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.
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.
Juan Williams is a writer, author and Fox News political analyst.