While testifying before Congress on Wednesday, National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher said that her network failed to adequately cover the 2020 election surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop.
On the recently established Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) panel, House Republicans questioned Maher and PBS CEO Paula Kerger about allegations of biased news coverage supported by federal funds.
Maher informed Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) that NPR had admitted that it was wrong not to cover the issue of Hunter Biden’s laptop more aggressively and sooner.
Under a different conversation with Republican Georgia Representative Brian Jack, she reaffirmed “we made a mistake” regarding the laptop’s lack of protection thereafter. Maher wasn’t working for the publicly funded news organization when the scandal initially surfaced since she was appointed CEO of NPR in 2024.
The laptop’s explosive allegation by the New York Post came in the height of the 2020 presidential campaign, when then-nominee Joe Biden was pitted against then-president Trump. The laptop had disturbing footage and images of drug usage and explicit activities, and the report revealed Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, which may have involved his father.
At the time, several prominent news organizations downplayed the story and even credulously repeated claims that the laptop belonged to a Russian misinformation effort. During that time, a listener asked NPR public editor Kelly McBride about the news outlet’s lack of coverage. The claims made in the article were unsubstantiated, and she called the Post’s reporting “many, many red flags,” among which were its possible links to Russia.
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” said Terence Samuel, managing editor of NPR, in an interview with McBride. “And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event, and we decided to treat it that way.”
The reaction of his liberal coworkers to the laptop disclosures was recounted in a breathtaking autobiographical piece written by Uri Berliner, a longtime editor at NPR, which was published in April.
Because of the laptop, it made headlines. In his piece, Berliner lamented the suppression of the age-old journalistic need to pursue a promising story lead. “During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.”
“We could have admitted our mistake when the Post’s reporting’s core facts were validated and the emails were independently reviewed, which was around one and a half years later. But we didn’t choose transparency, just like with Russia’s collaboration, he went on to say.
While discussing the COVID pandemic with Cloud, Maher also admitted that the CIA’s Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis had some merit, despite NPR’s earlier rejection of such claims.
Despite her own confessions, Maher maintained that National Public Radio is a “nonpartisan” journalism outlet.
