National Public Radio is in the "Featured Employers Spotlight" in Sunday's Washington Post. That could be because NPR has posted ads for 24 job openings at NPR, including the vacated spot of Ellen Weiss, the senior vice president for news that canned Juan Williams over the phone. But even in the want ads, NPR can't be honest about its support from taxpayers:
NPR is an internationally acclaimed producer and distributor of noncommercial news, talk, and entertainment programming. A privately supported, not-for-profit membership organization, NPR produces and distributes programming that reaches a combined audience of 27.1 million listeners weekly. NPR Member organizations operate 784 stations, and another 117 public radio stations also present NPR programs, for a total of more than 900 stations nationwide who broadcast NPR programming.
NPR certainly is "privately supported," but why do they hide the public support? They even try to be known only by the letters of NPR, so the "Public" doesn't show.
They're also looking for a Reporter covering "Money, Power, and Influence," where they may hire another activist from Common Cause like Peter Overby.
Meanwhile at the Daily Kos this week, they're mad that NPR can't simply acknowledge that "Truth has a liberal bias," and agree with the notion that the entire Tea Party is a rotten barrel of racists:
The problem isn't that an NPR employee called the Tea Party racist. The problem is that NPR didn't simply respond to this supposed "gotcha" video with a big yawn and a "Yeah? And?" Schiller said the Tea Party is racist. Oh my! This is the equivalent of a gotcha video showing a man saying the sky is blue. Shocking film at 11!
The problem is the unwillingness of the media, not to mention those on the left—including Vice President Biden—to state, unequivocally and unapologetically, that of course the Tea Party is racist. This isn't a debatable point, or at least, it shouldn't be debatable. Headlines about the Tea Party's racism don't require a question mark at the end. NPR needn't have tripped over itself to condemn the remarks of its vice president, even before the unedited video showed that Schiller was describing what Republicans had reported to him.
