As Lachlan noted earlier, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller claimed at the National Press Club that NPR isn't a left-wing sandbox. But the transparent fakery of this became even more transparent when she boasted that in a world drowning in punditry, NPR deals in fact, and then quoted leftist smackdown artist James Wolcott of Vanity Fair for honoring NPR as "The Sound of Sanity."
Schiller also proclaimed the firing of Juan Williams was handled badly, but didn't note that Wolcott's reaction to the firing last October was ecstatic, and very uncivil: "Well, now he can Uncle Tom to his heart's content and feel like he's Solzhenitsyn."
Schiller also quoted Wolcott's "sanity" line in a November 2010 speech at the USC Annenberg School, where she also claimed NPR was as unbiased as any human enterprise could ever be:
Listeners appreciate the dignity, craftsmanship, balance and impartiality of fact and reporter-based news coverage [on NPR] at a time when many other news organizations are going in a very different direction.
They value hearing a range of opinions, but in the context of civil dialogue, and they appreciate our respectful approach to news — challenging common assumptions while always striving to treat newsmakers and sources fairly. Most encouragingly, our digital community appreciates these very same values.
An article about NPR in this month’s Vanity Fair by one of the most acerbic and eloquent critics around, James Wolcott, was titled, “The Sound of Sanity.” I love that.
In her remarks Monday, Schiller began her conclusion:
At a time when our industry is cutting back; when punditry is drowning real news and thoughtful analysis, NPR is moving continuously forward with quality reporting and storytelling delivered with respect for the audience — what columnist James Wolcott recently called "The Sound of Sanity."
But Wolcott was slamming conservatives and Christians in the very first paragraph of his Vanity Fair piece. Did Schiller love that, too? Does Wolcott have any respect for the American audience? Or just the snobby liberal NPR audience? He began:
It isn’t until I leave New York City and turn on the car radio or the creaky one in the motel room that NPR’s distinctive, coherent, cadenced qualities press to the forefront: its commitment to informing and entertaining an educated audience like adults speaking to other adults while every other hothead and hysteric on the dial hops up and down on the pogo stick of the outrage du jour. Or, conversely, reaches out from the speaker to soothe thy troubled brow, a ghostly comforter which turns out to be the radio ministry of a Jesus station requesting a prayer offering payable by check or credit card. Right-wing or religious, radio packs a ton of nuts into every listening bite.
How can Schiller say the world is drowning in incivility, and then quote this pie-throwing sourpuss? How can she cite as her beacon of civility the magazine with the "Authoritative Trig Palin Conspiracy Timeline"? In his ode to "sanity," Wolcott blatantly shilled for the official NPR propaganda book This Is NPR, and added:
Unlike nearly all the rest of talk radio, which divides civilization into us and our Churchillian allies and Everybody Else (ungrateful bastards who haven’t thanked us in the last five minutes for winning World War II), NPR is cognizant of a whole world out there that isn’t the United States and is worth knowing, even if we’re not dropping bombs on them at the moment.
This is why Schiller loves his "acerbic and eloquent" writing. Wolcott also praised the presence of so many women on the air at NPR, and insisted that their feminism also makes NPR superior:
It isn’t that NPR is matriarchal but that it has dedicated itself to not being patriarchal in its outlook and presentation, stipulating from the outset that its headline voices would not resound across the fruited plains from big male bags of air sent from Mount Olympus.
The big male bags of air have been puffing at NPR from the outside, trying to blow the house down. And blowhards don’t come any blowhardier than Newt Gingrich, who, upon being elected Speaker of the House following the Republican takeover of 1994, pronounced his intention “to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” putting it on a starvation diet that would have wiped dozens of smaller stations off the airwaves that depended on grant moneys from the C.P.B. and reduced others to skeleton crews, recounts This Is NPR.
This animus against public radio first gained rhetorical traction on the right during the “Reagan Revolution,” as so many ideologically driven crusades did, when NPR was christened “Radio Sandinista” for what the contra-backing Reaganites considered its slanted-left Nicaragua coverage. Gingrich railed against the elitism of NPR, proclaiming that the popularity of Rush Limbaugh represented the real face of public broadcasting, but as usual Gingrich’s grandiosity was greater than his grip on political reality, and his plan fell as flat as his Speakership after the first flush of giddiness.
In This Is NPR, Gingrich is quoted as graciously conceding in 2003 that he no longer considers the network an enemy within. “NPR is a lot less to the left ... or I’ve mellowed. Or some combination of the two.” Or a third alternative: in the era of Sarah Palin Superstar, bashing NPR no longer gets the primitive, tribal juices going on the right, not with such a bumper crop of Muslims and illegal immigrants for Tea Party panderers to sink their gums into.
Gingrich has mellowed, but NPR and Wolcott have not. These people take taxpayer money, but see it as their right to take that money and professionally hate conservatives and "Jesus freaks." This kind of sassy leftism is exactly why other lobbyists for the leftist sandbox like Free Press also linked up to the "genius" of Wolcott. This is just another NPR executive unsubtly winking at the Obama's-way-too-centrist, MoveOn crowd that supports them.
Vivian, your slip is showing.
