Conservative media activist James O'Keefe scored his biggest hit yet last week, posting a video that recorded an NPR executive making remarks that played into the stereotype of the classic liberal mentality that critics say it's all about (such as calling the Tea Party racist, among other bon mots) and absolutely not sounding like a journalist (which of course he's not, he's a business guy).
The video was pretty devastating. The executive, Ron Schiller, was out at NPR almost immediately after it became news. But the reverberations, coming months after the Juan Williams debacle, were so great that the network ended up sacking their leader, CEO Vivian Schiller (no relation), because, well, two public relations disasters in a row at a time when the House of Representatives wants to completely cut off your federal funding – yeah, something had to give.
Anyway, before we comment further, let's go to the videotape. No, not of the 11 minute ordeal with Ron Schiller (and NPR Institutional giving director Betsy Liley) having lunch with two would be representatives of an organization " originally founded by a few members of the Muslim Brotherhood in America." Not that tape, but the one where the conservative journalist gave a rare interview to CNN's Howard Kurtz on his Reliable Sources program on Sunday.
O'Keefe became famous when an earlier undercover gimmick helped bring down ACORN, much to the delight of the conservative media conglomerate. Which is why the most interesting part of the interview with CNN's Howard Kurtz is when he asks O'Keefe if he's all about simply bringing down liberal organizations, more than he is about being an honest reporter who just wants to" expose hypocrisy and absurdity in people's behavior," which is what he told the NY Post on Sunday. Though there were serious questions about what O'Keefe did on that ACORN tape, the fact was, he was successful, because it ended up destroying that group's reputation and forced many of it advocates to abandon the social justice group (There were serious questions about the editing of that video – just as there now is with the NPR tape, with none other than a Glenn Beck affiliated group saying that O'Keefe's Project Veritas did some creative editing with this latest video).
O'Keefe also embarrassed himself and lost some credibility when he allegedly was going to try to seduce a CNN producer went awry, something that Kurtz asks him, but only because he knows he would be blasted if he didn't, though O'Keefe's answer is completely unpersuasive.
Newt Gingrich and his new Republican House of Representatives in 1995 seriously tried to defund NPR, but a powerful counterattack prevented that from happening. Now with both parties looking to find things to cut, funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which includes public TV & Radio, as well as funds to community radio stations like WMNF) is again vulnerable. Conservatives have said that with so many options (cable, satellite radio, the Internet) public broadcasting hardly needs or deserves federal funding, like it did when the CPB was created and there were only three main television networks in the 1960's.
And the fact that the right believes NPR is "liberal" only fuels their cause. And the Juan Williams and Ron Schiller incidents are only making it harder for NPR.
The key line that conservatives were embracing when the Schiller video went viral last week is his quote that NPR doesn't need the federal funds to survive. And they probably don't, though the hundreds of their smaller affiliates around the country absolutely do need that little money to keep going.
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2011.