NPR Continues to Implode
The coverage of the surreptitiously recorded footage you can watch here has been emphasizing Ron Schiller’s description of the Tea Party people as racists, and other things directly offensive to the conservatives behind the stunt and its promotion. But I suggest you watch the whole video carefully. If you do, and you have the conscience of a normal person, you will never again be able to contribute a dime to NPR.
Even if one already has low expectations of NPR executives and is primed to expect the worst, the video is shocking, sickening, and chilling. Ron Schiller, a top executive apparently in charge of NPR’s non-federal fundraising, grows increasingly comradely with his luncheon companions even after learning that they are (pretending to be) a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, a fanatical group that strives to impose the most oppressive forms of Sharia upon the Islamic populations over which it gains political power. He nods in enthusiastic agreement when his new pals refer to the imaginary Jewish control of the media. He is eager to point out that this is a problem with all those Jewish-owned newspapers, but that NPR is OK because nobody owns them. He also nods in thorough accord as his Muslim Brotherhood friends offer appreciation for the fact that NPR presents the Hamas and Hezbollah point of view, not merely the Israeli one. I suspect the the perpetrators of this little sting had no idea how much pay dirt they were going to hit, else they would have been prepared with even more bait. There can be really little doubt at this point at how Schiller would have reacted to the gift of a deluxe edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Another high-powered NPR executive, Betsy Liley, the director of institutional giving, is there most of the time too, and just as noddingly chummy as Schiller. She pipes up to say how much she loves the nickname “National Palestinian Radio”, and, in a bizarre non-sequitur, to sputter that the U.S. imprisoned Japanese-Americans during World War II.
There is more. You should watch for yourself, if you are not too easily disturbed.
I am glad that I took the decision a few years ago, despite some excellent programming, to stop contributing to NPR. This was mainly because of the increasingly brazen corporate advertising (now with music), but the decision was made easier by the sense of something unhealthy at the core: something insular, smug, self-righteous. This bit of secretly recorded video shows that there are people infecting the top rungs of NPR management who are so morally bankrupt that they can cheerfully lunch with a couple of characters who wear their fascism on their sleeves and not so much as raise an eyebrow.
This should sadden you regardless of your position on the (largely artificial) political spectrum. The conservatives will eat this up, and it probably dooms NPR’s federal funding at least for a while. The Tea Party people look to me like a bunch of yahoos, and it’s hard to think of a living politician more deserving of contempt than their spiritual leader, Ms. Palin. So it’s not “politics” that causes some of us to attribute NPR’s continuing implosion to the rottenness at its core, and to have to grimly acknowledge that they will deserve the crescendo of Republican abuse coming their way.
Update, 11 March 2011: The full, unedited video is now available. A lengthy segment of audio has been erased to protect the safety of an NPR reporter operating in a foreign country. This raises an interesting question. If the NPR executives were saying things that put this reporter at risk, why were they saying them in a restaurant, to people they had just met and whom they obviously didn’t know anything about?
