The New York Times on the NPR debacle
Bookworm on Mar 09 2011 at 9:38 am | Filed under: Media matters
The New York Times hasn’t yet gotten around to reporting officially on Ron Schiller’s disgusting performance before a supposed front group for the Muslim Brotherhood. Those of us who have watched the short video, and made inroads into the long video, saw him trashing in the most extreme terms Tea Partiers, conservatives, and Jews, as well as actively inviting funding an input from a group (faux, thankfully) that wants to spread sharia law and that advances the Hezbollah and Hamas terrorist organizations.
Please be clear: Schiller did not just make mumbling noises of agreement in the hopes of getting a check. He was on a ranting roll:
On the tapes, Schiller wastes little time before attacking conservatives. The Republican Party, Schiller says, has been “hijacked by this group.” The man posing as Malik finishes the sentence by adding, “the radical, racist, Islamaphobic, Tea Party people.” Schiller agrees and intensifies the criticism, saying that the 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.”
Schiller goes on to describe liberals as more intelligent and informed than conservatives. “In my personal opinion, liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives,” he said.
[snip]
Schiller doesn’t blink. Instead, he assumes the role of fan. “I think what we all believe is if we don’t have Muslim voices in our schools, on the air,” Schiller says, “it’s the same thing we faced as a nation when we didn’t have female voices.”
When O’Keefe’s two associates pressed him into the topic, Schiller decried U.S. media coverage of Egypt’s uprising against former dictator Hosni Mubarak, especially talk of the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence on the protests and future of Egypt. Schiller said that is what he is “most disappointed by in this country, which is that the educated, so-called elite in this country is too small a percentage of the population, so that you have this very large un-educated part of the population that carries these ideas.”
When the man pretending to be Kasaam suggests to Schiller that “Jews do kind of control the media or, I mean, certainly the Zionists and the people who have the interests in swaying media coverage toward a favorable direction of Israel,” Schiller does not rebut him or stop eating. He just nods his head slightly.
[snip]
When the ersatz Islamists declare they’re “not too upset about maybe a little bit less Jew influence of money into NPR,” Schiller responds by saying he doesn’t find “Zionist or pro-Israel” ideas at NPR, “even among funders. I mean it’s there in those who own newspapers, obviously, but no one owns NPR.”
Schiller’s occasional references to “my personal opinion” make it clear that, most of the time, he believed he was officially stating the NPR party line.
So how does the New York Times describe this disgusting wallow in the NPR liberal brain? Very, very carefully, in the vaguest terms possible, with the obvious hope that its readers won’t get curious and try to find more details. (And knowing Times readers, it’s a good bet that curiosity won’t be their besetting sin.)
Ms. Schiller is leaving NPR after a two-year tenure at the helm of an organization that has been beset by controversy. Her departure comes a day after the latest episode, in which a political activist released a video showing one of NPR’s fund-raising executives expressing harsh personal views of Republicans and Tea Party supporters in a conversation with people posing as prospective donors.
[snip]
In the activist’s video, the fund-raising executive, Ronald Schiller, who is not related to Ms. Schiller, was heard telling people posing as Muslim philanthropists that the Republican Party had been “hijacked” by the Tea Party and that Tea Party supporters were “seriously racist, racist people.” Mr. Schiller, who was already scheduled to leave NPR soon to take a job at the Aspen Institute, said on Tuesday that he would leave immediately.
That’s it. In the entire post about Ms. Schiller’s firing, that’s all that the Times’ reporters have to say about Ron Schiller’s ugly diatribe. Looking at it, not only is calculated to tamp down on readers’ curiosity, given the Times demographic, it’s also meant to inspire sympathy on their part. They too think the Tea Party is a creepy racist movement. Considering how many Times’ readers are Jews (albeit liberal Jews utterly in thrall to the radical wing of the Democrat party), one wonders if they’d be as sympathetic to Schiller if they heard his open anti-Semitism.
The majority of reader comments, so far, are what you’d expect from people spoon-fed a constant stream of bile filled non-news:
It’s important for conservatives to destroy any independent media so that it’s all propaganda, all the time.
Are teabaggers racists? Just read the signs at their scooter protests.
***
Stop letting the terrorists win. Don’t kowtow to these Republican operatives — it’s not like Gov. Walker is resigning after he was caught with his hand in the Koch till!
***
There’s more reliable information on NPR in an hour than in all the years of conservative talk radio–and none of the blustering, festering ill will. The problem for conservative ideologues is as it always is–anyone not with them is their enemy.
***
Mr. Schiller wasn’t exactly wrong. The tea party is a racist organization.
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6 Responses to “The New York Times on the NPR debacle”
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If the Times were honest and pure in their reporting of liberal speech (and, often enough, actions) it would be, as your headline references: debacle after debacle after debacle. Every time most of them open their mouths it’s a debacle of greater or lesser magnitude – but it’s hardly ever anything of which to be proud.
So at this point the Times is suffering from a reflex of virtually Pavlovian dimensions. The last few years have taught them that they can’t just simply flat ignore this stuff – they have to say something, because everybody knows – but the reflex is to find the most innocuous, least damaging, and lightest touch with which to skate over the news of the latest liberal idiocy. It’s a tough job, trying to make Pelosi, Reid, Boxer, Fwank, et al look something other than ready for someone to come and throw a net over them. Have a little sympathy!
Looks like the Aspen Institute doesn’t get him, either: http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/romenesko/122506/ron-schiller-will-not-be-joining-the-aspen-institute/
Second degree?
Boggles the mind. How could they step it down from first degree??
Good call, jj. Your comment made me think of the Tracey Ullman skit where two very smart women and a moronic man compete for an executive position at a corporation. Left in a room by themselves with a cardboard box that contains an odd assortment of items, one women creates a chemical compound, applies it to her 6-inch heels, jumps up on a table and sets off mini-explosions as she stamps around doing a flamenco dance. The second woman pulls out a saw and begins playing a concerto on it.
The man, hopelessly outclassed, pulls two straws out of the box and shoves them up his nose.
The New York Times is that man.
[...] This morning, I noted that the New York Times, in reporting on the NPR debacle, managed to ignore the anti-Semitism issue. I speculated that this was to protect its Jewish readers from getting suspicious about the whole Progressive/Democrat structure. What I forgot is that the MSM (especially the Times) also likes to keep from its readers the fact that Islamists are violently (in deed, not just word) anti-Semitic. [...]