NPR in a Nutshell

NPR in a Nutshell

The New York Sun predicted back on October 23, 2010 that the current Republican effort to defund National Public Radio just may succeed even though previous attempts at cutting off NPR from the public trough have failed and despite the fact “the recipients of taxpayer funding will try to make a constitutional case that they can not be cut off for content.”

NPR and its primary money supplier, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, CPB, which itself is itself federally funded, have yet to make that freedom of the press/speech case but give it time. As of now, NPR is boasting that it doesn’t need government subsidies. We should take it at its word and end them.

The latest brouhaha over NPR began with the firing of political commentator Juan Williams who had worked for NPR for a decade and years later began making appearances on the Fox News Network. NPR considered that treasonous mutiny, in direct conflict with NPR’s leftist programming, although it couldn’t quite say that.

Instead, NPR waited for more substantive justification to send Williams packing.

Williams, who is far from conservative, furnished that justification on October 20, 2010 during a guest appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor” when he spoke a truth with which any thinking air traveller would concur: “Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot,” Williams said. “You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Notwithstanding his incongruous non-sequitur of comparing the civil rights struggle with Muslim terrorism–Williams subsequently called NPR “an all white operation–Juan had given NPR CEO Vivian Schiller and her cronies the ammunition they needed, a pretext to dump him. Insensitivity to Muslims was inconsequential; daring to appear on the vile Fox network–and on O’Reilly!–was Williams’ unforgivable sin.

Five months down the road, after Williams unaccountably snagged a plum multimillion gig at Fox and after Schiller took heat even from liberals, she conceded that, “We handled the situation badly” and the Williams episode was a breakdown in “personnel processes about who calls who when.” Without identifying those processes, she said those issues have been “fixed” and that NPR has “undertaken a thorough review” of its news code of ethics: http://tiny.cc/zbxuu

Schiller didn’t clarify that code, either.

Her die was cast after other NPR scandals hit the . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=3846)