Reporters and commentators for National Public Radio are absolutely lockstep with each other in what they say and even how they say it. That’s what I thought of when I read a statement from NPR’s brand-new CEO borrowing, accidentally I assume, from intelligent design theorist Michael Behe. Katherine Maher was protesting an insider’s recent criticism of the network’s “absence of viewpoint diversity.” But isn’t that absence just obvious? Not to Ms. Maher. 

From the New York Post:

Award-winning NPR business editor Uri Berliner’s lengthy essay in The Free Press was “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning,” Katherine Maher, the radio network’s 42-year-old president, complained in a letter to staffers.

“Our people represent America, our irreducibly complex nation,” Maher wrote Friday, in a response that did not address Berliner’s evidence of the news organization’s relentlessly leftist slant. 

“We succeed through our diversity.”

Hah. Professor Behe is probably not the first in the English language to have put the words “irreducibly” and “complex” together in a sentence. But he’s the one who made the expression famous, in his book Darwin’s Black Box, describing a quality in biology indicative of design. I had to laugh. In a loose sense, America may be “irreducibly complex” but NPR sure is not. And “diverse”? America is, but NPR certainly isn’t. 

But Ms. Maher, since you raise the subject, here’s an idea. Why not bring on an ID scientist to talk about irreducibly complex systems in life and what they say about the viability of Darwinian theory? Yeah, I’m not holding my breath.