NPR Goes Down under the Weight of Just Three Words: Minimum Viable Truth
NPR CEO believes in “minimum viable truth.” If you aren’t familiar, don’t feel bad. Few are. It's not journalism—it's propaganda with a philosophy degree.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting's announcement on Friday, August 1, that it will run out of money in September and thereafter shutter, marks the culmination of a predictable decline for an institution that abandoned its mission in favor of promoting ideology—a $1-billion defunding that didn't happen overnight but was crystallized in one damning revelation.
The Berliner Bombshell: 87 Democrats, Zero Republicans
In May 2021, Uri Berliner, a 25-year NPR veteran, did something simple yet devastating: he looked up the voter registration of NPR’s newsroom staff in Washington, D.C.
The results: 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans.
Not one. That's more politically uniform than Pravda during the Soviet era.
When Berliner presented these findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting, the response wasn’t denial or concern. It was, in Berliner’s words, “profound indifference.”
Think about that. A major news organization, funded by taxpayers across the political spectrum, had created an ideological monoculture so complete that not a single Republican voice existed in editorial positions. By 2023, per Berliner’s essay, only 11 percent of NPR’s audience described themselves as conservative, down from 26 percent in 2011.
When you lose more than half your conservative audience in a decade, you’re not doing journalism—you’re preaching to the choir.
As Berliner would write in The Free Press: “An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.”
Enter Katherine Maher: NPR’s Middle Finger to Its Critics
Faced with Berliner’s documented proof of ideological capture, NPR’s board had a choice: address the problem or double down. They chose to give their critics the middle finger.
In March 2024, they appointed Katherine Maher as CEO—someone who had never been a reporter, editor, publisher, or broadcaster. This wasn’t tone-deaf leadership. This was a deliberate message: We hear your concerns about ideological uniformity, and we’re responding by hiring someone who doesn’t believe in objective truth.
Here’s where it gets surreal: In a 2021 TED Talk, Maher, then CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, actually said this out loud:
“We shift from focusing on one key truth to instead finding minimum viable truth. Minimum viable truth means getting it right enough, enough of the time to be useful enough to enough people. It means setting aside our bigger belief systems and not being quite so fussy about perfection.”
She went further, arguing that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
Getting what things done, ma’am?
This wasn’t a slip of the tongue. This was her operational philosophy. And NPR’s board knew exactly what they were getting. Board Chair Jennifer Ferro praised Maher as “an extraordinary leader who has tackled the issues around reliable and accessible information for all.”
That last phrase—”reliable and accessible information for all”—would prove bitterly ironic.
Meanwhile, I can only imagine what it was like over at the Public Broadcasting System, trying to keep their heads down, trying to figure out where they could send Rick Steves to gin up some interest in PBS, or what they could Ken Burns-ify into some attention. And then they look across the street at NPR, and see the anarchy and chaos happening there.
You could argue, and I don’t know that there would be a tremendous amount of pushback, but PBS’s part in misuse of taxpayer dollars resonates as a distant second in the two-horse race to oblivion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
PBS had gone woke, made some terrible choices in programming, and its news and commentary had become virtually irrelevant through a lack of ideological diversity and fresh ideas. Its news has possessed a decided left tilt to it for years.
But its news division just never had that much impact to begin with. Their nightly program is “watched” – I presume – primarily by people who fall asleep during “Grantchester.” And, to the credit of PBS, I have no evidence that it ever openly discussed manufacturing a minimally viable truth approach to journalism.
One might, however, argue that any funding for PBS news was simply waste rather than a financial instrument for corruption.
To put a finer point to it, as lame as PBS’s news products are, they rarely present the same ideological agita that listening to an hour of NPR consistently produces for audiences in the middle and right of center.
The end to National Public Radio’s federal funding didn’t happen overnight. More like suddenly, and then all at once.
Collapse at the Speed of Sound
Within just one month of Maher’s arrival, Berliner went public with his whistleblower essay—years of internal warnings finally exploding into public view.
He detailed NPR’s systematic failures:
The Russiagate obsession that proved unfounded;
The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story; and
The one-sided COVID coverage that dismissed the lab leak theory as racist conspiracy mongering.
The timing was no coincidence. NPR had answered Berliner’s concerns about bias by hiring a CEO who embodied that bias.
Maher’s response was textbook gaslighting. Instead of addressing Berliner’s data and documented bias, she suggested he had questioned “whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity.”
She reframed his fact-based critique as an identity-based attack.
Within days, Berliner resigned, writing: “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.”
The dominoes fell fast. Conservative lawmakers seized on Berliner’s revelations and forced them into a public forum for discussion. Then along comes President Trump’s 2025 executive order, which cited violations of the Public Broadcasting Act’s neutrality requirements.
The result: complete defunding. Half a billion dollars gone from NPR, another half-billion from PBS.
Brothers and sisters, let me tell you: I miss Prairie Home Companion, Click and Clack, Bob Ross, and Mr. Rogers. If reruns of Gunsmoke can outperform new network shows, then perhaps those four could make their own respective comebacks.
Why This Matters
At The Center Square, we operate on a different principle: facts are facts. Truth isn’t negotiable, consensus-based, or “minimum viable.” It’s discovered through investigation, verified through multiple sources, and reported without fear or favor. This isn’t a conservative or liberal position—it’s Journalism 101.
We don’t take government money. We hire journalists from across the political spectrum because intellectual diversity strengthens coverage. And we never, ever, subscribe to the notion of “minimum viable truth.”
There’s no such thing as “minimum viable truth” in journalism. Those three words reveal everything wrong with modern media: the belief that truth is flexible, that narrative matters more than facts, that getting it “right enough” is good enough.
The First Amendment protects the press from government interference precisely because journalism requires independence. When government funds media, when newsrooms become ideological monocultures, when CEOs treat truth as negotiable, the result is inevitable.
The Real Cost
The $500 million in lost federal funding is just a number. The real loss is the collapse of an institution that could have served all Americans. NPR had the infrastructure, the talent, and the mission to be something special. Instead, under leaders like Maher, it became just another progressive echo chamber.
Katherine Maher wasn’t the cause of NPR’s failure—she was its final insult. A CEO who believed in “minimum viable truth” leading a newsroom with minimum viable diversity, serving a minimum viable slice of America. When your response to “we have no Republicans in our newsroom” is to hire someone who thinks truth is negotiable, you’re not fixing the problem—you’re flaunting it.
NPR welcomed in minimum viable truth. They got maximum viable consequences.
That’s not a partisan position. It’s the foundation of journalism itself.
Chris Krug is the publisher of The Center Square, a news service that provides state and local government coverage across America without taking government funding.