NPR Can't Keep Their Story Straight

When James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released their latest undercover video investigation targeting National Public Radio this morning, NPR was lightening fast with their response. They denounced Vice President of Finance Ron Schiller’s comments and said they were “appalled” by them. They also took great pains to point out that Mr. Schiller has already announced he was leaving the government-funded broadcaster — a move that was hastened today by NPR putting Mr. Schiller on “administrative leave.”

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In the realm of damage control, this statement was pretty effective in it’s unambiguous denunciation and in its effort to isolate the damage just to Mr. Schiller. So far so good. However, NPR also took time in their statement to address the proposed $5 million gift from the phony organization set up to look like a Muslim Brotherhood front group by O’Keefe’s journalists.

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.

Also unambiguous. However, according to NPR’s subsequent statement on the matter, it appears to be false.

NPR’s David Folkenflik reports that there were clear signs that the Muslim Education Action Center Trust was not a long-standing organization …

CEO Vivian Schiller tells David that NPR became aware of those peculiarities, and that NPR was vetting the organization. And he has obtained e-mails (not from an official NPR source, but which have been verified by NPR) showing that the network last week asked the fictitious Ibrahim Kasaam for, among other things, verification that the Muslim Education Action Center was qualified as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. It was not, of course.

As this story continues to unravel on NPR they are going to need to explain how the could definitively state to the public that they repeatedly refused the large, anonymous donation from MEAC yet at the same time, were “vetting” them. Why would you vet an organization from which you were repeatedly refusing a donation?

If NPR’s position is that they first went through the vetting process and as soon as they discovered that the group was bogus, they then repeatedly refused their donation, they better look at their statement again. According to NPR they were in contact with MEAC as recently as last week to discover their 501(c)(3) status. How could they possibly have “repeatedly” refused MEAC’s donation if just last week they were asking them for their tax-free status qualifications.

NPR needs to re-group here and come up with one, coherent story Otherwise we might just begin to think that the rest of their damage control is bogus as well — you know, the part where they claim Mr. Schiller’s elitist and derogatory statements about conservatives don’t reflect on their organization as a whole.