NPR Staffers Fear The Loss Of OUR Money
Oct 22, 2010 9 Comments ›› Grizz
washingtonpost
Saturday, October 23, 2010; 12:07 AM
NPR faced fierce public and political reaction – most of it strongly negative – in the wake of its firing of commentator Juan Williams for comments he made on a Fox News program earlier in the week.
Even NPR’s own staff expressed exasperation at the decision during a meeting Friday with NPR’s president, Vivian Schiller. Several of those who attended said Schiller told employees that she regretted how she handled the episode.
The most serious issue facing NPR may be whether Williams’s firing will cause lasting damage to public broadcasting’s finances. Many conservative lawmakers and politicians – including House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) – have called on Congress to curtail or eliminate federal subsidies for public broadcasting.
The threat of a funding cutoff is an old one among conservatives, who have long characterized NPR as a bastion of liberal bias. But some at NPR and in public broadcasting worry about the timing of the calls this time. The Williams controversy broke less than two weeks before a midterm election that may restore Republican control of the House and Senate.
While NPR receives only about 2 percent of its $154 million annual budget from federal sources, including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Endowment for the Arts, its 800-plus member stations are much more reliant on tax subsidies. Some smaller stations receive as much as a third of their operating revenue from federal sources.
The firing drew thousands of e-mails and phone calls to NPR’s downtown Washington headquarters, the majority of them expressing outrage. The deluge crashed the “Contact Us” form on NPR’s Web site by Thursday afternoon, according to NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard.
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“They want NPR to hire him back immediately,” Shepard wrote on NPR’s site. “If NPR doesn’t, they want all public funding of public radio to stop. They promise to never donate again. . . . It was daunting to answer the phone and hear so much unrestrained anger.”
