Truemors
is reporting from
Member
NP Rank:
NP Rank:
NPR $1.8 million George Soros Open Society Foundation Grant
Share: 
by NowPublic Staff | October 22, 2010 at 02:33 pm
772 views | 0 Recommendations | 2 comments
NPR Fires One Journalist Juan Williams, Set To Hire 100 Journalist To Investigate Impact Of Government
Fascinating. Juan Williams gets fired by NPR and then promptly signs a $2 million contract with Fox - for one journalist. At the same time NPR gets a $1.8 million dollar grant from the Open Society Foundation (backed by billionaire George Soros) and NPR hopes to hire 100 journalists.
The reporters, editors and analysts will cover state governments and how their actions affect people.
The project “creates capacity for local stations to hire reporters and to cover issues that matter that other places aren’t doing,” said Vivian Schiller, NPR’s president and chief executive. “Everything that we’re doing as relates to member stations comes down to two things: building local news capacity and making sure the content we create is available to all people across all platforms.”
Ms. Schiller said the journalists would not be part of typical statehouse coverage, but instead would work on enterprise journalism that looks at how state government decisions play out over years, and extend beyond a single state’s borders.
Interesting isn't it NPR may well have been wrong to fire Juan Williams but clearly Mr. Williams will do just fine at Fox News, thank you very much.
But the fact that Fox News is paying $2 million for one person and NPR is paying $1 million for 100 journalists speaks volumes about how seriously the two networks treat journalism.
Real journalism involves "rolling up your sleeves," ferreting out information in the corridors of power - and that takes people - lots of them, especially, if the goal is to speak truth to power.
NPR may have committed a stupid knee-jerk Liberal reaction in firing Juan Williams but it does redeem itself by committing to public sector journalism, not exactly a powerful revenue generator.
For Fox News spending $2 million dollars is smart - the Juan Williams story becomes part of the news cycle and Fox is portrayed as the defender of free speech against the politically correct. For Juan Williams it is great news - the noble victim and $2 million dollars richer to boot.
But for Journalism it is mostly bad.
No matter how thoughtful Mr, Williams may be he has become part of the largely indistinguishable noise that passes off for news on television, especially Fox.
Now, Juan Williams joins the crowd at Fox News, the shrill braying, the faux indignation, the cynical peddling of fear disguised as information.
Advertisement
What is NowPublic?
NowPublic lets people work together to cover news events around the world.
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (2)
- Sign In or Join to post comments
Barada (not verified)at 17:46 on October 22nd, 2010
Just ran across this and was wondering if it is a real news organization or just a blog. The writing doesn't seem very professional. It seems to have the same journalistic standards as NPR.
- Sign In or Join to post comments
Barada (not verified)at 18:01 on October 22nd, 2010
Actually, the 1.8 million dollars is for a one year pilot study that will place reporters in eight states. I presume that will be 16 journalists.See the Open Society Foundations website where you will see: The grant from the Open Society Foundations supports the planning and the beginning of the year-long pilot phase with station partners in eight states.NPR is currently inviting member stations to submit applications for the pilot projects and has posted staff positions for the initiative. The pilot stations will be selected by the end of December 2010 and begin work in March 2011. After the first year, NPR will phase in an additional 17 states, bringing the number of legislatures covered by the initiative to 25. Eventually, the initiative will cover every legislature in the country.