Vivian Schiller, the former head of National Public Radio, who was fired for permitting it to function as a leftist propaganda machine, is now the chief of the NBC television network’s digital operations.
According to NBC, the disgraced former headmistress of NPR, a key component of the radical left’s media engine, Schiller will run NBC’s website and mobile phone operation.
NBC, its president said, is glad to bring the leftist Schiller on board because of her prodigious talents.
Why She Was Fired
NPR fired leftist Schiller after network executives were caught on video calling members of the tea party political movement racists. The remarks occurred during a sting operation organized by conservative investigator James O’Keefe, who had become famous for bringing down ACORN, the leftist community organization whose principal mission was voter fraud. O’Keefe ran the operation through his Project Veritas.
O’Keefe dispatched two operatives, posing as Muslims and representing something called the Muslims Education Action Trust to eat lunch with NPR foundation president Ron Schiller (no relation to Vivian) and his NPR’s chief fundraiser Betsy Liley, the director for institutional giving. During the lunch, the faux Muslims flatly told the pair of leftists that MEAC was a front for the Muslims Brotherhood, an organization connected to terrorists whose goal is the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate. MEAC’s website also espouses that goal.
During the lunch, one of the Muslims said that the Tea Party is racist and Islamophobic.
The Tea Party is 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 said the Republican Party is “fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian — I wouldn’t even call it Christian. It’s this weird evangelical kind of move.”
For her part, NPR exec Liley told the two Muslims that this country’s racist past includes the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and that NPR was right to cashier liberal Juan Williams when he confessed, on Bill O’Reilly’s program, that encountering Muslims on airline flights makes him nervous.
The phony Muslims offered NPR $5 million during their conversations.
NPR Ready To Accept Brotherhood Money
Naturally, NPR denied it was willing to accept $5 million from a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. “The fraudulent organization represented in this video repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept,” an NPR spokesman said.
But another release from Project Veritas soon proved that claim false. That audio recording showed that NPR was drafting the legal documents to accept $5 million from the MEAC, again a front for the terrorist-connected Muslim Brotherhood. As well, it showed that Vivian Schiller knew the Muslim moolah was on the way.
Vivian knows about our meeting as my email indicated I think for her to feel — for us to prep her appropriately for the next meeting, it would be great to have some more information from you guys. But Ron and she talked, and I shared notes from our meeting about kind of where you are in your interest, and so I think for us to do kind of our due diligence, it would also be helpful to get some of the background information [on the organization and on its leadership].
As well, Liley repeatedly promised the Muslim money men that their donation would remain anonymous.
[Y]ou might want to be an anonymous donor. And, we would certainly, if that was your interest, want to shield you from that…. I let [NPR legal counsel] know. well, Vivian let her know about this…. Typically we have some kind of written agreement, especially with gifts of this size, even a simple letter just to lay out the terms so that both sides understand what the support would be used for. So she’s putting something together that we could share with you tomorrow in draft form. … It’s a simple gift agreement …
In an email, rainmaker Liley told the Muslims “NPR can list MEAC as an anonymous donor in our database.”
Schiller Out
NPR’s board forced Schiller out the back door because it could no longer tolerate the embarrassment of her tenure. She was still in trouble, it turned out, for the Juan Williams fiasco. Schiller permitted one of her torpedoes at NPR to fire the veteran NPR hand in a phone call.
Although Schiller, who has fulsomely denied NPR has a liberal bias, was ushered out, that didn’t stop conservatives in Congress from loading their guns and aiming at NPR’s funding, which comes through the $445 million budget of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Although NPR only gets 2 percent of its budget from CPB, many of its stations are dependent upon public money.
As the scandal was brewing, a public radio executive admitted that NPR must broaden its audience beyond the white liberal elite it has cultivated.
NBC Happy to Have Leftist Schiller
For its part, NBC isn’t concerned about Schiller’s past. NBC released a statement from news chief Steve Capus:
Bringing Vivian on board enhances this network’s mission of growth and the evolution of its digital businesses and strategy. With Vivian’s help, NBC News will be recognized as the premier broadcast news organization in America, as well as the most innovative, comprehensive and trusted news operation. Her background in journalism, combined with expertise in the digital space will add a strong new pillar to the NBC News leadership team.
According to The Associated Press, Capus doesn’t much care about Schiller’s scandalous departure from NPR. “Capus said Thursday,” AP reported, “that Schiller’s unpleasant ending at NPR had no effect on the consideration of her for the NBC job.”
“The only aspect of the NPR experience that came into play is that, by all accounts, she took a radio network and turned it into a brilliant multi-platform organization, and she did the same thing with the newspaper website when she worked at The New York Times,” Capus said. “That’s why she got the digital job at NBC News.”
Capus, apparently, isn’t worried that Schiller’s duties may involve funding from Muslim Brotherhood front groups in NBC’s digital effort.
Photo: President and CEO of NPR Vivian Schiller appears on The Kalb Report at the National Press Club in Washington, on March 24, 2009: AP Images
