Executive Caught Calling Tea Partiers Racist

NPR was jolted Tuesday by the release of a videotape that showed one of the organization’s fund-raising executives repeatedly criticizing conservatives and Tea Party supporters.
The executive, Ron Schiller, was recorded secretly by the Republican filmmaker and mischief-maker James O’Keefe. On the videotape, Mr. Schiller calls Tea Party supporters “seriously racist, racist people,” and says, “In my personal opinion, liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives.”
Dana Davis Rehm, a spokeswoman for NPR, said in a statement Tuesday, “We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for.”
The release of the video comes at a sensitive time for NPR. Republicans in Congress who view NPR as biased are trying to cut federal funding for its local stations across the country. They are likely to seize on the video as further evidence of their views and further reason to reduce funding for the stations.
On the secretly recorded video, Mr. Schiller, whose job is to solicit non-federal funding for NPR, says he feels that the organization would be better without the federal funds. He also says that some stations could “go dark” without the funds.
A few hours after the video was published by The Daily Caller, the headline on the popular conservative-leaning news site The Drudge Report was “NPR EXEC: ‘WE WOULD BE BETTER OFF WITHOUT FEDERAL FUNDING’…”
Mr. Schiller is not related to Vivian Schiller, the chief executive of NPR. He is on the way out of NPR: he announced last week, before the videotape was made public, that he was taking a job at the Aspen Institute.
NPR made note of Mr. Schiller’s exit plans in the statement on Tuesday.
Mr. Schiller was essentially set up by Mr. O’Keefe, who has become well-known for such stunts. The people he is heard talking to on the videotape are posing as members of the Muslim Education Action Center Trust, a fictional group. They falsely claim that they want to donate up to $5 million to NPR.
NPR said in the statement that the fake group members “repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused.”
The fake group members sometimes bring up topics in an apparent effort to get Mr. Schiller talking. For example, they tell him that their group was founded “by a few members of the Muslim Brotherhood in America” and that it donates money to Muslim schools.
Mr. Schiller answers, “I think what we all believe is if we don’t have Muslim voices in our schools, on the air, it’s the same thing we faced as a nation when we didn’t have female voices.”
NPR was caught up in controversy over alleged bias last fall when it dismissed Juan Williams, a longtime analyst, due to comments he had made on the Fox News Channel, which also employed him as an analyst