Here’s a Vivian Schiller story.
Ms. Schiller is suddenly infamous as the National Public
Radio executive with Soviet-style values on display in the firing
of Juan Williams.
Where would an American media executive ever learn that
dissent is not to be tolerated?
How about a film project called Portrait of the Soviet
Union?
It was lovely. A glowing documentary of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics produced in documentary film format by a
big Soviet Union fan — Ted Turner.
The 1988 film was also made into a book of the same name,
with Fitzroy MacLean, a onetime British MP listed as the author. By
1988 MacLean was the “chief consultant” for Turner
Broadcasting.
So who cares?
As a point of interest in terms of the intolerance
displayed by NPR President and CEO Schiller, it is perhaps worth
noting that — yes indeed — Schiller comes about her intolerance
for free speech honestly.
Ms. Schiller, it seems, had a fascination with the Russian
language. Which led her to the Soviet Union after college, which
led in turn to a job as a tour guide, which led to work on the
documentary version of Turner’s Portrait of the Soviet
Union.
Schiller was not a creative force on the film, she was
simply using her Russian skills to help the Turner people get
around the country. But it is interesting that a career that has
blossomed in the hallowed halls of the notoriously intolerant
American left-wing media began in one of the most infamously
intolerant civilizations on earth — where Schiller was hired to
work on what became a stunningly rose-colored look at the Communist
tyranny.
Don’t take my word for it.
John Corry of the New York Times —
that’s right, the New York Times —panned the
film that Schiller helped facilitate. “History
disappears down the memory hole in ‘Portrait of the Soviet
Union,’”said Corry in his opening line of a scorching review
that appeared in the Times on March 20, 1988.
The film said, said Corry caustically (Corry was the rare
conservative at the Times), tells us: “The
Soviet spirit just works wonders. From Moscow to Azerbaijan to deep
in frozen Siberia, no one even frowns.”
Narrated by the late liberal actor Roy Scheider of
Jaws fame, the Soviet Union is presented as — no kidding
— the “place of tomorrow.” Asks Corry: “What happened to Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago? It’s as if it never existed; the
memory hole has opened up.” The series — which ran in seven parts
— makes a big deal that everyone in the Soviet Union just gets
along swimmingly, all marching along behind those big Red flags
with the hammer and sickle.
Corry notes that actor Scheider happily prattles on about
”the greatest experiment in social engineering the world has ever
seen.” Now the ”first stage of the revolution is nearing
completion.”
The future was bright, the film inisited. Three years
later the Soviet Union collapsed onto, as Reagan accurately
predicted, the “ash heap of history.”
So what does Ms. Schiller herself have to say of this time
in her life? In an interview
in, of all places for an NPR executive, the February-March 2009
issue of Entrepreneur Magazine, she says
“At the time, Ted Turner went through this period of deep
fascination with the Soviet Union … and they hired me to be a
translator/production assistant/’fixer’—which in production terms
is somebody in a foreign country who ‘makes it happen,’” Schiller
says.
Understand this carefully. To be a “fixer” in a
totalitarian country is to swim in the waters, understanding how it
works and how to manipulate people to get things done.
How, in other words, a society that will not tolerate dissent
or free speech can silence that
speech.
What makes one sit up and pay attention in the
indescribably abysmal treatment of Juan Williams is that it comes
at the hands of a woman who spent a serious part of her youth
absorbing a working knowledge of how an intolerant society is run
— including the media. If there is some blunt, Reagan-style
condemnation of the Soviets from Schiller, it has yet to
surface.
What has surfaced are admiring profiles where her time in
what Reagan accurately termed the “Evil Empire” are recalled with
fondness. Nary a negative word to say about Portrait of the
Soviet Union. And why should there be? Schiller got a job out
of the whole experience. She worked at Turner and CNN from 1988
until 2002, when she moved on and joined — yes — the New York
Times Company as Senior Vice President and General Manager of
NYTimes.com. And from that left-wing media perch to NPR.
Where, today, she brought the values of the Soviet Union
into play against one of the more honorable and decent advocates of
American liberalism — Juan Williams.
Is it a shame? Yes.
But it’s much more than that. It’s an outright assault on
American First Amendment values.
From a media network that is funded by — you.
