March 08, 2011
Categories:
NPR exec: tea party is ‘scary,’ ‘racist’
James O’Keefe, master of the video sting, targets NPR this time, in a pretty damaging interview with Ron Schiller, NPR’s senior vice president for development, and Betsy Liley, senior director of institutional giving.
O’Keefe’s compatriots, Shaughn Adeleye and Simon Templar, posed as members of a Muslim group with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood that wants to give NPR $5 million in light of the recent Republican threats to defund public broadcasting.
In the course of a lunch at Café Milano, Schiller presents himself as a liberal who thinks the tea party is “scary” and that there are not enough Muslim voices on the American airwaves, nodding as his lunchmates say they are glad NPR allows Hamas's and Hezbollah's views to be heard.
He claims the Republican party has been “hijacked” by the tea party, and when one of his lunch partner’s suggests that they’re “radical, racist, Islamaphobic, Tea Party people,” Schiller says, they’re “not 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.”
He also veers pretty wildly off the script that NPR CEO Vivian Schiller clung to during her address to the National Press Club Monday, saying “it is very clear that in the long run we would be better off without federal funding.” Vivian Schiller (no relation) was very careful to make the point Monday that while federal funding is only about 10 percent of NPR’s budget, it’s essential.
It was announced yesterday that Ron Schiller is leaving NPR to take a job at the Aspen Institute.
He came to NPR from the world of university fundraising and became NPR’s top fundraising official in late 2009, not long before discussions began for the $1.8 million gift from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations that, along with the Juan Williams firing, helped make NPR such a potent political target for Republicans.
I've reached out to NPR for comment and will update when I hear back.
UPDATE: NPR media reporter David Folkenflik tweets NPR's comment: "We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for."
UPDATE: The full NPR statement from Dana Davis Rehm, senior vice president of Marketing, Communications & External Relations:
“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.”
