A senior executive at NPR was caught on undercover video, bashing the Tea Part movement as being “scary” and “racist”, and “fundamentally involved with people’s personal lives” and declaring that NPR would be better off without federal funding. Two men pretending to be from a fake Muslim brotherhood met with executives, one being Senior Vice President Ron Schiller, and the other being Director of Institutional Giving Betsy Liley, and offered five million dollars for funding. Ron Schiller put down Christians, Zionists, Tea Partyers and uneducated Americans.
Needless to say, Schiller said he’ll be leaving NPR last week. Although the video was a set up by James O’keefe, it’s still scary to see just how biased the people we trust to relay information to us are. We’ve seen subtle slip-ups on the air, bringing a masked agenda into full view. So much is still below the surface, and it’s actually frightening to see the biases journalists and newscasters truly feel while believing they’re off camera. No one is untainted by personal views and opinions, but shouldn’t those filtering our news be less so than average?
Furthermore, we cannot possibly ignore the influence of funding and support for news. Try as we might, viewership, advertisements, and the money that will or will not flow into the media based on that which was just mentioned has a direct influence. And even if the character of our newscasters and journalists were as pure and unwavering in their views, would it even matter? At the end of the day, it comes down to money.
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