NPR CEO Katherine Maher recently traveled to London for the city’s SXSW festival because, apparently, she thinks London is the place to be when she needs to convince American lawmakers not to rescind her federal funding. While in London, Maher sat down for an interview with CNN International’s Max Foster that aired on his Monday installment of What We Know, where she insisted that NPR wasn’t on the left because nobody really knows what “left” means. She also claimed NPR is needed in order for people to have safe drinking water after hurricanes.
Foster had more of a declaration than a question when he opined, “America's got lots of networks that aren't so common here in Europe, which are opinion-based networks, and that's a different culture. But you have to serve everyone. So you're trying to stay in the middle. And that's become harder.”
Maher agreed, “I think it's harder insofar as people don't agree on what the middle is now. It's not harder in the sense of our commitment to ensuring we're hearing from different voices. I also tend to think there's this perspective that, you know, people can be reduced to sort of political platforms, but in reality, when you drill down on people's preferences, they're far more complex than that.”
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