- [Presenter] Support for "Overheard with Evan Smith" comes from... Hillco Partners.

A Texas government affairs consultancy.

Claire and Carl Stuart.

Christine and Philip Dial, And the Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation, and public affairs communication.

Ellergroup.com.

- I'm Evan Smith, she's the president and CEO of NPR.

The hottest hot seat job in American media today.

She's Katherine Maher, this is "Overheard."

A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

You really turn the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving into the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

Two.

This is "Overheard."

(audience clapping) Katherine Maher, thank you so much for being here.

- Thank you for having me, Evan.

- So yesterday you testified before Congress.

- I did.

- Yeah.

How was that?

(audience laughs) - A bucket list.

A bucket list.

- I bet, right?

You checked... (audience laughs) I was thinking we would role play.

You be you, I'll be Marjorie Taylor Greene.

(audience laughs) And I'll ask you, "Is there anything you wanna say to me?"

(Katherine laughs) - Thank you so much for the opportunity to come out and advocate on behalf of public media.

- You did the right thing just there.

(Katherine laughs) - I have to say that heading into this hearing, I felt for you, I felt for my friend Paula Kerger at PBS, because they advertised the hearing by its name, and they gave away the game.

"Anti-American Airwaves" was the name of the hearing.

No really, tell us what you think, right?

(Katherine laughs) Did you feel like that the hearing was conducted in good faith?

- You know, I can say wholeheartedly, I do.

I had the opportunity to speak to a number of members of Congress prior to going into the hearing, over the course of the past year.

You know, I feel as though when I was there, and when I was testifying, and when members asked me questions, very often I saw that they were listening.

And you know, we're not going to necessarily convince every single person that public media is the right, you know, thing for them.

But I think that the goal is to convince enough people that it is the right thing for America.

And when we talk about all of the stations that are across the nation, whether public television or public radio, and what they do for the communities that they serve, you hear Congress people listen.

- Yeah.

They listened, but did they hear you?

This is my question.

Because it seemed as if they went in intending by the end to come out and say, "Well, we heard everything, we're gonna defund."

Like, it seems like the outcome was predetermined.

Do you think that there was a chance that you could sway them?

Get them off of that?

- Yeah.

I mean, it's not just the DOGE sub-committee that we're speaking to though.

We're speaking to all of Congress.

We're speaking to the American people when you stand up and testify.

And so, absolutely.

I think that there were folks in the room who listened, and listened with an open ear.

And I am certain that people were paying attention outside the room too.

And so I don't come in to convince one person of our value.

I come in to speak to the value that, as we know, 75% of Americans believe that public media should continue to be funded.

- Right, although, I did see, since you brought that up, I know that was in your statement yesterday, and I think that's a great talking point for all public media.

Right?

People believe in the value of the work.

I saw a Pew study today that actually had that number below 50%.

I don't know if it was a different polling question, or if the times have changed or what, but I do wonder, speaking over Congress to the American people, that's a really good strategy, and it's gonna be a necessary strategy, right?

The public is gonna have to speak up on behalf of its stations.

- I think so.

I mean, I know that the Pew study came out, I haven't had the chance to review it.

The study that I'm quoting was from February of 2025, so pretty recent.

- Pretty close, right.

- Pretty recent.

Independent study.

But yeah, I mean, absolutely.

It is up to people to be able to advocate for what it is that they value.

And so if you value public media, I would encourage you to get in touch with your legislator, get in touch with your member of Congress, let them know that this is something that means something to you, for whatever reason it does.

And there's a million reasons why people might... Actually, there's, you know, 330 million of us.

There's 330 million reasons why people might value public- - And 1,300 stations across the country.

- And 1,300 stations across the country.

And, you know, I think it was 386 is the number of independent public radio stations.

I can speak to that.

I don't have the number of public television stations at hand, but yeah.

- Amazing.

You've been in a job now for a year and like three days.

- A year and two days.

- A year and two days.

(audience laughs) Like, it's basically a year, right?

- I mean, well, yesterday was kind of a big day, and the day before was kind of a big day, you know, an anniversary.

Another testimony.

- And you're here.

And today is a big day.

- Today is a big day too.

I already had tacos.

- So, when you came in... (audience laughs) That's the best day.

- Didn't even leave the airport without getting tacos.

- When you came into this job a year and two days ago, you had a certain set of expectations.

You knew what was going on at NPR.

- Mm, yeah.

- You knew the challenges on the road ahead.

- Mhm.

- You said yesterday in your statement that you were brought in to revive NPR.

- [Katherine] Yeah.

- That word jumped out at me, "revive".

what needed to be revived?

- I mean, I am a representative of a generation that I would like to be engaged with public media.

- [Evan] Right.

- I think that if you look at... NPR's been around for 50 plus years, it is a phenomenal organization, and I think we can all acknowledge that it has not necessarily made the most elegant of transitions to being a full, you know, ubiquitous digital presence as well as broadcast presence.

It has many, many strengths, but they don't necessarily connect together in a way that you would want for it to be frictionless for audience members who want to find public media wherever they go.

They want it on demand, they want it streaming, they want it on their broadcast.

There's so many ways in which we could think about the experience of it.

There's ways in which we can think about, "How do we make ourselves relevant?"

I mean, I'm a millennial, I'm old at this point.

Right?

- Right.

- Like, I mean, truly.

I'm worried about mortgages, you know, all of these things.

What about the generation below me?

How are we speaking to the relevance of public media?

So when I say revive, to me it's a little bit like walking into a beautiful building.

It's saying, "I think just that we could do a little bit of freshening up around here.

And we'll have what the builders intended."

- So, to be clear though... A good answer, but to be clear, you're not talking about the quality of the content.

- No, no.

I should be very clear on that.

- [Evan] Or the fairness of the journalism.

- Absolutely not.

- Right?

Or the degree to which this is a product produced for everybody.

Like those are not things that you felt needed to be revived.

- Well, I will say that I think the quality of the journalism is exceptional.

I think we have some of the best editorial standards, and our ethic handbook is absolutely a gold standard when it comes to how our journalists comport themselves.

I believe to the absolute you know, the bones of my being, that our journalists wake up every single day and want to earn the trust of the American public.

And I think that we want to have a larger audience than we have today.

And I think that we want more people to feel as though we are trustworthy.

- Yeah.

I mean, some of this is not specific to NPR or even to broadcast.

Some of this is specific to journalism, right?

Like the trust question that you mentioned.

We know that trust in the media is at an all time low.

That very same Pew poll, by the way, that came out today, said that only 29% of people consider NPR's news product something that they consider trustworthy.

That says something not just about NPR, but about the world we're in.

You are not helped by this general problem of trusted media.

- I mean, the problem of trusted media is very real.

We all recognize it.

We could do a whole session on trusted institutions- - On just that specifically.

- Well, on just trusted institutions at large.

Because it's not just media that is having a trust challenge.

- So like the Judiciary, Congress.

- You got it.

I mean, literal institutions- - Up and down the line.

- Abstract institutions, absolutely.

I think that we've got a real challenge as institutions have not been as responsive to the needs of a changing and increasingly diverse nation.

It has not been as responsive to the needs of an 24/7 on demand nation.

I mean, there's a lot of work to do.

There's a reason Americans voted for a transformative administration.

It's because the institutions of our nation, you know, there's a lot of sentiment out there that they're just not working.

And I think that there's an opportunity for us in the media to think about that too.

- Yeah, the public's not really crazy about the status quo.

We know that.

- It seems like, yeah.

- We saw that in politics, we see that in media.

They want something new.

They want something different.

So if I'm a potential donor, or I'm someone who may be persuadable as a listener, what is the value proposition of NPR, right now as you make your elevator speech?

- Yeah.

Well, I mean, obviously, it is high quality, fact-based journalism.

There's no doubt about that.

But it is a number of other things too.

I would be absolutely remiss if I didn't point out the fact that we do a lot of cultural programming.

We explore ideas in our work, much as you're doing here.

But what I really think about when I think about public media is the value of connection.

Because one of the things that public media is required to do, both in our mission and in, you know, sort of the text of our founding documents, and the spirit in which people operate, is connect communities across America, across difference.

Other forms of media do not have that same mission.

Every single study that I've ever seen, whether Pew or otherwise.

I always wanna name-check our friends at Pew.

Indicates that local media, local journalism, which is what NPR does so well in partnership with its member stations, 85% of Americans believe that it's good for their communities.

It correlates with higher rates of civic engagement, lower rates of partisanship, greater participation in elections, even better municipal bond ratings.

I said this yesterday in my opening.

Absolutely, there is something there, and there is something for us to build on.

- You cited a number, 43 million people.

- That's right.

- Listen to- - Engage with- - Engage with.

- Read, watch.

- NPR programming per week.

- That's correct.

- Per week.

Do you know who those people are?

- We do, by and large.

- So paint the demographic profile of those.

- Broadcast is a little tricky, because I don't wanna bore the audience with it, but broadcast is an older medium.

It's harder to get good data.

I can tell you that we know that they're Americans, we know that they are from all across the country.

Traffic to our website correlates one-to-one with population size of individual states.

So we're in Texas, what's that, the second largest in terms of population in the nation?

- [Evan] It is.

- It is the second largest source of our traffic to our website.

So there you go, right?

We also know, and particularly on our digital products, so that's podcast and website, that our distribution of visitors' maps to the American political distribution as well.

So conservative, independent, or middle of the road, liberal, progressive.

That is a one third, one third, one third, give or take, which is- - Yeah.

- Pretty much the American body politic.

So we are talking about something that serves everyone.

- Of course, the poll, again, I'm sorry to come back to polling.

- No, it's fine.

But the polling suggests that Republicans are less interested in what you're producing than Democrats.

Marjorie Taylor Greene herself yesterday dismissed the NPR audience as white, wealthy urban liberals who look down their nose at rural America.

She has a different perception.

- She does, and- - Of what your audience is.

Is she wrong?

- I think that NPR, and this is one of the things that I was really surprised by when I came in, and I'm thrilled that people were incredibly receptive and already ahead of me and wanting to change this.

If you go back to our founding... You know, we didn't do audience research and polling at the get go.

But once we started doing it, we limited that research to college educated or people with some college education.

And I think that that's a huge problem, because as you probably know, about 35% of Americans have some college education, college degree.

We're talking 65% of America.

- You're leaving them out.

- How?

This is public media.

- Right.

- And so this is an opportunity for us to... We've already gone out, we've started talking to folks without that educational pre-screening.

It's an opportunity for us to think about who are we speaking to.

As for the rest of it, I mean, yes, there are population centers that we speak to because they're big cities.

But we also are well listened to across the entire nation.

- Well, you have nearly a hundred percent coverage.

I mean, I always have to point out to people when they complain, "We have news deserts all over this country."

- Except for public media.

- There are so many people who are left without a source of information.

You know, NPR stations are in like north of 98%.

- 99.7, which rounds up to a hundred.

- There it is, I mean... (audience laughs) - So the the idea that somehow we've allowed your stations to fall off of this map of where we have local news and- - We're in conversation with Madill about this.

We feel as though, yes, public media is very important to be represented here because it is local news- - Well, I'm speaking up on your behalf all the time- - Thank you.

Appreciate that.

- But I think the point is that one pushback against this is, we don't have just listeners who look down their nose at rural America, rural America is listening to NPR.

- That's absolutely right.

- Right?

- Absolutely right.

- You can have that one for free.

- Oh, thank you.

I'll take it.

No, but it is true.

I mean, Harvest Public Media is an absolutely excellent project out of our colleagues in Missouri and Kansas City, that is deliberately speaking to the needs of communities that are in the space of, you know, agriculture, agrarian needs.

- So the persistent threat in front of you, and it's coming outta this hearing, and frankly, it was the case before, it's the case after, is "defunding."

- Yes.

- "Defunding."

What does defunding mean?

- Well, in this context, it means taking the annual appropriation for public media out of the federal budget.

- So the impact of defunding, if we cut that source off, the impact would be effectively a hundred million dollars that goes to the stations, plus the money that stays at NPR HQ.

- Well, the money that doesn't go to the station doesn't stay at NPR HQ.

It stays with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which then uses it to support any number of additional programming.

So that last 21 actually does not go to you.

- That's correct.

- It stays with CPB.

- Last year we received 11.2 million.

The vast majority of which I don't have the exact number, but let's say a give or take nine to 10, went to funding the public radio satellite system, which is what we operate on behalf of the entire network.

- Again, back to critical infrastructure.

- Critical infrastructure.

So say about, 3 million came to NPR.

- Yeah, so you're not running a high overhead cost business.

- I'm not even sure we're profitable.

(Katherine laughs) (audience chuckles) - Right, no.

Obviously, you have the ability to raise money, and the stations have the ability to raise money to augment that, but the point is, that loss of funding would be across the country.

From station to station, a significant hit.

- Absolutely.

And I think that this is the really critical part.

Because people often say, you know, "But such and such station will be fine" - [Evan] Right.

- And there are stations for whom- - I've talked to people, they say, "Well, it's 6% or it's 8% of what our budget is.

We'll be able to find that money somewhere."

- But that is not true for the majority of rural stations, it's not true for stations where they serve communities that don't have the capacity to give.

And many of those rural stations in particular, their highest overhead is the maintenance of the infrastructure that allows them to cover that 100% of the country we were talking about earlier.

To be able to ensure that they've got towers in places all across the nation.

One of my colleagues...

Sorry, one of our station leaders was telling me about the investment that they've made in rural Eastern Kentucky, in putting repeaters in hollers.

I mean, and then you have to maintain those.

You have to have people who can drive all across enormous swaths of this beautiful nation.

And make sure that that infrastructure actually operates.

And so that is extremely expensive.

And if federal funding goes away, not only does that infrastructure go away, but it also means that we don't get to hear from Americans.

So right now, about 14% of NPR's reporting are journalists from local stations filing on air.

We'd like to get that number higher.

It's a really big priority.

The most expensive thing often for stations to program is local programming.

It's running a newsroom, it's hiring journalists.

That is the thing that is the most at risk, and that's what we want to protect.

- So the argument for defunding effectively reduces to two things from what I could tell from the hearing.

I've talked to some friends in Congress who are actually for defunding, and I'm like, "Okay, you need to explain this to me."

And what it's come down to is effectively two things.

One is that the competitive environment is not what it was when NPR was created.

So today, Chairman Comer said this yesterday.

Actually, you alluded to the number of choices- - Absolutely.

- That we all have as Americans now in your statement yesterday.

That, you know, back in the day, this was the only thing we had available.

Now, there are so many more places to get this kind of information.

We don't actually need a federally funded NPR.

The second thing is bias, it is said.

We certainly don't need federal money going into a series of stations that are producing biased content.

That's the critique.

Take those one at a time.

(Katherine chuckles) Tell me what's wrong with that view of NPR, because that really is the substantive case for defunding.

- Well, it's not a federally funded NPR, it's a federally funded public media network.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- That serves all Americans.

- Again, a hundred million of the 121 million, straight to station, so that's what we're actually talking about.

- Right, but they still think that there's bias.

- Well, we'll come back to that.

But in terms of the competitive aspect, what is the number?

I think it is 20% of Americans live in a news desert, other than public radio.

- [Evan] Right.

- It's a third of newspapers have closed in the last 20 years.

We're talking about places that cannot sustain local news.

Public media is what ensures that we have news that connects Americans, and I just talked about connection earlier, right?

That is absolutely vital for communities to remain healthy communities.

So that is- - So the idea that there is an adequate amount, just to be clear about this, the idea that there's an adequate amount of news and information being produced by other people today, wasn't the case before, so therefore we don't need these stations, you reject it.

- I would say that you would not see the closure of local news all across this nation if there was a market that would actually support it.

And that is what we're talking about.

So NPR makes up on average, 25% of a station's airtime.

But the audiences that it draws, and the donations that it draws, allows for the subsidization of that 75%, that includes a tremendous amount of local news.

- How does that work exactly?

I mean, I heard you say that, and I wondered about this.

So it's because of "Morning Edition", and "All Things Considered", and "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!

", and everything else, on these local stations, the audience is greater because of those shows.

And then those are the people who in the community will pitch in a couple of bucks and support the station.

- Again, 25% of programming NPR, on average, that's 50% of the total listening audience.

- Right.

- And so when you have your fundraising weeks, and everybody knows what these are, right?

- You're drawing from those people.

- Those are the folks who are listening and calling.

And not exclusively.

But again, 50% of the audience.

So, absolutely.

That means that we are creating an environment where we have a large enough audience to support all of this other really great programming that happens, and all of those other reporting on local communities.

And the market has clearly proven that it's incapable of doing that for a hundred percent of the country, and that's what public media's here to do.

- So really defunding actually costs these stations more than the a hundred million dollars across the country.

It costs them some of the local revenue that they generate on top of that.

- You could certainly make that argument, yes.

- Okay, so the competitive thing we've talked about.

Is the content that your folks are producing across the country biased?

- Well, I will speak for NPR.

Because again, there's a lot of public radio out there, and I'm sure you're familiar with this.

You know, I get calls with people complaining about a show that has nothing to do with us.

It's a local show, or it's a show from another producer.

You know, emails, things like that.

Talking about NPR, NPR is not biased in its coverage.

- You're talking about the national shows that- - The national news shows that we produce.

I'm speaking about our editorial news gathering function.

- Right.

- There is not bias in NPR.

I will say, I admitted to this the other day on...

Yesterday, yesterday.

It feels like a long time ago.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- Speaking with our editorial leadership.

You know, one thing that came up quite frequently was the Hunter Biden laptop story.

- [Evan] Indeed.

- And our editorial leadership today says, "You know, we wish we'd gotten on that earlier."

- And you, in fact, expressed a regret yesterday in the hearing.

That was one of the newsworthy things.

You came out whole from that hearing.

But what made news was your regret that you had not done a better job institutionally on the Hunter Biden story.

- Yeah.

And to be clear, I'm not on the editorial side of the organization, and I was not there at the time.

- But you represented it as your feeling, and as the feeling of the editorial team today.

- That's correct.

Because we feel as though it was a big story, and we didn't get on it early enough.

And so is that a mistake?

Sure.

We can acknowledge that we are not always perfect.

My belief is that it's not our goal to be trusted, it's our goal to be trustworthy.

Which means we get up every single day, and we try to do the best job so that we earn the worth.

That we are worth people's trust.

But we never assume that we're trusted.

- But they assume, speaking of assuming...

They assume that you didn't cover that story more fully because you're biased.

- I do understand that.

And that's why I think it's important to acknowledge when we're not.

- But you don't think that was bias?

- I was not there, and I cannot speak to the conversations that happened.

So I don't know what it went into it, but my view is that when we hear criticism, we need to take it on board, and we need to examine what it is that is generating this criticism.

- [Evan] Right.

- And determine what we're gonna do about it.

If we are going to serve the public interest, we need to hear from the public.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- And then we need to determine what of that is something that we can integrate in order to earn that public trust.

- You and I both know that the reality of this is, that reality doesn't matter.

And that the perception of reality matters.

(Katherine chuckles) And in this case, whether or not you're biased, there is an acknowledged perception, you acknowledged it yesterday.

There are people who perceive your content, content that you produce at the national level, and that the local stations produce as biased.

That is the perception in some corners.

- I think we have work to do to overcome that perception.

- Many of the people we heard from yesterday have that view.

- And I respect that view because I think it's important for us to hear it.

And I think it's important for us to do the work to overcome that perception.

- What's driving the perception?

- What's driving- - Why do they think that?

Because, you know, James Comer said himself yesterday, "I used to be on my tractor listening to NPR.

I thought it was great.

And then within the last couple of years, I think it's gone in the wrong direction."

What happened?

Where was the inflection point?

Where people came to believe it, even if it's not true?

- I think as you noted, trust in media is down.

There's a lot of compounding factors here, right?

And so I'm gonna give you an example, but this does not mean that this is the reason.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- I can say, we wanted to speak to a younger audience.

We wanted to earn younger listeners.

We took an approach over the last couple years that was aimed at doing that.

That did not have the impact that we had hoped in terms of earning younger listeners.

And I can tell you that some of our sort of core listeners who are a little bit older, felt as though it wasn't speaking to them.

And so, what issues are we covering in that instance?

Does that feel like we're covering issues that speak more to youth culture?

Does that feel as though that leans in a particular political direction?

I mean, right now that, if you look at youth culture, actually youth culture is quite mixed in terms of its political orientation.

But I wanna acknowledge and recognize that as we have tried different things, some of them have landed and some of them haven't.

Again, it's really important from my perspective to hold a mirror up and say, "What are we doing that's working?

What are we doing that's not?"

- You made a point of saying yesterday, "I'm the CEO, I don't have anything to do with the content in the newsroom."

- That's correct.

- Right.

So how do you get the newsroom to align with that core value?

How do you get them to stand back and say, "We have this big challenge in terms of how people perceive us.

We have to think about the work we're doing in a way that busts that perception, and presents the real intent behind our work."

- Well, I think it is, first of all, our colleagues in the newsroom are doing excellent work.

And oftentimes that work is not recognized for the excellent work that it is.

- Why is that?

- Well, I'll tell you... (Katherine chuckles) For one thing, I don't think public media has necessarily always done a great job of telling its own story.

- Yeah.

- And I think that that is also the case that we haven't invested in telling that story.

And I mean that in a very literal sense.

We don't do marketing.

And now, you could say marketing's a dirty word.

If your content's so good, you probably don't need it.

But we all know that you need to tell your own story.

And it's important for us to do that.

So for example, you know, we had an incredible story, it was earlier this year, last year, where we did work around an issue, a policy issue that was leading to the likelihood of veterans defaulting on their mortgages, due to some changes that were made during COVID.

The reporting that went into that led to policy changes that has kept thousands... Thousands of veteran families in their homes.

I don't hear us talking about that, and I don't hear other people talking about how great that work is that NPR has done.

- Yeah.

- Sorry, we're the only media organization I'm aware of that has a veteran's beat that isn't behind a paywall.

Right?

So we don't tell those stories.

We need to be telling those stories.

That's a big piece of it.

So on the reporting side, we're doing great work, and we're not necessarily talking about it.

We certainly aren't talking about it in ways that speak to the partisan sort of news cycle about what bias is.

You know, we did a lot of really great work too, around the fact that applications for FAFSA under the Biden administration were potentially going to lead to really significant negative consequences for young people looking to go to school.

We're not there talking about how we are doing that because it is one administration over the other.

We're just doing that work.

- [Evan] Right.

- So that's one piece of it, right?

The journalism is great, and we need to be talking about it more.

And then I think the other thing is, we need to reintroduce ourselves.

I already mentioned this issue of not speaking to people who... Or not thinking about what the needs are of people without college degrees.

It's a great opportunity for us to say, "Hey, have you thought about us recently?

We're public media.

We're here to serve you."

Our only interest is the American public.

That is our only obligation, and that is what we're here to do.

- Okay.

We're out of time.

- Oh, no!

- Really, I know.

I know, I know.

- I can keep going.

I bet you could too.

- There may be more time on the radio than there is on television.

I don't know.

(everyone laughing) You're very nice to come and to give us some time with you, especially in this busy week.

So Katherine Maher, thanks so much.

Good to see you.

- My pleasure.

Thank you.

(audience clapping) We'd love to have you join us in the studio.

Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard, to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes.

- Journalism is actually in a remarkably self-regulating industry.

Good journalists, everybody knows and respects them, and bad journalists, everybody knows and does not respect them.

And those folks don't tend to keep working at good organizations, right?

The public doesn't know that.

There's no Hippocratic Oath.

We don't talk about that.

There's no bar that we can look to in terms of, you know, different professions with professional standards.

- [Presenter] Support for "Overheard with Evan Smith" comes from... Hillco Partners.

A Texas government affairs consultancy.

Claire and Carl Stuart.

Christine and Philip Dial.

And the Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation and public affairs communication.

Ellergroup.com.

(lighthearted music)