12:57 p.m. | Updated | NPR was jolted Tuesday by the release of a videotape that showed one of the organization’s fund-raising executives repeatedly criticizing Republicans and Tea Party supporters.
The executive, Ronald Schiller, was recorded secretly by the Republican filmmaker and mischief-maker James O’Keefe. On the videotape, Mr. Schiller tells people posing as Muslim philanthropists that the Republican party has been “hijacked” by the Tea Party and that Tea Party supporters are “seriously racist, racist people.” Mr. Schiller indicates that he is sharing his personal point of view, not NPR’s.
Dana Davis Rehm, a spokeswoman for NPR, said in a statement Tuesday, “We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for.”
The release of the video comes at a sensitive time for NPR. Republicans in Congress who view NPR as biased are trying to cut federal funding for its local stations across the country. Some quickly seized on the video as further evidence of their views and further reason to reduce funding for the stations. Doug Lamborn, Republican of Colorado, told the Washington Examiner that the video showed “condescension and arrogance.”
On the secretly recorded video, Mr. Schiller, whose job is to solicit non-federal funding for NPR, says it is “very clear” that the organization would be “better off in the long-run without federal funding.” He adds, “The challenge right now is that if we lost it all together, we would have a lot of stations go dark.”
An edited version of the video was published by The Daily Caller on Tuesday morning. The unedited video is also available.
Mr. Schiller is on the way out of NPR: he announced last week that he was taking a job at the Aspen Institute, an international nonprofit. “There is no connection between the video and his decision to leave NPR,” the organization told staffers in an internal memorandum. The memo added that the new job is “closer to his home in Colorado.”
Mr. Schiller is not related to Vivian Schiller, the chief executive of NPR.
Mr. Schiller was essentially set up by Mr. O’Keefe, who has become well-known for such stunts. The people he is heard talking to on the videotape are posing as members of the Muslim Education Action Center Trust, a fictional group. They falsely claim that they want to donate up to $5 million to public media.
NPR said in the statement that the fake group members “repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept.”
Mr. Schiller and another NPR executive, Betsy Liley, met the fake group members for lunch at Cafe Milano, a staple of the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. A video camera was placed near the group’s table. Early on in the conversation, Mr. Schiller says, “Now I’ll talk personally as opposed to wearing my NPR hat.” Later, he adds caveats like “in my personal opinion.”
At one point, one of the fake group members jokes, “I like it when you take your NPR hat off.”
The fake group members bring up topics in an apparent effort to keep Mr. Schiller talking. For example, they tell him that their group was founded “by a few members of the Muslim Brotherhood in America” and that it donates money to Muslim schools.
Mr. Schiller answers, “I think what we all believe is if we don’t have Muslim voices in our schools, on the air, I mean, it’s the same thing we faced as a nation when we didn’t have female voices.”
Conservative blogs noted that a Web site set up for the fake Muslim group says it wants to “spread acceptance of Sharia across the world.” The Time magazine columnist James Poniewozik wrote Tuesday that “the prank — which uses ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ more often in screen titles than in the actual conversation — seems premised on the idea that meeting with a Muslim group and being in favor of including Muslim perspectives is inherently wrong,”
At another point in the secretly recorded lunch, Mr. Schiller criticizes what he calls an “anti-intellectual move on the part of a significant part of the Republican party.” He says that the pursuit of knowledge is “traditionally something that Democrats have funded and Republicans have not funded.”
Some Republicans in the House of Representatives have targeted NPR in recent weeks. Mike Riksen, NPR’s vice president of policy and representation, told member stations in January that a confluence of events — the growing deficit, questions about the role of the government in media, budget concerns on both sides of the political aisle and in both houses, objections to a perceived left-wing bias — had created “the most determined, organized and sophisticated challenge to federal funding for public radio — ever.”
On Feb. 19, the House approved a bill for 2011 that cut all financing for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the year 2013, the first time in recent memory that such a zeroing-out measure passed a vote.
Democrats have defended public broadcasting, and President Obama has proposed a 2012 fiscal year budget that includes a $6 million increase to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s basic appropriation, for a total of $451 million.
NPR was caught up in another controversy over alleged bias last fall when it dismissed Juan Williams, a longtime analyst, due to comments he had made on the Fox News Channel, where he was also employed as an analyst. Fox promptly gave Mr. Williams a new contract. Mr. Williams is scheduled to talk about Mr. Schiller’s comments Tuesday night on “Hannity,” one of the prime time programs on Fox News.
Elizabeth Jensen contributed reporting.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/npr-executive-caug...
