Republican chop shop

House Republicans have introduced a list outlining $2.5 trillion in cuts over ten years. Rail projects and health care make up the bulk of the cuts, but there are savings from cultural programs, too. From David Weigel's piece in Slate:

And cuts that get revenge for Juan Williams: $445 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, $167.5 million from the NEA, and $167.5 million from the NEH.

NPR news exec resigns in wake of Williams firing

NPR released two memos today. The first says NPR must update its ethics guidelines based on an independent review of news analyst Juan Williams's firing. The second says Ellen Weiss, senior vice president of news at NPR and the person who called Williams to give him the boot, has resigned. The two memos are connected, obviously, though its not yet clear whether Weiss was forced out or bolted because of the NPR board's blatant meddling in news business.

Copies of both memos are here.

According to the first memo, the NPR board has demanded the news division establish a committee to review and update its code of ethics, both to ensure NPR journalists doing work for outside media outlets have more free rein and so the news division's "practices encourage a broad range of viewpoints to assist its decision-making, support its mission, and reflect the diversity of its national audiences"

The NPR board also gave CEO Vivian Schiller a renewed vote of confidence, but has withheld her bonus for 2010.

The second memo, written by Schiller, offers some background on Weiss's tenure at NPR and says who will step in for her until a new senior vice president of news is named, but it offers no detail on why she left. Was she forced out to give House Republicans their pound of flesh? Or is her exit a protest over how NPR has handled the Williams affair?

Here's more from NPR's news blog, which steps lightly around the connection between Weiss and Williams:

For background on the Juan Williams dismissal, you might start here. Alicia Shepard, NPR's ombudsman, previously said that the firing "was poorly handled." Williams previously said he thinks he was fired because "I appear on Fox." Weiss was the NPR executive who informed Williams of his dismissal, which came after he said on Fox News Channel that he gets nervous when he sees people in "Muslim garb" on airplanes. NPR said the remark was the latest in a pattern of problem comments made by Williams over recent years.

As NPR's David Folkenflik reports for our newscast, after Williams' dismissal "conservatives blasted NPR, and Fox News' most prominent opinion hosts made a cause of it. Republican lawmakers threatened to cut federal funding for public broadcasters."

As for the review done by Weil, Gotshal & Manges, David summarizes the findings this way: "It found that the termination of Williams' contract was entirely legal. But the board said the report called for a full review of the company's policies on ethics and outside appearances and for them to be applied consistently to all personnel."

He adds that Weiss "joined NPR in 1982 and rose through the ranks, holding a variety of key positions, such as executive producer of All Things Considered and national editor. She helped lead coverage of some of the biggest stories and highest-impact investigations in recent years. And she is credited with leading the network through an era of wrenching changes in journalism. But her dismissal of Williams — by phone — became a flashpoint in the debate."

39 percent of Americans want to cut off NPR

A majority of registered Republicans and 39 percent of Americans overall want to see the federal government pull its funding to NPR, a new survey found. Only 45 percent of those surveyed want to keep the funding the vanquisher of Juan Williams.

From the survey summary:

In partisan terms, Republicans favored ending U.S. funding 54-28 percent, while Democrats wanted the funding to continue 58-25 percent. NPR funding was favored by independents 49-38 percent.

Broken down by ages, the 18-29 group supported continued taxpayer subsidies 62-30 percent. The 30-44 group narrowly sided with halting the funding 42-39 percent, and older groups were almost evenly split on the idea.

Men backed NPR’s federal funding 50-40 percent, but women were not so decisive. They supported continued funding 40-37 percent, with another 23 percent undecided. Support hovered around 50 percent among all ethnic groups in the survey – whites, blacks, Latinos and others.

A second look at Juan Williams, and then looking past him

The Juan Williams flap is more interesting than I first suggested yesterday, once the personalities and Fox squawk are toned down some.

The predictable calls for Congress to de-fund NPR were predictable. But conservative critics could gain some ammunition in their charge of liberal bias since, earlier this week, NPR accepted $1.8 million from a foundation run by liberal activist billionaire George Soros. On the other side of the partisan divide, David Weigel at Slate asks whether conservatives are letting themselves get sidetracked in the final week of campaign season:

Doesn't this remind that voter whom the Democrats are trying to spook with Christine O'Donnell attacks that the GOP he's voting for is going to wage culture war as much as it's going to try and bring back jobs?

And, of course, there's the increasing pressure on journalists to "get real" by offering opinions and reactions, rather than muck up the American reality show with mushy impartiality and faux objectivity:

The Williams firing shows that NPR, in many ways, is an example of a news organization trying to navigate new media without muddying the role of journalism in society, says Jen Reeves, an associate journalism professor at the University of Missouri in Columbia.

"It's confusing to the general public what journalism is anymore," says Ms. Reeves. "Our job as journalists is to question the culture and present it to the general public to think about. But instead we're constantly [playing up people's fears]."

I'm still not sure why people seek elite stand ins to sloppily represent their thoughts and opinions; and I don't see how a response to fake outrage on a show like the O'Reilly Factor offers a truthful glimpse into reality. But whatever.

There's the question of how Muslims are being used by ideologues to stand as symbols of what we should fear or what we should celebrate; there's a profit issue (people get paid more to bash on cable than to think on NPR), and then there's perhaps the most interesting question to me, one related to the opinion and spin journalism on television and online. The story was done by a reporter at NPR and it will sound sympathetic to the president to some. Here's an excerpt:

[Walt] Rowen counseled patience, sounding very much like the owner of a family business that's now celebrating its 100th year.

"Like businesses, many, many times it's a long-term process. You can't expect immediate results," he said. "You've got to look down the road and say, 'These are the policies that I need to implement now that will get me where I want to go.'

"And that's very difficult to get across in our society today. Everybody is like Velma Hart. She wants an immediate answer. She wants instant gratification. And it's not possible."

Rowen's words reminded me of Cavalier's and Amadeo's. But their philosophy isn't one that's getting a lot of airtime these days. That has left Rowen asking the question one hears from across the political spectrum: left, right and especially center.

"Why aren't people like me that have opinions like mine being asked or talked to?" he asked.

Across the country, there's no shortage of shouting this election season.  But beyond the backyard, real conversations about politics are hard to come by.

A journalist needs to set his own opinions aside to hear and report Rowen's. And it's a hell of a lot more interesting than what Juan Williams thinks when he gets on a plane.

Juan Williams, the most important man in America today

I find it hard to get too worked up about NPR firing Juan Williams for saying he gets "nervous" when he sees Muslims on an airplane. One could certainly argue that NPR handled the situation poorly from a PR perspective; and any inconsistency in how NPR applies its policy prohibiting analysts and reporters from offering opinion is certainly newsworthy. My main takeaway: If Williams wasn't supposed to offer opinions on cable news shows, NPR should have fired him long before he stumbled into an issue that's so politically charged.

What have we learned from all of this? First, conservatives who didn't like NPR before don't like NPR even more now. Second, despite repeated claims that NPR is a taxpayer-funded operation, it really isn't. Third, getting fired by the "lamestream" media is lucrative. Last, pundits yelling the loudest about censorship aren't necessarily the most consistent on the issue. From Bloggasm:

The conservative media watchdog Newsbusters claimed today that “Juan Williams has done nothing wrong” and that “what he said echoes what the vast majority of Americans believe.” This is the complete opposite of the view it took on Nasr’s rather anodyne tweet. “CNN has finally taken a step in the right direction in removing a terrorist sympathizer from their ranks,” the blogger wrote several months ago. “It’s a shame it took this amount of publicity and attention from organizations like the MRC to get the job done, as Octavia Nasr should never have been granted the position of authority to begin with.”

Four in the morning

1. Guests on public television news and interview shows are mostly white and male. FAIR

2. NPR fired Juan Williams for statements he made about Muslims on "The O'Reilly Factor" (WaPo). There's some push back from other media (Slate). NPR's president explains further (LA Observed). Williams does more talking on Fox (NYT).

3. Jim Rainey does not think public radio will replace newspapers as a main source of local news. LA Times

4. Have you applied to become the next editor of Newsweek? Hispters should probably apply twice. The Awl