NPR's ouster of Vivian Schiller, its CEO, on Wednesday in the wake of a video sting that caught another NPR executive (Ron Schiller, no relation) slamming Republicans and the Tea Party was carried out with the hope that it might quiet calls from conservatives who want NPR defunded.
"I'm hopeful that my departure from NPR will have the intended effect of easing the defunding pressure on public broadcasting," Vivian Schiller said in a statement to the New York Times.
“I did not want to leave NPR,” she told the AP. "But it would have made it too difficult for stations to face that funding threat in Congress without this change."
But it doesn't appear that a pair of Schillers on a spit are going satisfy conservatives' appetite for NPR blood. In fact, the video sting appears to have galvanized anti-NPR sentiment on Capitol Hill.
"Our concern is not about any one person at NPR, rather it's about millions of taxpayers," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) said in a statement on Wednesday. "NPR has admitted that they don't need taxpayer subsidies to thrive, and at a time when the government is borrowing 40 cents of every dollar that it spends, we certainly agree with them."
The admission Cantor is referring to comes from the video released Tuesday by James O'Keefe, in which Ron Schiller tells a pair of would-be supporters from a fake Muslim group that NPR would be better off without federal funding.
"Republicans play off the belief among the general population that most of our funding comes from the government," Schiller says on the tape. "Very little of our funding comes from the government, but they act as if all our funding comes from the government."
Schiller has a point. NPR receives about 2 percent — or about $400 million — of its budget each year from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But for other public radio stations that run NPR programming, that number jumps to 10 percent.
"The challenge right now is that if we lost it altogether, we'd have a lot of stations go dark," he said.
“The fear is that up to 100 stations could go dark without it,” NPR media reporter David Folkenflik said on the air Wednesday. That's the real backdrop here. There were renewed calls yesterday on Capitol Hill, intensified calls to take that money away, and I think the board — a majority of which is controlled by station officials themselves — felt that this was one misstep, one major black eye too many.”
NPR, which immediately distanced itself from Schiller's covertly-taped commentary, appears committed to keeping the money coming. NPR chairman Dave Edwards — who announced Vivian Schiller's resignation, said Wednesday that federal funding "is so absolutely critical to what we do as an industry."
The Obama Administration, which recently submitted a federal budget that keeps public broadcasting funds intact, agrees.
“We think they are a worthwhile and important priority, as our budget makes clear,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said on Wednesday.
Nonetheless, healing this latest black eye may take awhile – with or without government funds.
"The events that took place became such a distraction to the organization that in the board's mind it hindered Vivian Schiller's ability to lead the organization going forward," Edwards said.
“People at NPR yesterday were angry and dazed by this episode, which is just the latest in a series of events that put the company in the worst possible light,” Alicia Shepard, NPR’s ombudsman, wrote. “Doesn't anyone in NPR's top management think of the consequences before they act?”
