James O’Keefe is a young conservative activist who made his name a couple of years ago with a series of stings against various ACORN offices throughout the country. Not one to rest on his laurels, Mr. O’Keefe has pulled off a new hoax against a liberal icon, this time National Palestinian Public Radio.
In Project Veritas’ latest coup, a pair of top NPR officials — Ron Schiller, President of the NPR Foundation, and Betsy Liley, the Senior Director of NPR Institutional Giving — were taken out to lunch by two members of a pretend Muslim Brotherhood front group, the Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) Trust. The two bogus Muslims offered NPR a $5 million donation in gratitude for its lack of “Zionist” bias, all the while recording the conversation with a hidden camera.
Mr. Schiller and Ms. Liley turned down the money, but they did provide some telling sound bites for Project Veritas. NPR is a target-rich environment, and exposing its mindless progressive bias tends to be shooting fish in a barrel. Still, this latest sting is particularly delicious — the viewer gets to see and hear a top NPR drone say all the things that we always knew about NPR, but which the organization has consistently denied.
NPR is not denying anything this time. The organization has, however, repudiated Mr. Schiller:
Dana Davis Rehm, NPR’s senior vice president of marketing, communications and external relations, has released this statement: “The fraudulent organization represented in this video repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept.
“We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for.
“Mr. Schiller announced last week that he is leaving NPR for another job.”
It seems — depending on one’s prejudices — that either NPR was tipped off to what lay ahead, or Ron Schiller just happened to change jobs last week. Readers can make up their own minds.
What stands out about the video below is the insouciance with which the NPR duo absorbed the up-front declaration that MEAC had been founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, and that the would-be donors wanted to see the MB treated more fairly in the media.
No problem! That’s what all enlightened journalists want to do anyway!
In the video, Mr. Schiller indicates that he does not think kindly of the Tea Parties. The Republican Party, he says, has been “hijacked by this group,” and he agrees with the characterization of them as “the radical, racist, Islamophobic, Tea Party people.” He says the Tea Partiers aren’t “just Islamophobic, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.”
It will be interesting to see whether this incident has any lasting effect on NPR, or whether it just gets buried by the MSM, as usual.
Gateway Pundit has a feature on the operation.
ABC News is covering it.
Time says NPR has been “embarrassed”, and the New York Times blog says it has been “jolted”.
I suspect that National Public Radio can survive a jolt of embarrassment. But we’ll see.
The eleven-minute edited video from Project Veritas is below the jump:
The full uncut two-hour video is here.
Hat tip: heroyalwhyness.
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