NPR has opinions about Tea Partiers...

Read the original post here.


via Wall Street Journal:


The Other White Meat - WSJ.com

By JAMES TARANTO^[1]

Give NPR this: Its own online report^[2] on the embarrassing sting/prank is fair and balanced:

NPR's then-senior vice president for fundraising Ron Schiller is seen and heard on a videotape released this morning telling two men who were posing as members of a fictitious Muslim Action Education [sic] Center that:

--"The Tea Party is fanatically involved in people's personal lives and very fundamental Christian--I wouldn't even call it Christian. It's this weird evangelical kind of move."

--"Tea Party people" aren't "just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it's scary. They're seriously racist, racist people."

--"I think what we all believe is if we don't have Muslim voices in our schools, on the air . . . it's the same thing we faced as a nation when we didn't have female voices." In the heavily edited tape, that comment followed Schiller being told by one of the men that their organization "was originally founded by a few members of the Muslim Brotherhood in America." There's no sign in the edited tape that Schiller reacted in any way after being told of the group's alleged connection to an Islamic group that appeared to be connected with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.

--That NPR "would be better off in the long run without federal funding," a position in direct conflict with the organization's official position.

The Muslim Education Action Center^[3] website now describes the group as "an element of 'Project Muslim Brotherhood' by James O'Keefe's Project Veritas." You may remember O'Keefe as the twentysomething man who in 2009 donned his grandmother's jacket and visited various offices of Acorn, the left-wing "community organizing" outfit, to ask for help in trafficking underage sex slaves, which was forthcoming.

Last month two O'Keefe associates took Schiller and his colleague Betsy Liley, director of institutional giving, to lunch at Washington's Café Milano, and kept a video recorder rolling throughout the meal. "They were allegedly interested in having their organization donate $5 million to NPR," reports NPR.
NPR adds that NPR's Dana Rehm, who carries the unwieldy title of senior vice president of marketing, communications and external relations, issued an official statement in response to the exposé:

The fraudulent organization represented in this video repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept.

We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for.

Rehm adds that "Schiller announced last week that he is leaving NPR for another job," a move that she later said is unconnected to the video.
"Ron Schiller embraces and lives the values that we share as a community," Walter Isaacson, Schiller's new boss at the Aspen Institute^[4], said in a press release. In fairness, we should note that the press release is dated March 3, five days before the video's release.
The Washington Examiner's Byron York^[5] reports the video has caught the attention of at least one pork-busting congressman, Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado:

"I am amazed at the condescension and arrogance that we saw in the sting video," Lamborn told me. "They seem to be viewing themselves as elites living in an ivory tower, and they are obviously out of touch with ordinary Americans."

The video has already become part of the debate currently raging on Capitol Hill about funding for NPR. "The real crux of the video was when the guy . . . admitted that they could survive and would even be better off without federal funding," says Lamborn. "That's what I'm hoping happens."

Meanwhile, today's New York Times^[6] features an editorial denouncing Rep. Peter King, a suburban New York Republican who plans to hold hearings later this week on radicalization of American Muslims:

Al Qaeda is aggressively recruiting Muslims in this country, he says. He wants to investigate the terror group's methods and what he claims is the eagerness of many young American Muslims to embrace it.

Notice that the hearing is solely about Muslims. It might be perfectly legitimate for the Homeland Security Committee to investigate violent radicalism in America among a wide variety of groups, but that doesn't seem to be Mr. King's real interest.

The Times editorialists give no examples of other "groups" among the "wide variety" that they think may be subject to al Qaeda recruitment. Perhaps they mean "Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media," the group the Timesscapegoated^[7], knowing full well that they were doing so falsely, for the shooting two months ago of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
NPR's Rehm did not specify which comments of Schiller's "appalled" the network. It's hard to believe his oikophobic attitudes toward "scary" "white, middle-America gun-toting" types--attitudes that precisely match those of the New York Times, the leading institution of the formerly mainstream media--are anything out of the ordinary at NPR.
Maybe she just meant NPR was appalled by his suggestion that NPR could do without federal funding. But why can't it? The New York Times manages to do so even though it's up against heavily subsidized competition on the radio.