I have recently found myself caught up in the scandal surrounding NPR and former NPR executive Ron Schiller, and it downright makes me mad. I have been an avid fan on NPR since I first began listening months ago. It upset me deeply and hurt my confidence with President Obama when he proposed cutting funding NPR, but this attempt to smear NPR and other “liberal media” outlets is petty and opportunistic.
If you are unfamiliar with the most recent controversy, conservative James O’Keefe arranged a sting operation targeting NPR by arranging Ron Schiller to meet with representatives of a fictional fundamentalist Muslim group who were posing as potential donors to NPR. Mr. Schiller and these fake representatives were meeting for lunch while another person sat nearby filming their conversation in which Schiller was quoted in saying that NPR would still continue on even without federal funding and in fact would be better off without, and that members of the Tea Party are xenophobic, ”seriously racist people,” and that they are “fanatically involved in people’s personal lives.”
See, that last quote made me laugh out loud because this controversy has gone to prove that the last line has a root of truth. This set up was admittedly a sting operation with the intent to find any dirt they could on “liberal media”, NPR in particular. A conservative group secretly video taped a private conversation in which the man they video taped was expressing his own, private viewpoints. Granted, I believe it to be unfair to generalize against any group of people (even if it is something I disagree with like the GOP and Tea Party), but those were his own viewpoints, not the views of public broadcasting as a whole.
It is simply unfair to take advantage of the things one person said in order to more firmly establish your own agenda. To me, it is the equivalent of being robbed by a person of color and using that incident to “prove” that all people of color will rob you. This is exactly what many conservative groups have done since this video was released to the public. Republican house majority leader was quoted in saying, ”Not only have top public broadcasting executives finally admitted that they do not need taxpayer dollars to survive, it is also clear that without federal funds, public broadcasting stations self-admittedly would become eligible for more private dollars on top of the multi-million dollar donations these organizations already receive.”
Since 1995 it has been found to be the goal of many Conservative and Republican groups (starting when Newt Gingrich called the action of cutting funding to public broadcasting) to cut funding to public broadcasting, and it seems that Conservatives have found the views of one man, who had resigned the day before the sting operation, as an outlet to further their agenda to privatize public radio and tear down NPR with the argument that public broadcasting, NPR and CBS in particular, because of their liberal biases.
I got most of this information from ABCnews.com, and when I saw that many conservatives want to destroy public broadcasting because of “liberal biases” in the article*, I was completely floored by the amount of sheer hypocrisy. Fox News fails miserably to hide the fact that they have highly conservative biases while claiming to be “fair and balanced”, but it an abomination to have media with more liberal leanings? Having listened to NPR extensively, I have personally not found it to be particularly liberal in it’s stories and broadcasting. Statistically, even the audience does not even identify as liberal, with majority of its listeners identifying as moderate at 45%, 29% identifying as liberal, and 22% identifying as conservative. Seemingly, the only people who truly believe NPR and other forms of public broadcasting have liberal leanings are only people who are against public broadcasting as a whole.
I find the recent behaviours of these conservative groups to be opportunistic, abhorrent, utterly immature and petty. I refuse to believe that every conservative person will behave the same way, but recent events have further damaged my feelings towards conservative groups as a whole. It is cheap and low to attempt to improve your own standing by undermining others, and reminds me of elementary school bullies. Now my question to you, the reader: How do you feel these events reflect public broadcasting groups and conservative groups alike? Should one person’s views be the basis of the views of the people they represent?
