Tuesday, March 08, 2011

The NPR Sting

NPR mike #1James O’Keefe is a young conservative activist who made his name a couple of years ago with a series of stings against various ACORN offices throughout the country. Not one to rest on his laurels, Mr. O’Keefe has pulled off a new hoax against a liberal icon, this time National Palestinian Public Radio.

In Project Veritas’ latest coup, a pair of top NPR officials — Ron Schiller, President of the NPR Foundation, and Betsy Liley, the Senior Director of NPR Institutional Giving — were taken out to lunch by two members of a pretend Muslim Brotherhood front group, the Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) Trust. The two bogus Muslims offered NPR a $5 million donation in gratitude for its lack of “Zionist” bias, all the while recording the conversation with a hidden camera.

Mr. Schiller and Ms. Liley turned down the money, but they did provide some telling sound bites for Project Veritas. NPR is a target-rich environment, and exposing its mindless progressive bias tends to be shooting fish in a barrel. Still, this latest sting is particularly delicious — the viewer gets to see and hear a top NPR drone say all the things that we always knew about NPR, but which the organization has consistently denied.

NPR is not denying anything this time. The organization has, however, repudiated Mr. Schiller:

Dana Davis Rehm, NPR’s senior vice president of marketing, communications and external relations, has released this statement: “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.

“Mr. Schiller announced last week that he is leaving NPR for another job.”

It seems — depending on one’s prejudices — that either NPR was tipped off to what lay ahead, or Ron Schiller just happened to change jobs last week. Readers can make up their own minds.

What stands out about the video below is the insouciance with which the NPR duo absorbed the up-front declaration that MEAC had been founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, and that the would-be donors wanted to see the MB treated more fairly in the media.

No problem! That’s what all enlightened journalists want to do anyway!

In the video, Mr. Schiller indicates that he does not think kindly of the Tea Parties. The Republican Party, he says, has been “hijacked by this group,” and he agrees with the characterization of them as “the radical, racist, Islamophobic, Tea Party people.” He says the Tea Partiers aren’t “just Islamophobic, 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.”

It will be interesting to see whether this incident has any lasting effect on NPR, or whether it just gets buried by the MSM, as usual.

Gateway Pundit has a feature on the operation.

ABC News is covering it.

Time says NPR has been “embarrassed”, and the New York Times blog says it has been “jolted”.

I suspect that National Public Radio can survive a jolt of embarrassment. But we’ll see.

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The eleven-minute edited video from Project Veritas is below the jump:


The full uncut two-hour video is here.


Hat tip: heroyalwhyness.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love fly on the wall stuff like this. It truly gives you an eye on what we all know to be the truth about so called "Liberals". Two moments that stick out for me are them yuckinh it up about "Palestine National Radio" and the guy talking about the importance of the ruling elite. The arrogance truly takes your breath away. Does anyone seriously doubt that if these people had their way they would put half this country into prison/re-education camps and the other half up against the wall?

Godffrey said...

"...and in other news, a top NPR official was forced to resign for comments that betrayed NPR's commitment to balanced journalism and shocked absolutely no one."

Anonymous said...

The woman was scraping the bottom of the barrel with that reference to the internment of Japanese Americans... she's lumping all the ethnics together and expects Muslims to make common cause with the Japanese. When people do that with me, I want to vomit. Both of those NPR people are hicks. It's hilarious that the guy refers to the problem of so few Americans being educated. Project much?

Papa Whiskey said...

It is a great pity that NPR's news division is so biased, because its musical programs are great. KJZZ in Phoenix plays classic jazz every evening except Saturday and Sunday, which are reserved for roots music and blues, respectively. Try and find that stuff on a commercial station -- fugedaboudit. All you'll find is rock schlock, rap crap and endless gabbling.

Hesperado said...

These NPR clowns can be categorized -- even by me -- as indeed "liberal Elites". Unfortunately, while they do exert considerable influence, the problem really are the relatively non-liberal and far more numerous ordinary folks out there in the West (and ordinary folks are not just janitors or street-sweepers to qualify as "non-Elite") including many centrists and conservatives who more or less either buy what these clowns say, or (at best) countenance it with some vague blurry apprehension that Israelis and Palestinians are caught in a "cycle of violence".

If PC MC were not dominant and mainstream among the relatively non-liberal masses (at least with regard to the problem of Islam), such NPR clowns would have little traction to exert their influence.

Anonymous said...

I just realized, Schiller's distress at so few Americans being educated, is funny in the same way as Basil Fawlty wanting to disinvite riff-raff from his restaurant.

Molly Brazen said...

@spackle "they would put half this country into prison/re-education camps"

They already have. They're called government schools. Attendance is mandatory, financial support is mandatory, ... and more than half the population has already been through them.

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