Tag Archives: Left-Wing Bias

MUST-SEE: NPR executive exposes radical left-wing bias in hidden camera sting

Here’s the video showing the sting of NPR that everyone is talking about:

That’s the short version. The longer version is here.

That NPR Senior Vice President for Fundraising Ron Schiller in the video. And he represents everything that NPR believes behind closed doors. The mask is off.

Where did that video come from?

NewsMax has the full story.

Excerpt:

In the video, Schiller is seen at a luncheon meeting in Georgetown with prospective NPR donors who claim to represent a pro-shariah group called the Muslim Education Action Center. The prospective donors, who say they have $5 million to disburse, are actually grass-roots activists O’Keefe trained.

The videotape shows Schiller telling his prospects that the the grass-roots conservative tea party organizations have “hijacked” the Republican party. He states that the new GOP elements are “not just Islamaphobic, 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.”

Schiller’s potential patrons state outright on their faux Web site that they support the spread of extremist shariah law. They also are heard telling Schiller that their organization has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, an extremist group that has been linked to terrorism.

In the video, Schiller also defended NPR’s decision to terminate its association with commentator and columnist Juan Williams over comments Williams made on Fox News last year. Williams discussed his uneasiness about flying with people wearing traditional Muslim garb. Schiller said Williams had “lost all credibility.”

[…]“What NPR did I’m very proud of,” Schiller says.[…]Another NPR fundraiser, Institutional Giving Director Betsy Liley, also attended the Feb. 22 meal where Schiller made those remarks. She appears to compare America’s treatment of Muslims in the years since 9/11 with the internment of Japanese Americans in camps during WWII.

[…]Asked to elaborate on the additional revelations he plans, O’Keefe confirmed the additional disclosures involve NPR, but would not say whether they stem from the same meeting involving Schiller and Liley.

Strangely enough, NPR denies that it has any left-wing bias.

Is NPR liberal? Are they biased to the left?

From the Heritage Foundation.

Excerpt:

Just yesterday NPR’s president and CEO stood before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and declared that the taxpayer-funded news organization exhibited no bias against conservatives. Vivian Schiller even dared conservatives to show her the proof.

Less than 24 hours later, filmmaker James O’Keefe delivered the goods. 

[…]The timing was fortuitous — and it exposed Schiller as an apologist for the liberal mainstream media, of which NPR is a key player. If this is the type of talk Schiller permitted at the highest levels of NPR, is there really any question about the organization’s hostility to conservatives?

Schiller’s plea yesterday for specific examples of bias was itself laughable. The Media Research Center has a treasure trove of incidents dating back years.

“There’s no question it is a perception issue,” Schiller insisted when asked about bias in the newsroom. “It is absolutely a perception issue.”

But while she was willing to chalk up NPR’s liberal bias as merely a “perception” problem, she made sure another form of diversity was being addressed in more substantive manner.

This is the organization that FIRED Juan Williams. Juan Williams is a leftist, but not crazy enough for NPR, apparently.

Why did they do it?

From CNN.

Excerpt:

The conservative activist responsible for producing an undercover video showing a National Public Radio senior executive slamming the Tea Party as “racist” and “scary” is speaking out about why he went after the organization.

And late Tuesday, NPR announced it has placed the executive, Senior Vice President for Fundraising Ron Schiller, on administrative leave.

Filmmaker James O’Keefe said the idea for the sting stemmed from an incident in October when NPR fired analyst Juan Williams after he said he got scared when people wore Muslim garb on airplanes.

“My colleague Shaughn Adeleye who posed as one of the members of the Muslim Brotherhood was pretty offended with what happened with Juan Williams and he suggested looking into NPR after that incident back in the fall,” O’Keefe said to CNN Correspondent Brian Todd on Tuesday.

“My other colleague Simon Templar came up with the idea to have a Muslim angle since Juan Williams was fired due to his comments. So we decided to see if there was a greater truth or hidden truth amongst these reporters and journalists and executives.”

I am a big fan of the Saint novels, so it’s good to see someone resurrecting the Simon Templar alias. This sting is definitely something that Simon Templar would do to expose “the ways of the ungodly”.

Please read this interview transcript from the Hugh Hewitt show.

Excerpt:

HH: And where is the full video? Is it at Project Veritas, James O’Keefe?

JO’K: www.theprojectveritas.com.

HH: All right, now James O’Keefe, tell us a little bit about www.theprojectveritas.com. Who funds it?

JO’K: Who funds it? We don’t have any money right now. We are a non-profit organization, funded by grassroots people. I’m not exaggerating. We get very small donations, we’re running on fumes. And we have volunteer filmmakers, volunteer videographers who go out there. So I would appreciate people make a donation. It’s a 501c3. We haven’t gotten our tax exemption back from the IRS yet, but hopefully we do. And it’s just an effort to muckrake, to shake things up, to expose things for what they are, and to investigate the powerful institutions that the mainstream media refuses to investigate.

HH: Did you time the release of this to coincide with the debate over whether or not to defund NPR?

JO’K: NO, that wasn’t intentional. We got this tape, you know, February 22nd, in that week, which you know, and I produced it. So frankly, it was just very coincidental, and it happens to be more of a story. You know, as a journalist, I’m glad it’s taking place now, because it’s getting a lot more exposure given the debate. But frankly, that was kind of coincidental. It was not done months and months and months ago and I waited. It was done two weeks ago, three weeks ago, and it took me some time to produce it.

HH: Is it fair in your opinion to call this a sting?

JO’K: I don’t care what you call it. Honestly, and everyone’s asking me what do I refer to myself as. It really does not matter. You can call it a sting, you can call it investigative reporting, you can call it filmmaking, you can call it activism. But what it is, is exposing that a triangle has three sides, frankly, that everyone knows that this is true. But the guy is a caricature, a stereotype, of what people have been talking about for years about these media elites. So I don’t really care what people call me or call my teammates, journalists or sting artists or activists or hoaxsters. Whatever they say, I think that it’s a form of journalism that’s been used for decades by ABC News, PrimeTime Live, 60 Minutes, To Catch A Predator. We’re just adding a new media twist to it.

HH: Where were you, the reason I asked for the term is so I can ask this question. Where were you when the sting was going down?

JO’K: I wasn’t even in D.C. I trained these two guys. I gave them all my expertise. I gave them equipment that I have. And I helped them do what they wanted to do. That’s my mission at The Project Veritas, train people, equip them, and send them out into the field to do creative reporting.

HH: Did you conceive of the idea, James?

JO’K: No, the idea was basically a hybrid between Shaughn Adeleye, who came to me and was a little bit offended by what happened with Juan Williams, and my other friend, Simon Templar, who similarly thought about doing something with NPR. And we just put our heads together, and I offered by expertise, which is the sort of undercover stuff, and they sort of did the rest.

Evolution News has more on how NPR covers science news.

Excerpt:

One particularly interesting segment of the tapes is an exchange in which the NPR officials explain how their network covers controversial subjects in science. Betsy Liley is heard describing another funding source who wanted NPR not to report the views of global warming skeptics:

This funder said to us, ‘you know you would like us to support your environmental coverage, but we really don’t want to give you money if you’re going to talk to the people who think climate change is not happening,’ (as reported by the Washington Times).

She continues to say,

It is a complicated thing, though. There’s a political question and there is a scientific question and we were talking to him about supporting the science desk. And so we’ve gone back to the science editor and asked how have you planned to cover this thing? Our coverage, if you look at our coverage, you would say that science coverage has accepted that climate change is happening and we’re covering it. But in politics, our Washington desk, might actually cover it should it resurface as a political issue…this debate….

I think the challenge in our society now is that we are questioning facts. It’s not opinions we are debating. I mean, what are the facts? Is the world flat? Is that the next question we’re going to debate?

Mr. Schiller chimes in later saying,

The main point here is that it is not our responsibility to present the opinion of a non-scientist through our science desk. All educated scientists accept that climate change as fact. On the political side, however, where it is not accepted as fact, and the fact that debate is happening is news and it’s really important news. And our point of view requires that we cover that debate, if for no other reason than to have Americans understand there are still people who believe that it is not fact.

We should be stinging the secular left elites all the time. Stinging NPR, ACORN and Planned Parenthood is great for everyone – we stop funding them and then their missions (communism, voter fraud and abortion, respectively) are set back. They need our money to do the evil things they want to do. We need to cut off or limit all funding sources of NPR, PBS, unions, trial lawyers, environmentalists, ACORN and Planned Parenthood. And we need to bring in vouchers to stop all involuntary funding of public schools. Why are we work hard in private industry to pay the salaries of lazy left-wing socialists? Let them find real jobs and pay their own way in the free market. Let them offer something of value that customers want instead of acting like parasites on a host.

New York Times walks back their biased coverage of the Tucson killings

From the radically left-wing, unreliable New York Times.

Excerpt:

The Times’s day-one coverage in some of its Sunday print editions included a strong focus on the political climate in Arizona and the nation. For some readers — and I share this view to an extent — placing the violence in the broader political context was problematic.

[…]The Times had a lot of company, as news organizations, commentators and political figures shouldered into an unruly scrum battling over whether the political environment was to blame. Meanwhile, opportunities were missed to pick up on evidence — quite apparent as early as that first day — that Jared Lee Loughner, who is charged with the shootings, had a mental disorder and might not have been motivated by politics at all.“If I were a reporter on this story, my very first call would have been to a mental health professional willing to consider the nature of Mr. Loughner’s illness,” Max Etchemendy of East Palo Alto, Calif., wrote. “The ‘political’ angle has been beaten to death, and ‘medical’ angle has been ignored completely.”

So why does a story get framed this way? Journalism educators characterize this kind of framing as a storytelling habit — one of relating new facts to an existing storyline — and also as a reflex of news organizations that are built to handle some topics well, and others less well.

Er, actually to the extent that he was motivated by politics at all, he was motivated by left-wing politics.

Gateway Pundit explains:

The Tucson killer was an anti-Christian, anti-Constitution, left-wing, pro-Marx, antiflag, “quite liberal” lunatic who hated Bush. He had been targeting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords since 2007.

2007? That’s before the Tea Partying even started. And before Sarah Palin was even discovered by most people except bloggers who live and breathe politics.

The New York Times just cannot report the facts on what animated the killer, because the New York Times journalists are largely animated by the same conspiracy theories and left-wing nonsense, (as seen in peer-reviewed studies of media bias and records of political contributions made by journalists). They believe in catastrophic man-made global warming now, just like they believed in catastrophic man-made global cooling 40 years ago. These are not rational people. They have an agenda, and it affects their ability to apprehend reality.

The thing that annoys me is that the rest of us in the blogosphere were all over this guy from day one, reporting on his Youtube channel and so on. Even I was paying attention to the story because ECM kept bombarding me with the details for 2 hours. He was the one that picked up on the anti-Christian ranting and the flag-burning video. The morons at the New York Times apparently took a week to find that video, but ECM found it in a minute. Maybe they are not capable of understaning things like Twitter, Youtube and RSS feeds. It was obvious that Loughner was a lefty. The only reason they didn’t report it is because they are not objective journalists at all, but Democrat operatives. They are as much in the tank for Obama as Robert Gibbs.

Democrats got 88% of 2008 contributions from mainstream media

From the Washington Examiner.

Excerpt:

Senior executives, on-air personalities, producers, reporters, editors, writers and other self-identifying employees of ABC, CBS and NBC contributed more than $1 million to Democratic candidates and campaign committees in 2008, according to an analysis by The Examiner of data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Democratic total of $1,020,816 was given by 1,160 employees of the three major broadcast television networks, with an average contribution of $880.

By contrast, only 193 of the employees contributed to Republican candidates and campaign committees, for a total of $142,863. The average Republican contribution was $744.

[…]The data on contributions by broadcast network employees was compiled by CRP at the request of The Examiner and included all 2008 contributions by individuals who identified their employer as one of the three networks or subsidiaries. The data does not include contributions by employees of the three networks who did not identify their employer.

The CRP is the organization behind OpenSecrets.org, the web site that for more than a decade has put campaign finance data within reach of anybody with an Internet connection.

President Obama received 710 such contributions worth a total of $461,898, for an average contribution of $651 from the network employees. Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain received only 39 contributions totaling $26,926, for an average donation of $709.

And that’s why the mainstream news channels cannot be trusted.

UPDATE:

Bill Press has his own show on CNN. On CNN!