Despite errors, NPR still vital
Former National Public Radio president Vivian Schiller Credit: AP
There's more trouble at National Public Radio.
Conservative undercover operators posing as Muslim philanthropists got one of the network's fundraising executives to denigrate Republicans and tea partiers on tape. He quickly resigned.
NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller did likewise on Wednesday. Last year the same CEO was roundly criticized for the dismissal of news analyst Juan Williams after he said on Fox News that people in "Muslim garb" on an airplane made him nervous.
But the latest NPR flap shouldn't obscure the value of public radio or the importance of government funding for it. As serious news has all but vanished from commercial radio, NPR has emerged as a potent cultural force offering mercifully nonhysterical coverage of important public issues.
Yet the network came to be perceived, perhaps accurately, as tilting liberal, a perception bolstered by Schiller's mishandling of the Williams affair.
America needs a strong NPR, but a strong NPR is unlikely to survive without changing public perceptions of its politics -- and finding a new leader savvy enough to navigate the political headwinds that will inevitably buffet an effective public broadcaster.
As Edward R. Murrow might have said, "This is reality calling."
