In Denial: Bill Moyers Claims 'We've Heard No Reporter -- Not a One' Advocate Liberal Ideas on NPR

From: Newsbusters

Katrina Vanden Heuvel isn’t alone when she claimed on MSNBC that her magazine The Nation wasn’t leftish, it was “transpartisan” and “independent.” Bill Moyers (alongside Michael Winship) has penned a third loopy attack on conservative critics of NPR. It’s gotten so loopy that Moyers claims he’s never heard anyone advocate liberal ideas on NPR:

For one, when we described the right-wing media machine as NPR’s "long-time nemesis," it was not to suggest that somehow public radio is its left-wing opposite. When it comes to covering and analyzing the news, the reverse of right isn't left; it's independent reporting that toes neither party nor ideological line. We’ve heard no NPR reporter -- not a one -- advocating on the air for more government spending (or less), for the right of abortion (or against it), for or against gay marriage, or for or against either political party, especially compared to what we hear from Fox News and talk radio on all of these issues and more.

Moyers brazenly claims that it’s conservative NPR critics who can’t stand debates or differing points of view, and that they loathe NPR because it’s “fact-driven” and has a high regard for evidence:

So what do conservatives really mean when they accuse NPR of being "liberal?" They mean it's not accountable to their worldview as conservatives and partisans. They mean it reflects too great a regard for evidence and is too open to reporting different points of views of the same event or idea or issue. Reporting that by its very fact-driven nature often fails to confirm their ideological underpinnings, their way of seeing things (which is why some liberals and Democrats also become irate with NPR).

Moyers reaches a rhetorical climax by claiming that conservatives are the forces of culturally-induced ignorance (and the lefties, by contrast, have cornered the nation’s market on wisdom):

That's why our favorite new word is "agnotology." According to the website WordSpy, it means "the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt," a concept developed in recent years by two historians of science at Stanford University, Robert Proctor and his wife, Londa Schiebinger.

Believing that global climate change is a myth is one example of the kind of ignorance agnotologists investigate. Or the insistence by the tobacco industry that the harm caused by smoking is still in dispute. Or the conviction that Barack Obama is a closet Muslim, and a radical one at that, who may not even be from America.

Those first two illusions have been induced by big business in a cynical attempt to keep pumping profits from deadly pollutants, whether fossil fuels or nicotine. The third, dreamed up by fantasists of the right-wing fringe, is in its own way just as toxic and has been tacitly, sometimes audibly, encouraged by certain opponents of President Obama who would perpetuate any prevarication to further blockade his agenda and deny him and fellow Democrats reelection.

In an attempt at sleight of hand, Moyers claims that NPR isn’t liberal because it’s not the polar opposite of conservative – it’s “non-ideological journalism” that “threatens the conservative belief system,” so it must be quashed:

To the accusers of NPR, the created reality of however they define "liberal" is not the same as what they mean when they call themselves "conservative." If it were, the two would be exact reverse images of each other. Where media are concerned, all you have to do to know this is not the case is to hold them up, side-by-side. If "liberal" were the counterpoint to "conservative," NPR would be the mirror of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and James O'Keefe, including the use of their techniques as well as content. Clearly it isn't. To charge otherwise is a phony gambit aimed at nothing less than quashing the public's access to non-ideological journalism, narrowing viewpoints to all but one. We know from first-hand experience that any journalist whose reporting threatens the conservative belief system gets sliced and diced by its apologists and polemicists at Fox and on talk radio.

Moyers completely dissolved his argument by arguing that radical Pacifica Radio is his "fact-based" model for asking "hard questions" about how corporations unfairly dominate our free society:

Americans need more and sustained reporting on what the journalist William Greider calls "the hard questions of governance" -- those questions of how and why some interests are allowed to dominate the government's decision making while others are excluded. Who gets the money and who has to pay? Who must be heard on this question and who can be safely ignored? None execute this kind of reporting better than Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on "Democracy Now," which, while carried by many public radio and television stations, is not distributed nationally by either NPR or PBS. Public media -- radio and television -- too rarely challenge the dictum: "News is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity."

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2011/03/25/denial-bill-moyers-claims-weve-heard-no-reporter-not-one-advocate-libera#ixzz1Hll2ONgO

What’s Killing NPR? It’s Not Bad PR

What’s Killing NPR? It’s Not Bad PR: "pMedia watcher Howard Kurtz is generally a keen observer of how the media works, but his piece in Newsweek about National Public Radio’s troubles shows that for all of his smarts, the longtime Washington Post/CNN figure is still too far inside the Beltway to understand why the network is viewed as a government-funded jobs program [...]/p"

NPR: tripped up by its own elitism

From: NYPOST.com by Juan Williams

It just keeps happening. NPR's leader ship keeps tripping over its microphone wires and then asking everybody else to plug them back in.

I know everybody thinks I must be in a vindictive mood, celebrating the sudden departure of NPR CEO Vivian Schiller after her handpicked personal fund-raiser was caught on tape disparaging Tea Party activists and Jews and taking more shots at me. I'm human and do have some thoughts, but it's OK to keep them to myself: Schiller's very public missteps allow everyone to draw their own conclusions about her.

I'm not being vindictive when I say that NPR's leaders had become ingrown and arrogant to the point that they lost sight of journalism as the essential product of NPR. People like Schiller and Ellen Weiss, the head of news for NPR, who made it her life's work to fire me, came to think of themselves as smarter than anyone else.

Schiller: CEO resigned after serial missteps.

They felt no need to answer to any critic. Any approach at variance with their own was considered traitorous and a basis for exiling them to the Gulag -- or, in my case, firing me.

The recent videotape showing NPR chief fund-raiser Ron Schiller (no relation to Vivian Schiller) is just an open microphone on what I've been hearing from NPR top executives and editors for years. They're willing to do anything in service to any liberal with money, and then they'll turn around and in self-righteous indignation claim that they have cleaner hands than anybody in the news business who accepts advertising or expresses a point of view.

Ron Schiller's performance on videotape -- which included lecturing two young men pretending to be Muslims on how to select wine -- is a "South Park"-worthy caricature of the American liberal as an effete, Volvo-driving, wine-sipping, NPR-listening dunderhead.

NPR's many outstanding journalists are caught in a game where they are trying to please a leadership that doesn't want to hear stories that contradict the official point of view. I'm not just talking about conservatives but also the far left, the poor -- anybody who didn't fit into leadership's design of NPR as the official voice of comfortable, liberal-leaning, upper-income America.

This just confirms my belief that it is time for our government to get out of the business of funding NPR. The idea, to me, of government-funded media doesn't fit the United States.

Journalists should not be doing news to please any party or any elected official -- out of fear of losing funding. Over the last several years, NPR's leadership had become so obsessed with the money issue, as evidenced by Ron Schiller's behavior, that it had started to corrupt the newsgathering process because non-profit fund-raising has devolved into an underworld cesspool.

The result is that NPR's leadership under the likes of Weiss and the two Schillers had been diminishing its own brand. They created an anti-intellectual environment that took delight and pride in censoring journalists like me for honestly admitting that people dressed in Muslim garb make me nervous at airports. They had lost slight of promoting debates and providing information that is essential for people who want to be well-informed as citizens of a thriving democracy.

I am still insulted when I hear Ron Schiller, no doubt reflecting his boss, Vivian Schiller, making the case that my firing was a good thing, and that it was just handled badly. This was not a process problem. I violated no journalistic standard that should have resulted in my being fired. It's only in the very small world and small thinking of NPR's leadership that appearing on Fox News Channel and speaking about a feeling in the context of a larger debate somehow make for a bad journalist who needs to be muzzled.

My hope is that the great journalists who are at NPR will carry on and that the NPR audience will support them, especially at the level of local member stations, where in many places NPR is a community treasure.

I'm still an NPR fan, but I'm no fan of the self-serving, self-righteous thinking that is at the top level of NPR in Washington and that has corrupted a once-great brand.

Glenn Beck bites NPR sting video

From: Chicago Tribune, Clarence Page

Guess who’s raising serious ethical questions about conservative James O’Keefe’s sting video that shook up NPR’s management? Right-wing icon and self-described "rodeo clown" Glenn Beck.

Yes, Glenn Beck.

Beck’s website The Blaze, of all places, examined O'Keefe's unedited video of NPR executives caught in the sting and found grossly misleading edits.

As I recount in today's column, the issue of government-funded broadcasting heated up after prankster O'Keefe's hidden camera caught NPR fundraising executive Ron Schiller, since departed, labeling the tea party movement as "racist" and "xenophobic" and saying NPR would be "better off in the long run" without federal funding.

As video editor and producer Pam Key at the Blaze reveals:

- Schiller’s liberal-ness has been greatly exaggerated. His controversial description of the tea party movement as “xenophobic…seriously racist people” turns out in the raw video to be quoting an unnamed Republican ambassador, not himself as he appears to be in the edited version.- the video actually undermines news accounts that NPR executives thought they were meeting with representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood.

- The impression that Schiller thinks liberals are more educated than conservatives also is undermined in video that O’Keefe omitted. Video Schiller turns out to be reluctant to criticize the education of conservatives and another NPR executive, Betsy Liley, aggressively defends the intelligence of Fox News viewers, despite goading from the impersonators.

- Schiller’s anti-Republican sentiments captured on the edited video leave out the raw video of him speaking favorably about the GOP, his own Republican heritage and his belief in fiscal conservatism.

- Schiller goes in to greater persuasive detail of how In the raw video, however, Schiller explains the risk to local stations in more detail and why NPR is doing “everything we can to advocate for federal funding.”

- After saying the public radio network would be better off "in the long run” without federal funding, Schiller's unedited remarks say more about how smaller NPR member stations, particularly in rural areas, probably would “go dark” to NPR without federal help.

That, by the way, raises a point that does not get enough attention, in my view: the value of government support for public radio and TV that supports our shared, common American culture.

That includes NPR's value in covering overseas news and other important news beats that commercial broadcasters might rather overlook in their pursuit of Charlie Sheen and Lady Ga Ga.

Since I usually am appalled by Glenn Beck’s avoidance of facts that might get in the way of a good paranoid rant, I happily salute The Blaze for its diligent pursuit of truth,accuracy and fair play, at least in this instance. I'm not alone. The Blaze is drawing praise from such unlikely sites as the Columbia Journalism Review.

Now, I wonder, will Beck on his Fox News show demand that O'Keefe appear for a live interview to explain himself? I’ll be waiting.

NPR Executives Caught On Video | Betsy Liley Attempts To Take Anonymous Donations From Muslim Front Group To Hide From Government

From: The Daily Caller

New video released Thursday afternoon indicates National Public Radio intended to accept a $5 million donation from fictitious Muslim Brotherhood front group Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) Trust – and that the publicly funded radio network might have helped MEAC make the donation anonymously to protect it from a federal government audit.

When a man posing as Ibrahim Kasaam asked, “It sounded like you were saying NPR would be able to shield us from a government audit, is that correct?” NPR’s senior director of institutional giving, Betsy Liley, responded, “I think that is the case, especially if you are anonymous. I can inquire about that.” According to conservative James O’Keefe, whose Project Veritas organization conducted the NPR sting organization, the man posing as Kasaam made two follow-up phone calls to Liley after their lunch.

Liley said a $5 million donation would amount to about “10 years of support.”

Kasaam follows up by asking: “The fact that NPR is not only a tax-exempt organization, but also receives direct contributions from the government — does that invite some sort of government oversight or government examination of contributions, et cetera?”

Liley answered: “They have audited our programs at times and, I think, as part of that, they can look at our audited financials. If you are concerned in any way about that, that’s one reason you might want to be an anonymous donor. And, we would certainly, if that was your interest, want to shield you from that.”
Liley mentioned a precedent at NPR — in more than $80 million in donations from universities.

“As I said, like this guy that I used to work with who gave – where I used to work for the university, I don’t know, $5 or $10 or $12 million, he was just entered into the database as anonymous,” Liley said. “I knew who he was and about five other people did, but there was no paperwork in any official place that identified him as that donor.”

With that remark, Liley was likely referring to her time at Purdue University, where she was the assistant vice president for corporate and foundation relations. Liley said she and NPR have taken millions of dollars in donations anonymously before.

“We also got an $8 million gift,” Liley said. “I don’t know if you remember this; about two years ago a number of institutions, higher ed institutions, all with women as presidents, got donations that ranged from $5 million to $12 million. They were never identified who the gifts were from, but they totaled about $80 million dollars.”

The man posing as Kasaam asked Liley whether NPR accepts anonymous gifts on a regular basis, and if the process they were talking about was common among NPR fundraisers.

“I don’t know if they – I know at Purdue we were a public institution, so we were part of government, and therefore our books could have been, you know, open to any inquiry from a member of the public,” Liley said. “You’re a private nonprofit, and so we have a different standard. We do comply with government audit but I don’t think that they go into our donor database.”

Following their phone calls, Liley checked with NPR’s senior management, and sent an e-mail to the man posing as Kasaam saying MEAC was cleared to make an anonymous donation of $5 million.

“NPR can list MEAC as an anonymous donor in our database, which would mean we would not disclose the organization’s name,” Liley wrote in the e-mail to the fictitious Kasaam. “We do not publish a list of gifts, so it would not be an issue there.”

Liley’s e-mail addressed the MEAC representatives’ concerns about government audits: “The audits of our governmental grants are conducted by the same firm we hire to do our NPR financial audit.”

Liley wrote that she’s “awaiting a draft of a gift agreement from our legal counsel and will share it when I have it.”

That e-mail directly contradicts NPR’s public statements issued in the wake of O’Keefe’s first video. “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,” NPR spokeswoman Dana Davis Rehm said in NPR’s official response.

The new video shows recently ousted NPR Chief Executive Vivian Schiller knew of her subordinates’ meeting with the Muslim Brotherhood front group. “Vivian knows about our meeting as my email indicated I think for her to feel – for us to prep her appropriately for the next meeting, it would be great to have some more information from you guys,” Liley said. “But Ron and she talked, and I shared notes from our meeting about kind of where you are in your interest, and so I think for us to do kind of our due diligence, it would also be helpful to get some of the background information [on the organization and on its leadership.”

Liley was referring to now former NPR Foundation president Ron Schiller, who made disparaging remarks about the Tea Party movement and Jewish people. He was set to work for the Aspen Institute, but has since decided against going to work there.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/03/10/new-video-npr-was-going-to-accept-muslim-education-action-center-donation-and-hide-it-from-the-government/#ixzz1GGTSzZZ9