I just caught up with the Ron Schiller tape, the lunchtime bugging of the senior vp for development at National Public Radio by a rightwinger named James O’Keefe posing as a Muslim wanting to make a $5 million donation to the network. Of course Schiller had to resign after the tape was released with his criticisms of racism in the Tea Party and the Christian right. And Schiller’s boss’s head has rolled too.
It’s excruciating to watch such a vicious assault on a professional’s privacy, but the interesting thing to me about the tape is that O’Keefe and a confederate with an African-sounding accent bait Schiller not just about rightwingers but about Jews, and Schiller rises to the bait about the rightwingers, but not Jews. It’s no problem for Schiller to announce that he’s taking off his NPR hat and then sell out the Christian right, the Tea Party, Republicans, and uneducated people in Wyoming. But when O’Keefe and his confederate bait Schiller about Jews controlling the media, he doesn’t really play.
Go to that link and at minute 38 and then at again 1:01 the hoaxers bait Schiller and his associate Betsy Liley, senior director for institutional giving, saying they like NPR because it’s “National Palestinian Radio,” and saying that Jews control the media. The hoaxers are clearly hoping that Schiller is going to try to please them by saying stuff about the Israel lobby and Jewish money, but he’s pretty discreet.
Schiller says that NPR has taken “huge hits” for its coverage of Israel and Palestine. “In fact some very significant Israeli funders have pulled their funding because from their point of view NPR was not pro-Israel enough,” Schiller says. Later he says, “This very prominent Jewish philanthropic family, for example, that supported NPR for over a decade… started saying, You can’t have so much Palestinian coverage…” NPR refused to play ball, and the funder disappeared. I wonder who that is.
When a hoaxer presses him about “Jewish influence” in the media, Schiller says, “I don’t actually find it at NPR… Zionist or pro-Israel– even among funders… It’s there in those who own newspapers, obviously. But no one owns NPR.”
Liley then says that while the American Jewish World Service may not agree with NPR’s coverage of the Middle East, it regards NPR as so important that it continues to fund it.
While Schiller says that NPR has drawn strength from the fact that its audience is an elite one, including “very educated Israeli people in the United States, many of whom have become really disenchanted with Israel.” How curious that Schiller seems to call American Jews “Israelis.”
My interpretation is this: NPR really does represent the blue state elite, that’s its highly-educated base, as Schiller states so frankly. So when Schiller trashes rural people or uneducated people or Christian rightwingers or Tea Party folks as racists, he’s merely representing his base, which shares those attitudes. Similarly, when he refuses to take the bait on Jews, but makes sophisticated observations, like that highly-educated Jews are disenchanted with Israel, he is again representing his base. As for his statement that Jews who own newspapers are supporting Israel, this is almost an objective observation. I bet NPR’s listenership has a high percentage of Jews, just as its reporting staff is strongly-Jewish, and so these are people Schiller knows and respects, unlike the poor shlub in Wyoming; and so he doesn’t sell them out.
