Tag: NPR

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Keep Big Bird, Ditch the News: A Path Forward for PBS With Budget Cuts

As was the case a half-dozen years ago, PBS and NPR are again the subject of a contentious debate about their taxpayer funding, this time courtesy of President Trump. The problem with that debate, then and now, is that like so many policy disputes, the arguments employed oversimplify the facts and ignore the obvious. I wrote about this matter in 2011 in a piece published in the now-defunct app called The Daily. What follows is an update of that piece.

For years, Republicans and conservatives have accused NPR and PBS of ideological and political bias. Things came to a head in 2010 when NPR fired Juan Williams as a commentator for allegedly making anti-Muslim remarks, and NPR successfully solicited funding for local reporting from a foundation controlled by the uber liberal George Soros.

This perception of bias would be noteworthy enough even if these broadcasters were not financially supported by taxpayers, conditioned on explicit statutory language requiring objectivity and balance. Since, however, they are, the ubiquity and durability of this perception becomes very nearly miraculous. Surely it’s not easy to so thoroughly offend one of the two major parties that, in the House vote in 2011, virtually every Republican member voted to defund NPR » Read More

Maines is president of The Media Institute. The opinions expressed are his alone and not those of The Media Institute, its board, advisory councils, or contributors. The full version of this article appeared in The Hill on March 21, 2017.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The Hypocrisy and Heavy Cost of Rupertphobia

If Rupert Murdoch were an evil alien, a mass murderer, or a child molester, his press coverage would look pretty much like what he’s been getting lately.  That so much of the media attacks on the man has been generated by people who are competitors (like the Guardian, New York Times, Bloomberg) and/or political adversaries explains a lot.

Even so, the criticism is extraordinary.  Take, for instance, the published opinions of the editor of the American Journalism Review, Rem Rieder.  Just this month, the gentleman has written no fewer than eight pieces.

From earliest to most recent, here are the titles: “Murdoch Under Fire”; “The Escalating Murdoch Scandal”; “For Murdoch, a Shocking Reversal of Fortune”; “The Inevitable Departure of Rebekah Brooks”; “Les Hinton, The Latest Casualty of the Phone-Hacking Scandal”; “The Wall Street Journal Careens Off the Rails”; “The Murdochs in the Lion’s Den”; “The Incredible Shrinking Rupert.”  Rieder’s WSJ piece is particularly noteworthy for what it says about his own editorial judgment:

It’s a truly shameful editorial….  The Wall Street Journal, stung by the ouster of its publisher last Friday in the fallout from the massive scandal that has engulfed its fellow Murdoch properties in Britain, has come out swinging wildly at the company’s critics….

When Murdoch acquired the Journal in 2007, there was much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments on the part of many people who are not enamored with Murdoch’s brand of journalism….

The Journal no doubt has changed.  It is much less distinctive, with less emphasis on the quirky page-one features that helped make it special.  It devotes much more attention to political coverage, and some have seen a decline in the comprehensiveness of its business coverage.

Not to be outdone, Politico has covered the British tabloid story with even greater interest, and a lot more venom.  Two pieces published the same day, July 20, are representative of the whole.  In a display of his usual subtlety and sophistication, Roger Simon penned “The Evil of Rupert Murdoch,” while Neal Gabler relieved himself of “Rupert Murdoch: Journalism’s Mubarak.”  Gabler’s piece is especially valuable for its cool erudition:

Most people realized that Murdoch was something of a conniver, that he was a bully, that his media empire was designed in the most self-serving ways….  But the telephone hacking scandal in Great Britain and the other attendant revelations reveal that Murdoch was something more than a garden-variety journalistic despot.  He appears to have been a journalistic terrorist as well, a journalistic KGB, a journalistic mobster whose minions used blackmail – overall a journalistic thug.

And for those whose preference runs to government-funded journalism, NPR weighed in with people like David Folkenflik, on “Morning Edition”: “The News of the World was less than 1 percent of News Corp., but it could – just could finally (emphasis added) drag the company out of the Murdochs’ grasp.”

Apart from the abject and transparent piling on – something that, in the current political and economic environment is probably to be expected, though not venerated – there is a deeply serious side to this affair that journalists of all political stripes and circumstance should heed: As a matter of law and policy, what goes around comes around.

Take, for instance, the federal investigations in this country now being launched or considered by agencies like the FBI and the Justice Department.  The gravamen of these investigations is that (1) News Corp.’s British journalists have committed acts that put the parent company in harm’s way of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; and/or (2) that there is a need to follow up on the rumor that News Corp. journalists may have attempted to hack into the cell phone calls of 9/11 victims.

Never mind the absurd overreach in attempting to apply the FCPA to newsgathering techniques used by foreign reporters, however unethical, or the fact that, as reported by Dean Starkman in the Columbia Journalism Review, the only news story that “purports to offer independent evidence” of the 9/11 hacking is “bollocks.”  Imagine what would happen if examples such as these became established precedents for government investigations of the media.

In the same way that the Democrats’ use of the parliamentary maneuver called “reconciliation” is certain to be used by the Republicans to undo Obamacare, if and when they acquire control of Congress and the White House, so too would Republicans use the FCPA, and stories like the 9/11 rumor, to initiate investigations of disfavored media organizations.

In time, history will tell us which was worse: tabloid reporters who bent all journalistic rules to acquire some salacious tidbits, or the journalism establishment that, by its desire to gain commercial or political advantage, stood by while the U.S. government bent rules and regulations in a way that diminished the independence of the press.

                                  

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

 

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Juan Williams and NPR

OK, so right off the bat let’s deal with what NPR’s firing of Juan Williams is, and what it is not.  It is a free speech issue, but it is not a First Amendment issue.  This is an important distinction because while many First Amendment issues involve freedom of speech, and many free speech issues involve the First Amendment, it is not the case that all free speech issues are First Amendment issues.

At bottom, the Speech Clause of the First Amendment is a proscription on what government can do to the media, not on what the media can do themselves.  As a practical matter what this means is that NPR’s management had the right to do what they did, and that, were this matter to go before a court, its resolution would not turn on First Amendment case law.

This said, the wisdom of the action taken, and what it suggests about the future of freedom of expression generally, are very much at issue here.

People of a certain age may remember the sad case of Jimmy (the Greek) Snyder, who was fired by CBS for some bizarre off-the-cuff comments he made about black athleticism while having a meal at a Washington restaurant.  Other similar cases are those of Don Imus, and more recently Helen Thomas and Rick Sanchez.

So while there are some important differences in these cases, we’re beginning to see a pattern here: When reporters and commentators say things that arguably offend minorities (and thereby disturb the politically correct equilibrium) they get fired.  And the question is whether this is the right, or even the intelligent, way to deal with such issues, especially for media companies?

It used to be believed that the best way to handle speech that is unfair or false was for more speech, not less, and by that measure a better way to have resolved many of these matters would have been for management to issue comments that mock, or directly challenge the falsities, in the offending comments.

Though the dust hasn’t even begun to settle, it’s already clear what many people, of varying political stripes, think of the way NPR has handled the Williams affair: They think it’s a disaster.  As Howard Kurtz, formerly of the Washington Post, put it in a Daily Beast piece: “His firing has backfired, handing FOX a victory and making Williams a symbol of liberal intolerance — on the very day NPR announced a grant from George Soros that it never should have accepted.”

Indeed, the Soros revelation, combined with Republican and (especially) conservative antipathy for taxpayer support of PBS and NPR, guarantee that the Williams flap is not going away any time soon.  As lamented here, there has been a coordinated and richly financed effort underway for months that has, as part of its aim, a substantial increase in government funding for public media generally, and that would oblige PBS member stations to redirect their news programs to more local coverage — the very thing that Soros’s contribution is designed to facilitate at NPR.

But that is a story that will play itself out in days to come.  Front and center now is the question of the impact of the Williams affair on NPR, in which regard it might be useful to examine a couple statements; the offending one, made by Williams, and another, made after his firing, by the president of NPR, Vivian Schiller.

Here’s Williams’s comment: “Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot.  But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

And here’s Schiller’s: “Juan Williams should have kept his feelings about Muslims between himself and his psychiatrist or his publicist.”

Under pressure, Schiller later apologized for her remark, but going forward that may not mean much.  Put it this way, of these two comments which one do you think is the most mean-spirited and intemperate?  And of the acts at issue — Williams’s comments or his firing – which one do you think does more damage to NPR?

Yes, I think so too.

                                                                           

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not necessarily of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.