NPR's Battle Plan

As a once-avid listener of all things NPR, this opinion piece from the Huffington Post piqued my interest. In it, author Eric Boehlert criticizes Nation Public Radio’s reaction to conservative activist James O’Keefe’s recent sting, which focused on comments made by NPR’s now freshly resigned ex-“head of fundraising,” Ron Schiller. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that “a video was posted online of [Schiller] making disparaging remarks about Republicans and tea-party supporters to people posing as members of a fictitious Muslim group” (Full Article). James O’Keefe was later discovered to have made two distinct versions of the video – one edited and one unedited. The edited version allegedly accredited certain comments to Schiller when he had, in fact, been paraphrasing comments made to him by “prominent Republicans.”

In the opinion piece linked above, Boehler calls NPR’s submissive reaction cowardly and ineffective, citing the apparently misleading nature of O’Keefe’s original edited video as a point over which NPR could have raised significant issue. Boehler states, “if NPR leaders knew immediately when the O'Keefe story broke that the tapes he was peddling had been "heavily edited" to discredit NPR, then NPR did a very good job keeping that information to themselves,” adding that “You have to fight back when bullies attack.”

Though Boehler’s opinion is stated without total awareness of the situation (it seems awfully brazen of him to assume NPR made a “misstep” when in fact non-action was likely the best looking option at the time for a supposedly non-partisan organization to take against an attack by conservatives (hindsight is always 20/20, etc.)), I am inclined to agree somewhat with his position. Though I’m sure NPR was attempting to keep their image as squeaky-clean as possible, perhaps contesting the edited video more publicly would have helped them save face in the long run.  As it stands, however, Boehler is likely correct in predicting that NPR will play target to more and more partisan attacks in the future, and would do well to establish a firm defense when said attacks arrive.