Anna Christopher, who is “senior manager of media relations” at
National Public Radio, spent yesterday doing some serious
explaining. Most of us probably didn’t know that NPR had
any managers of media relations, much less a senior one,
and certainly didn’t care. NPR is free to waste money any way it
chooses, even if some of the money does come from taxpayers.
Anyway, seems Ms. Christopher was called upon to manage
the media regarding NPR’s firing of Juan Williams for saying
something inconsistent with the company line. The problem was what
he said, Ms. Christopher insisted, not where he said it, which was
on Fox TV.
What Williams said was that he gets nervous when he is on
an airplane and notices some of his fellow passengers in Muslim
garb. This, of course, simply will not do.
One wonders how Ms. Christopher and her co-workers at NPR
would feel if they saw a couple of sunburned, tobacco chewing old
boys in a pickup truck with a rifle racked over the seat coming
down the street where they live. Most likely the strangers would
not be dangerous; just a couple of bitter clinging deer hunters who
got lost. Sort of people you should pity, not fear. But… you never
know.
Anyway, Williams was fired and as if that were not
punishment enough Vivian Schiller, Ms. Christopher’s boss, the CEO
of NPR, said he should have kept his feelings between himself and
“his psychiatrist or his publicist.”
Ms. Schiller got this nifty off while speaking to the
Atlanta Press Club. One wonders:
(a) How her audience reacted?
(b) Why she felt compelled to send Ms. Christopher out to
manage the media again, this time with an apology?
What the senior manager of media relations said was,
“Vivian [Schiller] spoke hastily and apologized to Juan and others
for her hasty remark.”
Why apologize? After all, Schiller and her outfit had
pretty much called Williams a racist already. Why not double down
and say he’s nuts, too? One suspects that it is a(nother) NPR taboo
to in any way be perceived as making light of people who are
mentally ill, emotionally disturbed, or suffering from any malady
requiring the services of a psychiatrist. Ms. Schiller probably
felt herself on the thinnest of PC ice and looking at a six-month
stretch in sensitivity boot camp. So she sent Ms. Christopher out
to do some managing of media relations.
You don’t mock the therapeutic culture at NPR where they
treat the audience as though it is in need of help and reassurance.
How else explain the soft, modulated voices of the on-the-air
talent and the implicit message of all those fund-raising
campaigns, which comes down to, “We are the voice of sanity in an
otherwise disturbed and disturbing world.”
That would be the real world. The one Juan Williams was
describing and which National Patronizing Radio elaborately
pretends does not exist.
