Glynnis MacNicol | Mar. 8, 2011, 10:44 AM
James O’Keefe strikes again.
O’Keefe is the ‘investigative’ journalist who made a name for himself by posing as various characters (a pimp, a repairman, a conservative activist) and recording people on hidden camera and then editing the footage to damning results (you will recall his ‘pimp’ footage from an ACORN office resulted in the entire organization being shut down) appears to have successfully punked NPR.
Sort of.
And probably not coincidentally right in the middle of fundraising week.
The Daily Caller posted a highly edited video this morning just released by O’Keefe (complete with narration and ominous middle easter music) of NPR’s (now former…he left last week) SVP of fundraising Ron Schiller (no relation to CEO Vivian Schiller) and Betsy Liley, NPR’s director of institutional, talking to a pair of men posing as “members of a Muslim Brotherhood front group.”
The men, “who identified themselves as Ibrahim Kasaam and Amir Malik from the fictitious Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) Trust” tell Schiller they want to give $5 million to NPR “partly out of concern for the defunding process the Republicans are trying to engage in.”
Not as the Daily Caller write-up suggests because ““the Zionist coverage is quite substantial elsewhere” or at least not directly.
More importantly NPR says they refused the money. Repeatedly. It just didn’t make it to the ‘caught on tape’ apparently.
The video is edited to such an extent it is impossible to tell whether the two posers actually say or do what the narrator says they say or do, or what exactly Schiller is responding to.
We do hear the pair tell Schiller that their “organization was originally founded by a few members of the Muslim Brotherhood in America actually.” But the description apparently stops there, and it’s unclear why this disclosure should necessarily be off-putting (but should that be a grey area for you the ominous background music is there to help).
Schiller says, (though in response to what is unclear): “I think what we all believe is if we don’t have Muslim voices in our schools and on our air. I mean it’s the same thing we faced when we as a nation didn’t have female voice.”
Again. Unclear why that viewpoint from a national news org is bad.
That doesn’t mean he is out of the clear
Here’s what this is what’s going to get him, and NPR, into trouble. And it has nothing really to do with Muslims. Apropos of something the video doesn’t make clear Schiller has this to say about the Tea Party:
The current Republican party, particularly the Tea Party is fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian. I wouldn’t even call it Christian.It’s this weird evangelical kind of movement.
[…]
The current Republican party is not even the really the Republican party — it’s been hijacked by this group — that is — [overdub] — exactly and not just Islamaphobic but xenophobic, and they are, they believe in sort of white, middle America, gun-toting, I mean it’s scary. They’re seriously, racist, racist people.
So that’s not good. Actually it’s very bad and not only because it feeds into every stereotype the right has about NPR (and liberal media in general) and leaves so little grey area that NPR will have a tough time turning the focus of the story to the fact much of this video is a thinly veiled attempt to appeal to anti-Muslim sentiment.
Back to the Zionist coverage remark.
Later in the lunch (the viewer is lead to believe, anyway…the posers do not appear on camera) one of them tells Schiller: “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 hears him out but goes on to say: “I don’t find that at NPR, the Zionist or pro-Israel. Even among funders….I mean it’s there in people who own newspapers, obviously, but no one owns NPR. I don’t find it.”
NPR tells me a statement on the matter will be forthcoming. Their media reporter David Folkenflik is tweeting out parts of it now: “We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for.”
Alas, I think between this and the Juan Williams thing, which NPR is still only recovering from, NPR is facing a serious uphill branding battle.
Update: Here is the full (if brief) statement) fromDana Davis Rehm, SVP of Marketing, Communications & External Relations for NPR.
“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.”