Katherine Maher, the new CEO of National Public Radio, tries to defend herself against accusations of her First Amendment ambivalence. She awkwardly replies to her critics in the Wall Street Journal with the following, ““It is by no means a personal perspective; it’s a very bad faith distortion of a nuanced perspective on a policy landscape issue.”  WTF? I have absolutely no idea what she means here. To be fair, I am not sure how Christopher Rufo, one of her critics, determined her position on the First Amendment from this video link.

She speaks in an academic jargon that is meaningless to the vast majority of Americans. This is fine if she is sitting down to lunch in a university cafeteria with a bunch of Social Science professors. On the other hand, if she is trying to defend herself against the idea that she is an Ivory Tower Academic Elitist, she might try using plainer language because, unfortunately for her, every time she speaks she sounds like an Ivory Tower Academic Elitist.