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 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.
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