Ronald Schiller Caught in James O'Keefe NPR Trap

Ronald Schiller: "Tea Party Supporters are Racist"

Ronald Schiller, an outgoing NPR fundraising executive, was caught in a hidden-camera trap calling Tea Party supporters "seriously racist". More damning for NPR, though, was that Schiller said that the network would be better off without federal funding, from which it gets 10% of its operating budget. NPR has done some public hand-wringing, but Schiller is leaving the organization anyway to join the Aspen Institute, so there isn't much the network can do. 

Who was behind the hidden camera prank? James O'Keefe.

A activist/troll who is often treated like a journalist, James O'Keefe was behind the ACORN video and the Planned Parenthood video, set up a prank in which actors posing as a fictional Muslim group tried to give NPR a check for $5 million. NPR refused the check, but still ended up giving James O'Keefe what he wanted.

Eric Cantor (R-Va), House Majority Leader, jumped on the budding controversy, using O'Keefe's video as a reason that NPR should no longer receive tax dollars. The GOP openly has it in for NPR, but we're yet to see any elements of "consider the source" coming from that side of the aisle.

Cantor didn't have anything to say about James O'Keefe's stunt, though, which is more troubling than anything Ronald Schiller said. 

The midterm elections, especially their media coverage, suggest that the Tea Party arguably has taken over the GOP. As for the racism charge, racist and xenophobic language have characterized Tea Party rallies: we've all seen the badly-spelled signs and heard the bizarre birther rants. That doesn't mean that every tea partier is racist, but the writing is on the wall, or the posterboard. No, the most damaging part of the NPR hidden-camera prank was the part about the funding.

So far, MSM (particularly Fox News) is giving O'Keefe what he craves: attention. And rewarded behavior is repeated. So we can expect more of these little "gotcha" games.

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sourced by Jordan Yerman