Overreach or Partisan Strategy?: NPR Host Steps Down After Husband Joins Obama Campaign

Michele Norris hosts NPR’s dishonestly named “All Things Considered,” one of those insufferable dulcet-toned offerings where very few conservative ideas or pols are “considered” reasonable or sane. The show would be laughable if not for the fact that my hard-earned tax dollars subsidize all the self-important leftist bias and sanctimony.

Anyway, the decision to remove her from the show seems like an overreach on NPR’s part. There’s no reason why what a spouse does for a living should in any way reflect on the other spouse. Husband and wife should be allowed to have their own separate careers, worldviews, and political beliefs without a guilt-by-association conflict of interest dogging them.

NPR, however, says they think differently:

Michele Norris, co-host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” is temporarily stepping away from all her duties and all campaign-related coverage because her husband, Broderick Johnson, has taken a senior advisor position with the president’s re-election campaign.

“After careful consideration, we decided that Broderick’s new role could make it difficult for me to continue hosting ATC,” Norris wrote in a note to NPR staff. “Given the nature of Broderick’s position with the campaign and the impact that it will most certainly have on our family life, I will temporarily step away from my hosting duties until after the 2012 elections.”

Broderick served as an informal advisor to Obama’s 2008 campaign and was a senior advisor for congressional affairs for the Kerry presidential campaign. He will “serve as a national surrogate for the campaign and our representative in meetings with key leaders, communities and organizations” for the 2012 campaign, according to an announcement from Obama for America.

All that was needed here was an approach similar to Nina Easton’s on Fox News. Whenever the topic on Brett Baier’s all-star panel or Fox News Sunday turns to Mitt Romney, Easton clearly states that her husband is an adviser for the Romney campaign. There’s no reason Norris couldn’t have done the same whenever her awful show gushed over Their Precious One.

My guess, though, is that once the news got out about their co-host’s husband, the welfare queens at NPR feared a conservative backlash. Funny how NPR will do everything to mollify the Right except, you know, report the news fairly, honestly, and with integrity.

However, another reason NPR might have done this is in advance of the left-wing media push about to take place aimed at removing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas from the upcoming ruling on ObamaCare. The coming narrative from the corrupt media is almost certain to target Thomas’s wife Ginni and her personal ties to a lobbying firm that opposes the bill. Jumping on this narrative would be difficult for NPR with their own non-existent conflict of interest on one of their high-profile shows.

And yes, I always see something sinister behind whatever the MSM does. But it’s only because they are the villains in the ongoing story of America.