It is with deep regret that I tell you that the NPR Board of Directors has preferred the resignation of Vivian Schiller as President and C.E.O. of NPR, effective immediately.
Schiller did not respond to a message left at his Aspen, Colo., family. His resignation from NPR was announced publicly last week and he has accepted a job as adviser of the Aspen Institute Arts Program. He is not related to Vivian Schiller.
The video was posted Tuesday by James O’Keefe, the same activist whose undercover videos have targeted additional groups opposed by conservatives, like the community organizing group ACORN and Planned Parenthood.
“The present Republican Party namely not really the Republican Party. It’s been hijacked by this group that is … not equitable Islamophobic merely, actually, xenophobic,” Schiller said in the movie, referring apt the tea celebration campaign. “They trust in arrange of pearly, navel America, gun-toting – it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist human.”
The full text of NPR’s bulletin about Schiller reads It��s about time:
I acknowledge the magnitude of this news — and that it comes on altitude of what has been a traumatic time for NPR and the larger public radio community. The Board is committed to supporting NPR through this interim duration and has reassurance in NPR’s leadership group.
Vivian brought vision and vigor to this organization. She led NPR behind from the enormous economic challenges of the before two years. She was passionately committed to NPR’s mission, and to stations and NPR working collaboratively for a local-national news network.
The video drew swift reaction from Republicans in Congress, who are renewing efforts to cut funding to public broadcasters. NPR and PBS have long been targets of conservatives who claim their programming has a left-wing bias. Similar efforts in the 1990s and 2005 were not successful, although public broadcasters take the menace seriously.
Project Veritas identified the men who met with Schiller and Liley as Shaughn Adeleye and Simon Templar. Their assumed labels were “Ibrahim Kasaam” and “Amir Malik,” and they claimed to characterize the Muslim Education Action Center, a group they said had knots to the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.
The heavily amended video shows Schiller and another NPR executive, Betsy Liley, meeting at a pricey restaurant in Washington’s Georgetown vicinity with two men demanding to be part of a Muslim organization. The males offer NPR a $5 million alms. NPR said Tuesday it was “again pressured” to accept a $5 million retard, which the organization “repeatedly refused.”
NPR disavowed his expressions.
About the Williams firing, Schiller said, “What NPR did, I’m quite elated of, and what NPR stood for is non-racist, non-bigoted, linear telling of the news.”
Sens. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., introduced a detach bill Friday to cut off funding for CPB.
NPR receives about 2 percentage of its revenue from federal grants, when its member stations get about 10 percent of their funding from federal and state governments.
National Public Radio said in a statement that it was “revolted” by the comments from Ron Schiller, the president of NPR’s fundraising arm and a senior vice president for development.
“It is very clear that we would be better off in the long sprint without federal funding,” Schiller said, saying it would grant the organization to become an neutral voice and clear up the misconception that it is largely government-funded.
“We’ve just exposed the true hearts and minds of NPR and their executives,” O’Keefe said in a letter posted on the site. He asked supporters to sign a requisition urging Congress to review NPR’s funding.
“At a period when the nation is upside down by extra than a trillion dollars, tin we really afford to cater big perquisite to entities that aboveboard state that they don’t need the money?” he wrote. “Let’s take his counsel and pass legislation that would defund the clearly prejudiced news organization that is out of touch with Americans along the nation.”
Through a publicist, O’Keefe admitted to react to e-mailed answers but did not immediately answer.
“The assertion that NPR and public radio stations would be better off without federal funding does not reflect reality,” Davis Rehm said.
A national coordinator for the group Tea Party Patriots, Mark Meckler, wrote an e-mail to supporters about the video.
O’Keefe, best known for hidden-camera videos that entangled the community-organizing group ACORN, posted the video Tuesday on his website, Project Veritas. The group said the video was shot on Feb. 22.
According to a CEO succession plan adopted by the Board in 2009, Joyce Slocum, S.V.P. of Legal Affairs and General Counsel, has been nominated to the situation of Interim C.E.O. The Board ambition now create one Executive Transition Committee that will develop a timeframe and process for the recruitment and culling of fashionable leadership.
The budget bill passed by the House final month would end funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which assists programs dispensed above NPR and PBS. CPB is obtaining $430 million in the current financial year.
The Board approved her resignation with knowing, authentic repent, and magnificent esteem as her presidency of NPR these past two years.
Schiller had planned to resign from his position ahead the video was shot and was expected to leave in May. In a statement Tuesday night, whatsoever, he said his resignation would be telling immediately.
Attacks by conservatives on NPR gained momentum last year when analyst Juan Williams was fired for saying on Fox News that he feels uncomfortable when he sees people in “Muslim garb” on airplanes. Schiller defends the Williams firing in the video.
A hidden-camera video of an NPR executive phoning the tea party racist and mentioning the network would be better off without federal money has led to the resignation of NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller.
“There’s two issues at peg here in regards to taxpayer funding for public broadcasting: We can’t afford it, and they don’t need it,” DeMint said in a statement Tuesday.
Liley says little in the video, nevertheless she can be listened smiling when one of the men says his group referred to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.” NPR would not say if any movement was taken to residence Liley’s remarks or exterior in the video.
“This confusing video makes it explicit that taxpayer greenbacks ought no longer be appropriated to NPR,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said in a statement. He added that executives have “finally admitted that they do not need taxpayer dollars to survive.”
Schiller conceded that whether the funding were lost, “we would have a lot of stations go dingy.”