Vivian Schiller, the former New York Times digital executive who has led NPR as CEO for the last two years, resigned on Tuesday following a furor over comments made by one of her subordinates.
Schiller is a well-regarded media executive who is credited with making technology a top priority at NPR and encouraging the development of NPR news applications for digital devices. Under her leadership, Schiller expanded the concept of "universal access" -- a NPR mandate traditionally applied to broadcast radio -- to the digital space, and was an advocate for using technology to get news to the American public.
But Schiller's tenure was also marked by controversy, most notably the firing of pundit Juan Williams for comments about Muslims, in a move that was later criticized by NPR's ombudsman.
The final straw, apparently, were comments by made by NPR fundraising chief Ron Schiller (no relation to Vivian Schiller) during a lunch meeting in January that was surreptitiously taped and released by conservative activist James O'Keefe, in which Ron Schiller called the Tea Party "seriously racist" and "xenophobic."
Vivian Schiller's ouster, which the NPR board decided late Tuesday evening following the release of the video, comes amid growing calls by Republicans to end federal funding of NPR, which produces and syndicates news, information and entertainment broadcasting to 800 local public radio stations around the country.
Newly emboldened by their takeover of the House of Representatives, national Republicans have renewed their campaign against public media like PBS and NPR, whose member stations receive about 10 percent of their funding from the federal government via a congressional appropriation to the nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NPR itself receives 2 percent of its budget from the federal government.
Republicans say the United States can no longer afford to fund public media.
In total, the federal contribution to public media is $1.35 per American per year, according to the CPB, which says that the public-media system raises six private dollars for every federal dollar.
But there is an emerging argument that NPR should eschew public funding, which, after all, accounts for a small fraction of its overall budget, precisely to avoid becoming a punching bag for opportunistic politicians on an ideological crusade. Even Ron Schiller endorsed that argument on the video.
"It is very clear that we would be better off in the long run without federal funding," he said during the secretly-taped lunch, which was held under false pretenses at a cafe in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. in January.
There is a certain amount of merit to this argument because 41 years after its creation, NPR has become a highly respected and crucial source of news for many Americans, and its 800 member-stations enjoy strong support for their coverage of local news, particularly in rural and underserved news markets. Of course, as nonprofit news organizations, NPR and PBS face a never-ending challenge to raise private funds, but the GOP attack on public media doesn't appear to have damaged fundraising, and may in fact have energized it.
On the other hand, public media experts say that although NPR and PBS will survive if the federal funding is cut, there will be casualties, and the hardest hit will likely be local station budgets.
“Local public broadcasting stations provide us with valuable information,” Rep. Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat, said in a statement. “What’s more, public broadcasting stations are the only source of free programming that educates our children rather than the many commercial stations simply trying to sell them products.”
A significant majority of Americans oppose eliminating federal support for public broadcasting, according to a recent poll by Hart Research and American Viewpoint, including 83 percent of Democrats, 69 percent of Independents, and 56 percent of Republicans.
The Ron Schiller video sting is clearly a black eye for NPR, and he is paying for it: He lost his job at the Aspen Institute over the scandal. He thought he was meeting with two members of a group called the Muslim Education Action Center to discuss a possible $5 million donation to NPR -- a donation that NPR said it refused at the time.
But the meeting was a complete setup. The Muslim Education Action Center is a fictitious group, and the two men were what O'Keefe called "citizen journalists." The sham appeared designed to trick Schiller and a colleague into making damaging comments while being secretly filmed.
Vivian Schiller said Wednesday that she hoped her resignation might help defuse the debate over NPR's relatively minuscule federal funding.
"NPR's under an incredible amount of pressure right now in Washington from the defunding threat," Schiller told The Wall Street Journal. "It's quite possible that the fact that I'm no longer with NPR would potentially mitigate that threat."
But GOP leaders showed no signs of relenting in their mission to cease funding NPR on fiscal grounds, although those efforts are to expected to be blocked by the Democrat-controlled Senate.
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