Josh Gerstein of Politico is reporting--and everyone else is buzzing about--the pressure that National Public Radio is putting on one of its employees, Mara Liasson, who is also a contributor to the Fox News Channel. Here's Gerstein's lede:
Executives at National Public Radio recently asked the network’s top political correspondent, Mara Liasson, to reconsider her regular appearances on Fox News because of what they perceived as the network’s political bias, two sources familiar with the effort said.
According to a source, Liasson was summoned in early October by NPR’s executive editor for news, Dick Meyer, and the network’s supervising senior Washington editor, Ron Elving. The NPR executives said they had concerns that Fox’s programming had grown more partisan, and they asked Liasson to spend 30 days watching the network.
At a follow-up meeting last month, Liasson reported that she’d seen no significant change in Fox’s programming and planned to continue appearing on the network, the source said.
By an amazing coincidence, Liasson was called in about the same time that White House communications director Anita Dunn launched her campaign against Fox News. And so it's little surprise that left-wing NPR execs were eager both to smite the right and also to suck up to the White House. (The fact that the White House has cancelled its anti-Fox campaign seems to have been lost on NPR, like true stooges, they keep going in the direction they've been pointed.)
Note also the totalitarian-style "self-criticism": NPR commissars "asked Liasson to spend 30 days watching the network," to see if she saw the error of her ways. Apparently she hasn't yet. The point is not that Liasson is supposed to agree with Fox. Instead, the point is that Fox open to all points of view, to be argued, in fairness and balance.
This is not the first time this has happened: Juan Williams, another NPR employee, and another Fox News contributor, has come under similar scrutiny.
In honor of Comrade Dunn's well-known Maoist proclivities, perhaps we should have shown a picture of a self-criticism session from Red China's cultural revolution of the late 60s. But this painting of the Spanish Inquisition, from Goya, c. 1816, is a favorite, and a reminder that the totalitarian virus pops up all over the place. (That's Liasson and Williams above, inserted into the picture).
And now, most recently, the "totalbug" has surfaced at NPR.
