drove people to seek solace in what they believed were impartial, reliable facts about the outbreak. Wikipedia was expertly wielded by the WEF and WHO to sell both the Covid-19 fear-porn itself and the attendant “infodemic” narrative that warned anyone doubting the “official story” that they were victims of “disinformation” or “misinformation” potentially as deadly as the novel coronavirus itself. The most-viewed article of 2020 was “Covid-19 pandemic,” and seven more of the top-50 most popular articles viewed that year related to the outbreak (25), while the Foundation added insult to injury by plastering its articles with donation requests even as the global economy collapsed in a controlled demolition.
Maher’s predecessor at NPR, John Lansing, ran the station much like Maher ran Wikipedia during the pandemic, capitalizing on its “public” aspect to preserve his otherwise-moribund operation from the ignominious demise it arguably deserved. He introduced a subscription system, counterintuitively demanding more money from the outlet’s shrinking audience ($8 per month for a selection of podcasts marketed as “NPR+,” or $2.99 per month per podcast, presumably coming with a free totebag exclusively designed for those “in the know” allowing the bearer to signal their democratic virtues as a Viewer Like You who’s gone out of their way to support NPR, because 51,000 people actually subscribed in the service’s first 18 months, according to the NYT) (26). Like Maher, Lansing zeroed in on identity politics to distract from a lack of ideological diversity, studiously ignoring criticism of the latter even as the range of opinions considered politically acceptable narrowed to the point of monotony and dogmatism, driving away audiences and their money.
Indeed, given that seemingly every Wikipedia-era interview with Maher includes her wagging her finger at the silent masses of white men who edit Wikipedia all day, lamenting their refusal to embrace the gospel of Inclusivity, it is interesting that Lansing embarked on a similar woke-ifying/finger-wagging campaign at NPR, according to the whistleblower Berliner. While it is difficult to imagine a CEO chiding the already notoriously-liberal NPR for being not liberal enough, Lansing, capitalizing on the George Floyd mania of 2020, made the alleged “white privilege” of the liberal media central to all aspects of the station’s operations, according to Berliner, requiring journalists to enter interviewees’ race, gender, and ethnicity along with more relevant attributes in a centralized database and submit to thoroughly-discredited “unconscious bias training” sessions (27).
“why is Antarctica so damn white? check your privilege, penguins”
The similarities between Maher and Lansing don’t end there. Lansing became CEO of the US Agency for Global Media, perhaps the largest propaganda institution most Americans have never heard of, just a year before Maher was named Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation (28). He took over that agency, which runs Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and other ostensibly foreign US propaganda organs, two years after then-president Barack Obama signed into law a Pentagon budget that included the now-infamous Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, which permitted US government-funded propaganda made for foreign audiences to be directed at American citizens on domestic soil. Prior to 2013, Voice of America and other USAGM properties had been legally prohibited from domestically broadcasting their content – which is somehow required to comply with both the “broad foreign policy objectives of the United States” and “promote respect for human rights,” goals which are all but mutually exclusive under the neoliberal-neocon chimera of the Biden administration (29).
Grabbing the Internet by the…Throat
Berliner, the NPR whistleblower, lamented that his employer’s descent into propaganda purgatory had decimated the respect the American people once held for it. Wikipedia has held on longer by partnering with the same Big Tech companies its supporters believe it does not resemble. Google for years has prominently featured Wikipedia entries for people, places, organizations, and even concepts at the top of its search results, and “raters” who index websites for the search engine use Wikipedia to gauge how reputable a site or its author is – and therefore how high up in search results it should feature (30). Google’s YouTube subsidiary often features snippets of Wikipedia articles beneath videos on controversial topics as a gentle warning that they may be engaging in thoughtcrime. Amazon’s AI-powered Alexa digital assistant frequently answers users’ questions with Wikipedia text or content from Wikidata, another Foundation property with even less stringent sourcing requirements (31). Facebook, following Google’s lead, once displayed snippets of Wikipedia articles about news organizations next to stories users shared from those outlets (32).
Maher herself made no secret of her mission to dominate the consensus reality in talks given on the subject of Wikimedia2030, the Foundation’s plan (temporal congruence with the UN’s and WEF’s own agendas is no accident) to elevate Wikipedia and its sister projects to “become the most respected source of knowledge.” (34). Accomplishing this globally would require these projects to be forced down the throat of the Global South, a population Maher – like most Empire-backed do-gooders hailing from northern latitudes – appeared to believe homogeneously backwards and in need of hardcore pandering, along the lines of the failed “Wikipedia Zero” project which sought to seduce impoverished and information-hungry customers by giving them mobile phones that could access Wikipedia (but none of its references) without data charges, effectively delivering the WEF’s dream of a pre-censored internet to people too poor to know just how they were being screwed (35). While that program predated Maher’s arrival as communications director, it folded in 2018, just a year after she delivered a megalomaniacal speech to Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center that wasted no time blaming the Foundation’s failure to take over the world on “structural inequalities.” Encyclopedias, she declared, are irrelevant to the benighted masses who think they are “old books where old people go to look up old information,” so the Foundation must expand, expand, expand until it saturates the very fabric of reality. The masses are not going to Wikipedia, therefore the Foundation must go to the masses, in such a way that they do not realize they are being propagandized.
The implications if Maher is indeed following in the alleged family business of Deep State skulduggery are extremely serious. Processes she set in motion with Wikimedia2030 led in 2022 to the Foundation being granted a privileged place in the implementation of Agenda 2030 and the Global Goals as a consultant and observer to the UN Economic and Social Affairs Council (ECOSOC) (36), allowing it to make great strides forward to its dream of becoming part of the backbone of the internet with a controlling interest in a structure that aspires to function as nothing short of a global Ministry of Truth. The UN and its private-sector partners in the WEF have both declared “misinformation” and “disinformation” to be the leading threat to the global order, and Wikipedia is the weapon they hope to use to win the information war. Ironically, non-Chinese internet users owe a debt of gratitude to the Chinese government – itself notorious for censoring its citizens’ internet access with a “Great Firewall” – for thrice blocking the Foundation’s efforts to obtain permanent observer status to the World Intellectual Property Organization (37).
The culmination of Maher’s megalomania at the Foundation – and fellow WEF Young Global Leader Jimmy Wales’ own dream of monetizing the free labor of thousands of anonymous editors – was Wikimedia Enterprise, a privileged backchannel with up-to-the-minute updates for clients who frequently use Wikipedia and its sister projects and don’t want the hassle of having to constantly query the mothership for the latest dictates from the Ministry of Truth. Its first reported customers were Google and the Internet Archive (the only publicly searchable database of webpages dating back to the early years of the internet), making it abundantly clear that Wikipedia’s version of truth was to be imposed past, present and future over what had previously passed for consensus reality (38).
It is not Wikipedia’s first partnership with Google, a natural ally in the fight to dominate all information streams. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt – now an advisor to the US government on science and technology – once described the plural nature of Google search results as a bug, not a feature, arguing that the perfect search engine would return just a single result, which would be exactly what the person searching had wanted – or believed he wanted, anyway. The US Federal Trade Commission acknowledged over a decade ago that the business model based on such a lack of choice ran afoul of its own antitrust statutes (39), yet has been loath to act on that acknowledgment, perhaps because of Google’s longstanding and foundational relationship with multiple US intelligence agencies and the Pentagon. No less a Deep State eminence grise than Henry Kissinger collaborated with Schmidt on a book about AI shortly before his death, the thesis of which was that AI will allow the technocratic ruling class to actually obtain a monopoly on “reality” itself, with those who fail to opt-in to the new AI paradigm becoming unable to participate in AI-“enhanced” society, which would be declared the only “real” reality by the ruling class as they could control aspects of it not possible in actual reality. Wikipedia’s approach is the same: the goal is not so much to convince you that 2+2=5 when you previously thought it was 4, but to alter your thought process in such a way that it never occurs to you that 2+2 could ever equal anything other than 5.
A (Trust) Crisis of Opportunity
By presenting its most virulent propaganda as written by “editors like you,” in the same vein as NPR’s funding by “viewers like you,” the ruling class subconsciously elicits consent from its targets: “surely if this was all lies, someone would have come along and edited it by now?” That illusion quickly falls apart if an individual tries to actually correct a false claim or add factual information that contradicts the establishment narrative, but the Foundation has been working feverishly behind the scenes on collaborations like its partnerships with Google and Amazon (and the UN) to make Wikipedia synonymous with reality.
The value of an encyclopedia – or a media property – powered by a vague ideal of democracy has only increased as trust in the western media establishment and other once-hallowed institutions has cratered. With journalists now viewed as possessed of slightly less integrity than the average used car salesman, Wikipedia’s image as an Oracle of Delphi populated by “regular guy” editors is worth its weight in gold. It is easy to forget that Wikipedia was once anathema in the American classroom, with students tempting a big red F if they dared cite the hoax-prone encyclopedia in legitimate academic papers. By the time Maher left, the Foundation had signed educational partnerships with the Inter-American Development Bank and even UNESCO, the UN’s educational arm. Individual teachers may still shudder reflexively when they see a Wikipedia citation in an assignment, but it has become so normalized that it has begun to alter the very concepts of “knowledge” and “truth.” In the grand tradition of soft-power coups by Maher’s previous employers, the Foundation made struggling educational bureaucracies an offer they could not refuse – free educational materials, ideally suited for the remote learning forced down hundreds of millions of children’s throats by their governments’ mercilessly antihuman Covid-19 policies. Children, the Foundation gloats, now use Wikipedia to “understand how knowledge is constructed.” (40)
This was done by partnering with UNESCO on the Global Education Coalition for Covid-19 Response – an easy-in in the early days of the manufactured “infodemic” as the WHO scrambled to pump out enough approved-narrative content to drown out dissenting opinions (41). With distance learning all but mandated around the world during the pandemic, the Foundation seized an opportunity tailor-made for it. The Foundation was already serving as a de-facto textbook for struggling school systems in the US before lockdown was imposed nationwide, and its growth as a force in the classroom during the ensuing two years was unprecedented. No doubt helped along by Foundation trustee Shani Evenstein Sigalov, an Israeli with multiple degrees in education technology who was promoted to vice-chair of the Foundation’s board in 2021 (42), it was shoehorned into virtual classrooms around the world – including in areas of Maher’s sought-after Global South where less than 1% of the population had heard of Wikipedia in 2017.
In a 2021 Atlantic Council interview given shortly after she left the Foundation, Maher came across as dead serious in her insistence that governments focus on weighing the “right” to access authoritative information against the right to free speech, never for a moment allowing the possibility that Wikipedia’s version of truth does not reflect reality to take hold in the listener’s mind (43). She is not only wholly onboard the UN’s efforts to create a global Ministry of Truth – she wants Wikipedia to run it. One can expect her reign at NPR to increase the organization’s focus on “viewers like you” and citizen journalism while quietly pushing the narratives that drove Berliner out – the fanatical belief that a “rules-based international order” dictated by the US, UK and Israel can do no wrong, that one cannot make a geopolitical omelette without breaking a few million eggs, and that anyone who disagrees must be some kind of racist, misogynist Trump supporter. But one would be foolish to dismiss her as just another wokeflake, as some conservative commentators seem to have done.
Shortly after taking over as Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher briefed the US State Department on “Wikipedia in a Post-Fact World,” lending her voice to the “fake news” hysteria then gripping both the media establishment and Wikipedia’s editorial conversation in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 electoral victory. Such seamless coordination with the overarching political narrative was no accident: during the two years following Maher’s hire as Chief Communications Officer for the Foundation, her department engaged the services of the Minassian Group, a consultancy whose founder Craig Minassian was also Chief Communications Officer for the Clinton Foundation, paying the three-employee outfit a six-figure sum rivaling even the most senior Foundation directors’ salaries. The firm was tasked with conducting a “communications review” and developing a media-training program for Foundation bigwigs, both of which focused on positioning the Foundation as an island of trustworthiness and neutrality in a sea of fake news and partisan sniping. While it did not bode well for the Foundation’s trustworthiness among Wikipedia editors that it neglected to mention the huge sums it was shelling out to a blatantly partisan organization (outside the pages of its yearly financial reports, where it was ultimately discovered by a prolific Wikipedia editor who claimed he was banned from editing the encyclopedia for years as retaliation), the decision – presumably made by Maher herself – to throw in with the Democratic establishment helped rocket the Foundation to the dizzying propaganda heights it now enjoys today (44).
Hip, Hip, Hypocrisy!
It’s no surprise that NPR wants a slice of that magic. However, the Maher it got is very different from the one who took the reins at Wikipedia in 2016. In a 2016 interview, she appeared to encourage ordinary Wikipedia readers to edit the encyclopedia even in the absence of expertise on any given subject, calling on people to research a subject in preparation for writing about it and become “general-purpose experts” that way. “We trust them to know when to do more research and to correct us if we’re wrong,” she said, insisting the Foundation believed that “people are fundamentally smart and that if you give them good information and the ability to engage in good faith they will generally do so.” (45)
But by the time she left the Foundation in 2021, Maher was an Atlantic Council fellow lamenting that the First Amendment was the biggest challenge in the fight against “disinformation” on social media platforms. She insisted her words in that particular interview, which resurfaced amid the furore over Berliner’s departure from NPR, had been taken out of context, though it’s hard to see how her “correction” – that she was in fact complaining about how difficult it was to regulate social media platforms with that First Amendment right hanging around – differed from her original statement, or how either sentiment could exist in a person whose career has supposedly been dedicated to championing the internet’s potential to maximize freedom and transparency across all levels of society. As curious readers began digging through her old tweets and uncovering hypocritical gem after gem, she complained they were taking issue with comments she’d made “as a private citizen” – never mind that as executive director of a propaganda organ she herself has explicitly stated she wants to see become part of the “fundamental epistemological backbone of the internet,” (46) she was anything but a “private citizen” back then.
Gazing upon her establishment-saturated resumé, one might question whether Maher has ever truly been a “private citizen.” It should surprise no one that she is a WEF Young Global Leader, as are Jimmy Wales and his wife, and it is difficult to find a single period in her adult life during which she was not apparently serving a function for some arm of Anglo-Zionist soft-power. Even in the months preceding her hire by NPR, she was brought in by Web Summit, a conference for Big Tech influencer types, to replace its co-founder Paddy Cosgrave and perform damage control after Cosgrave observed in response to Israel’s brutal invasion of Gaza last year that “war crimes are war crimes even when committed by allies and should be called out for what they are,” a comment so milquetoastish as to border on self-parody that nonetheless caused several sponsors to back out of the conference. While even the NPR whistleblower Berliner appears to think that NPR and Maher are anti-Israel, lumping such a position in with the generic “woke” personality package available on social media to anyone with a critical-thinking-shaped hole in their brains, Web Summit clearly selected Maher to make nice with the genocide deniers for a reason.
a reason aside from this stylish dress she made out of your curtains
Without being rabidly pro-Israel (in the manner of commentator Bari Weiss, whose ironically-titled “Free Press” Substack published Berliner’s essay just months after demanding pro-Palestinian college students be expelled from Harvard), Maher has made it clear throughout her career that her chief loyalty is to the system that created her – a system in which Israel plays such a key role that it is impossible to imagine that system existing without it. One suspects that this is why she was able, after a career purporting to uphold the value of free speech and an open internet, to savagely chomp down on the hand that fed her during that now-viral 2021 interview in which she declared the First Amendment to be a “challenge” without batting an eyelash. Maher appears to care no more for a free and open internet than she does for the tens of thousands of Palestinian children who’ve been blown to pieces in the last six months by Israeli troops using bombs purchased for them by the eternally-gullible American taxpayer.
Nor, it seems, is she particularly bothered by “disinformation,” at least where it is deployed in service of self-aggrandizement. Maher’s own biography on the Atlantic Council website literally credits her for “the success of Wikipedia,” which was already among the top 10 websites on the internet when she joined in 2014, 13 years after its founding. The profile also claims she reversed “decades-long declines in core contributors” and “steered Wikimedia through the misinformation crisis of the late 2010s and led Wikipedia to its highest brand trust since its founding.” In actual fact, Wikipedia remains a libelous swamp for any public figure who has ever defied the West’s burgeoning Ministry of Truth, brooking no meaningful controversy lest the slightest chink in its “reliable” armor reveal the leprous expanse of hoaxes, half-truths and agitprop beneath, and over three-fourths of its content is written by 1% of its editors (47). The women and minorities Maher has taken credit for finally dragging onto the platform are either banned immediately, bullied into silence (48), or exposed as Rachel Dolezal-style fakers, which ultimately led Maher to pitch a bizarre version of reparations to the editorial community. Maher expounded on her plan to pay female and minority users to edit Wikipedia to bolster their demographic representation, explaining – in the tortured manner of so many princelings who believe themselves the first to have discovered how the “other half” lives – that most underrepresented minorities didn’t have the free time and extra income to spend hours waging Wikipedia edit-wars with Whitey, so it was Whitey’s duty to bribe them (49).
As for Wikipedia’s “highest brand trust,” any figure over zero is still higher than zero, but here Maher’s history in regime-change technology uniquely positioned her to deliver the results NPR presumably craves. By packaging Wikipedia’s woke makeover to friendly media (the same outlets favored editors deem “reliable,” including NPR itself) she replaced the old Wikipedia narrative (which held it to be an unserious encyclopedia written by a bunch of pale sweaty white boys living in their parents’ basements somewhere in North America or Europe) with a more cosmopolitan, UN-friendly one that has seen the Foundation welcomed in the realms of higher education and the NGO Valhalla that is the UN’s ECOSOC. She enthralled the audience at the Atlantic Council in 2021 with promises that any Big Tech company could replicate Wikipedia’s trust coup.
NPR’s credibility, however, was already languishing from a near-fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound to the foot even before Maher arrived as CEO. Unlike Wikipedia, where editors are pseudonymous by default and can misrepresent their ethnicity if under the gun to meet some kind of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion target, NPR was quickly forced to acknowledge that its own cartoonish focus on white guilt (a sample article title mocked by the equally DEI-deranged New York Times was “Decolonize Your Bookshelf”) was not increasing minority audience numbers even three years after declaring war on “systemic racism” and mounting a full frontal assault on the supposedly towering white privilege of its audience (and staff) (50). Its fundraising and buzzword prowess, however, is beyond question, and these are the talents NPR desperately needs to keep afloat as the word ‘radio’ increasingly becomes an anachronism.
NPR’s public positions on free speech and critical thinking are anathema to the stated positions of the Wikimedia Foundation when Maher arrived, and even now fly in the face of the convictions of many Wikipedia editors. However, theirs is no longer the official view of the erstwhile “people’s encyclopedia,” as Maher confirmed in her exit interview with the Atlantic Council in 2021, reminding the audience of assembled regime-change fanboys and color revolutionaries that online platforms have a First Amendment right, too – the right to decide what they do and do not want to publish – and that theirs may supersede the little guys.’
Leading the Epistemological Color Revolution
Digital platforms’ narrative control is still perceived as looser than that of traditional news media, and this openness is still considered desirable, as reflected in surveys by Pew Research (51) and other pollsters confirming that more Americans now trust social, rather than television, networks to supply their news. However, social networks are rapidly tightening their content controls even as western governments train their populations to eschew critical thinking and demand internet censorship. Scrambling to reestablish a fraction of the audiences they enjoyed before the internet while wresting that trust back from the social networks that replaced them, “public” media outlets like NPR are uniquely situated to benefit from what Maher herself acknowledged in 2021 was a major paradigm shift. Wikipedia editors, after all, still need “reliable” neoliberal-centrist sources to serve as the raw material for their articles, and Pew Research found NPR was the most popular political news source among young (but not TOO young), Democrat-leaning adults in 2020 (52). Meanwhile, last year Pew Research found more Americans than ever before supported legally-enforceable internet content restrictions, not only for the standard bogeymen like explicit sex and violence but for “false information” as well (53). When NPR warned its audience in January not to do their own research – the act that Maher herself once said provides the backbone of the Wikipedia model – it was speaking to a closer approximation of Wikipedia’s own target audience than any other mainstream political broadcaster, and they were listening more closely than ever before.
Following Berliner’s departure and the attendant PR crisis, NPR sprouted a new six-person editorial layer, similar to Wikipedia’s star-chamber Arbitration Committee, funded by an anonymous benefactor and supported by Maher. Called “Backstop,” it will review all of the outlet’s content before release – and management have reportedly refused to tell staff who’s paying (54). Like Wikipedia under Maher, NPR is expanding its “standards and practices” team, and journalists will be periodically confronted with its “ethics handbook,” according to a NYT article detailing the changes earlier this month. Furious employees apparently tattled to the competing news organization, indignant that these new editors were being hired less than a year after a bloody round of layoffs that cut NPR’s staff by 10%.
Taking over NPR will, if nothing else, allow Maher to answer the question she posed in a 2010 blog post unearthed by Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo: “Can a Radio Station Govern a Country?” Then employed by the World Bank, she described how the Ivory Coast’s state broadcaster had refused to recognize the winner of the country’s 2010 presidential election, instead backing the incumbent ruler who already controlled the station (55). While obviously unknown to Maher 15 years ago, parallels with the 2020 US presidential election are impossible to ignore. It was the typically-conservative Fox News’ reporting of Biden’s alleged victory in Arizona that convinced many Trump supporters their man had lost the state, and for months the media establishment appeared to be playing “reality chicken” with the majority of the American public, telling people who’d never met a Biden supporter in real life that this frail old man – responsible for the infamously racist 1994 Crime Bill and parts of the 2001 Patriot Act – had somehow gotten more votes than any other candidate in history. It eventually emerged (in Louisiana & Missouri v Biden et al and later in the Twitter Files) that Maher’s Wikipedia was regularly sitting down with representatives from at least 12 US government agencies and other social media platforms during this time to receive what were essentially narrative briefings, receiving their marching orders on what and whom to censor and silence in order to “protect democracy” from the will of the people.
One might speculate that a news outlet run by Wikipedia would bear uncanny similarities with post-Trump NPR, but speculation isn’t even necessary: Jimmy Wales launched WikiTribune – technically a separate project from the Foundation, though blatantly trading on the name association – in 2017 only to meet a volley of complaints about the site’s apparent political bias masquerading as earnest objectivity. Its first article was a puff piece about Project Everyone, the PR campaign his wife had helped run, which neglected to mention Wales’ connection to the subject matter discussed. While some of the inaccuracies were apparently corrected after complaints that included one prominent backer of WikiTribune pulling his support from the project, even its “finished” version was unlikely to ever be mistaken for objective journalism (56).
Like every project Wales has attempted to launch alone (Wikipedia was co-founded by Larry Sanger, much to Wales’ ongoing chagrin), WikiTribune failed rapidly due to the founder’s hubris. It was turned into a social media site in 2020. Unable to control the creation and the historicization of the narrative by the same route, the ruling class has merely tightened its grip on the media establishment, shutting down competitors to distract from the spiraling quality of its own product. Maher’s resurfacing at NPR is merely a continuation of that process, as the Berliner affair has made abundantly clear.
The establishment Left in the US has been engaged in an ongoing act of credibility-seppuku since Trump’s 2016 electoral victory, not because of any deeply-held beliefs on their part but because the organizations that have hijacked its ideological North Star have long since been coopted by entities hostile to true liberal values and the vulgar, unpredictable Trump merely yanked the mask off the whole sordid process. Rather than work for peace, justice, and equality, they focus on ruthlessly stripping out target populations’ remaining assets until nothing is left but the bare walls, then goading those populations into flagellating themselves for not being quicker to offer up the bare walls as well. Maher no more represented free speech at Wikipedia than she did human rights at the World Bank, and her response to the whistleblower Berliner’s essay – dismissing it because it was celebrated by NPR’s conservative critics without addressing one of his many valid points (57) – is an eerie echo of the Wikipedia editorial elite’s dismissal of former editors’ (and co-founder Sanger’s) critiques because they happen to be republished by Breitbart or Infowars. Truth is an afterthought – “Verifiability,” defined by Wikipedia as prevalence in “reliable sources,” is king. And with reliability accredited only through votes of support by influential (ideologically sympathetic) editors, a self-perpetuating disinformation circuit is sealed, impenetrable to truth even as it is sold as the only acceptable reality for “good people” in “democracies.” In modern western society, in which the masses have abdicated en masse their duty to think critically about the information they are mainlining every day, when you control both encyclopedia and references, you get to write history. No media property – even one edited by (or funded by) “the people” – should have such power.
Footnotes
1: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/expert/katherine-maher/
2: https://www.theregister.com/2008/03/05/jimmy_wales_and_danny_wool/
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
5: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/19/daily-mail-jimmy-wales-fake-news-wikipedia-wikitribune.html
6: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jan/27/baroness-rebuck-jimmy-wales-guardian-media-group-board
7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard
8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_democracy
9: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krmaher/
10: https://marketrealist.com/p/why-does-wikipedia-need-money/
11: http://transparency.globalvoicesonline.org/project/sharek961
12: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ory-okolloh/details/experience/
13: https://www.salon.com/2007/10/12/wesley_clark/
14: https://hoytfuneralhome.com/tribute/details/1435/Gordon-Maher/obituary.html
15: https://twitter.com/slim404/status/709032758442631168
16: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0065782
17: https://suegardner.org/2011/02/19/nine-reasons-why-women-dont-edit-wikipedia-in-their-own-words/
18: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DGB-6182
19: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/03/women-technology-katherine-maher-1389966
20: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2018/10/18/wikipedia-mirror-world-gender-biases/
21: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/wikipedia-ban-editor-culture-war
22: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_to_the_Wikimedia_Foundation%27s_ban_of_Fram
23: https://www.dailydot.com/business/wikipedia-editors-global-bans/
24: https://sputnikglobe.com/20191013/andrew-philip-cross-wikipedia-editing-scandal-continues-but-for-how-much-longer-1077038943.html
25: https://financesonline.com/wikipedia-statistics/
26: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/business/media/npr-uri-berliner-diversity.html
27: https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/01/implicit-bias-debunked-study-disputes-effects-unconscious-prejudice/
28: https://www.usagm.gov/who-we-are/management-team/john-lansing-chief-executive-officer-and-director/
29: https://www.usagm.gov/who-we-are/oversight/legislation/standards-principles/?_ga=2.166859838.105308304.1603980712-1437506193.1603980712
30: https://ahrefs.com/blog/eat-seo/
31: https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-alexa-friendly-world-of-wikidata/
32: https://web.archive.org/web/20180310015358/https://mashable.com/2017/10/05/facebook-wikipedia-context-articles-news-feed/#bmcsSQ0ujqqk
33: https://www.facebook.com/formedia/blog/third-party-fact-checking-how-it-works/
34: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2017/luncheon/10/Maher
35: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero
36: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2022/07/22/wikimedia-foundation-earns-accreditation-to-the-united-nations-economic-and-social-affairs-council-ecosoc/
37: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/07/07/for-third-time-china-blocks-wikimedia-foundation-as-permanent-observer-to-the-world-intellectual-property-organization-wipo/
38: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2022/06/21/wikimedia-enterprise-announces-google-and-internet-archive-first-customers/
39: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against-google.html
40: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Reading_Wikipedia_in_the_Classroom_-_Booklet.pdf
41: https://www.unesco.org/archives/multimedia/document-5029
42: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shani-evenstein/
43: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/event/a-conversation-with-katherine-maher/
44: http://ling.creoliste.fr/index.php?title=En-WP%3APress_Release_%2F_An_Open_Letter_to_ArbCom#Minassian_Media.2C_Inc._.28the_Clinton_Foundation-WMF_connection.29
45: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaMDvfO-Cfs
46: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/event/a-conversation-with-katherine-maher/
47: https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-elite-diversity-foundation
48: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/how-wikipedia-is-hostile-to-women/411619/
49: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/news/transcripts/katherine-maher-on-how-big-tech-can-be-as-trusted-as-wikipedia/
50: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/business/media/npr-uri-berliner-diversity.html
51: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/12/06/social-media-seen-as-mostly-good-for-democracy-across-many-nations-but-u-s-is-a-major-outlier/
52: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/01/americans-main-sources-for-political-news-vary-by-party-and-age/
53: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/20/most-americans-favor-restrictions-on-false-information-violent-content-online/
54: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/business/npr-editing-backstop.html
55: https://web.archive.org/web/20130219092634/http:/www.demworks.org/blog/2010/12/can-radio-station-govern-country
56: https://medium.com/wikitribune/wikitribune-taster-1-the-great-and-the-good-meet-to-promote-un-global-goals-729a22401bd3
57: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/09/1243755769/npr-journalist-uri-berliner-trust-diversity
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