Jay Rosen on NPR affiliate WNYC:
If WNYC’s Bob Garfield organizes and fronts for Comcast Must Die, an advocacy campaign targeting a media company that his show covers, that’s awkward but ultimately acceptable.
He can remain as host of On the Media.
But if a freelancer for WNYC, Caitlin Curran, stands with Occupy Wall Street, by carrying a sign with a passage from the Atlantic.com about corrupt practices in the financial industry, that’s an obvious ethics violation.
And she must be removed.
Are we all clear now?
I buy into DougJ’s Springsteenian theory about NPR (you end up like a dog that’s been beat too much, til you spend half your life just covering up), but Rosen’s example points out that there’s something more going on here. Presumably WNYC is afraid of Comcast, and Comcast complained. Why is participating in a protest different from starting one?
cleek
the difference is: wingnuts do not care if you hate Comcast; but they do care if you threaten the GOP’s electoral chances.
cathyx
I used to listen to my public broadcast station quite a lot but when they started to change their tone, I changed the station. I didn’t need to hear another rightwing radio program. Now I only listen to a few shows on the weekend, A Prairie Home Companion (I change it during the blue grass music though), and This American Life.
PeakVT
Garfield is an insider (at WNYC); Curran is not.
Also, too: OWS threatens the entire status quo; CCMD threatened just one company.
deep cap
I had a lot of normally reasonable Moderately Democratic friends complain bitterly about the OWS movement lately and identify with the 53% campaign. They hate the movement for the reasons that John Cole was originally reluctant to sign on: it “appears” to be a bunch of dirty hippies (literally), truthers, wealthy/privileged college kids, and jobless bums who can’t be taken seriously.
I’ve tried arguing with them that it much bigger than that. That those of us who have jobs and actually bathe still support the OWS even if we’re not down there every day with the kids.
It’s been hard, there’s still a lot of misunderstanding out there of the OWS movement and it’s not all Limpball’s fault.
bin Lurkin'
Because shut up..
D’oh..
Bill E Pilgrim
@deep cap: It’s not his fault, it’s the fault of NPR for being overly intimidated by whatever he (and everyone like him) decide offends them.
In other words, even if OWS were everything your friends think it is and nothing more, a contractor on an arts program that doesn’t cover news shouldn’t be fired for joining in and showing support.
It’s the pressure from the Wingnuts and dittoheads and etc that forces them to act in such extreme and unreasonable ways, and apparently it’s just relentless. If you actually talk to them, even the ombudsmen at the newspapers, they make it clear that the liberal outrage is tiny compared to the massive, constant barrage from the right.
ornery
I buy into DougJâs Springsteenian theory about NPR (you end up like a dog thatâs been beat too much, til you spend half your life just covering up)…
Of course you do, mrmix, of course you do! Your buy-in doesn’t fit the facts all that well, but it’s easier than recognizing NPR’s board was infiltrated with rightwing hacks and takes corporate money against its original design, which isn’t the kind of truth you can see. For whatever reason.
If folks like you COULD see the truth of the Right hijacking yet another media company … well the last decade would have looked a lot different.
ornery
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Itâs the pressure from the Wingnuts and dittoheads and etc that forces them to act in such extreme and unreasonable ways
No, they are modeling weakness for the nation to see … they simply take money for this behavior, it’s not that there’s so much ‘pressure.’
How nice for our corporate agenda that they have so many apologists for the Right. It would be much much better to simply say nothing about motives rather than sugarcoat it, for whatever reason.
Actually it is an important matter … did you and mrmx not actually LEARN what fascism is and how it works? Yeah I said it: you have a responsibility to learn about the enemies your nation has fought against. Then you might not be sitting here blabbing and giving it a foot massage.
Bill E Pilgrim
@ornery: What are you talking about? Appointing right wing board members isn’t responding to pressure from the right?
“They simply take money for this behavior” isn’t part of responding to pressure? What do you think would be pressure then? Treatening people that if they don’t support the right more, they’ll give them more money??
Saying that NPR is run by people following Rush Limbaugh’s agenda, just as the entire “right” is, which is why they call him the leader of the right in this country– is “apologizing for the right?”
If you try to make at least a little sense then I can try to respond.
Woodrowfan
Listening to the news on BBC this am. They interviewed a former newscaster from Syrian TV. He described how the Syrian rulers have shuttered themselves in their own alternative reality, how they views the media as only a tool to present that reality to the masses, and how they will even distort the weather report to match what they think should be the truth. I thought “this sounds very familiar.”
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@deep cap:
Just remember, Hippies can never be right about anything. Even when they’re right, they’re wrong, because they’re hippies. And everyone hates Hippies.
At least John, from what I remember, was more worried about the actual longevity and effect of the movement. It sounds like your friends just want to hippie punch.
MikeJ
@deep cap:
I’ve been wondering about that “475 pay no federal income tax” argument. A quick check tells me that 24% of Americans are under 18, and thus usually don’t earn much. Another 13% are over 65 and also don’t tend to earn as much. That leaves 10% of adults to be the lucky duckies that earn so little they don’t pay federal income tax.
joes527
Curran was not fired for holding up a sign or for participating in OWS.
She was fired for pitching her own activities as a story for her show.
Agree or disagree with the firing, but be honest enough to see the difference.
Shawn in ShowMe
@The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik:
For a lot of people just trying to live their lives, right and wrong ain’t got nothing to do with it. If being a hippie would put food on the table and pay their kids college tuition, there’d be hippies as far as the eye could see.
Creating a sosh-ul-list town of even 500 residents where people could work, play and receive medical care would do more to convince DFH critics than a dozen Wall Street protests. When a corporate wage slave asks “ya got something better?”, there’d finally be something real to point to.
cleek
@MikeJ:
IIRC, the 53/47% thing includes only people who work in jobs where they could pay federal income taxes (so that excludes people who don’t work). 47% don’t make enough to pay, or they get full refunds, or they receive enough in credits to offset whatever they pay.
Judas Escargot
@ornery:
This.
They tried the same trick with PBS, also too, with somewhat less success… which is how we ended up with Galtian tonguebaths like this getting on the air last decade.
El Cid
@Shawn in ShowMe: What if you could put a hippie on the table for food? People eat possums, skunks, and squirrel. This way the “53 percent”, including the huge number of those who pay federal income taxes in moral beliefs rather than dollars, can satisfy both their broke-ass need to put food on their family and slake their bloodlust to make their weaker enemies suffer.
Redshift
@cleek:
According to the CBPP (as reported by TPM), the figure is based on people who file tax returns, so it does include retired and disabled people on Social Security, people receiving unemployment, and full-time students.
Jay Rosen
@joes527
“Curran was not fired for holding up a sign or for participating in OWS. She was fired for pitching her own activities as a story for her show. Agree or disagree with the firing, but be honest enough to see the difference.”
Not correct. The bosses found out about it when she pitched her story. She was fired for violating an ethics code and a prohibition on joining demonstrations, especially Occupy Wall Street. Curran told me that The Takeaway had a staff meeting where staffers were specifically warned about participating in Occupy Wall Street, but she was not there because she works (part-time, on a freelance basis) at night and the meeting was during the day. She said she was not told about the meeting.
deep cap
@The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik:
Yes, I think that’s exactly it.
Nutella
@Woodrowfan:
Yes, very familiar. There’s a story about the LA Times doing that. They have a tradition of choosing one day in the middle of winter to have a front page story showing whatever eastern city has the worst weather that day and contrast it to their own excellent weather. They were ready to go with the story one year but they had a tornado in downtown Los Angeles that damaged some buildings and just missed rush hour traffic on the freeway. Normally that would be big news but the LA Times suppressed all mention of it and went with their pre-planned story about the excellence of their weather.
So yeah, the MSM here lies about anything that doesn’t fit their ‘story’, even the weather.
From a Mike Davis book. I think it was in Ecology of Fear.
WereBear (itouch)
These people live to complain. Other people have lives.
I still don’t know how to counter such an advantage.
Barry
@deep cap: “I had a lot of normally reasonable Moderately Democratic friends complain bitterly about the OWS movement lately and identify with the 53% campaign. They hate the movement for the reasons that John Cole was originally reluctant to sign on: it âappearsâ to be a bunch of dirty hippies (literally), truthers, wealthy/privileged college kids, and jobless bums who canât be taken seriously.”
Nah, they hate it because OWS had the courage to stand up and make a fuss, while the ‘Moderates’ eagerly accepted every lie thrown out about how we couldn’t get anything better.
slag
Really? Did their complaint go something like this:
Joel
Kudos to Jay Rosen for wading over here and laying down the truth of the matter. Primary sources for the win.
burnspbesq
@cathyx:
That tears it. You’re really dead to me now.
dj spellchecka
at the risk of giving the wingnuts more targets…wonder when they’ll realize that the charlie pierce who does a weekly segment on “only a game” is also the charles pierce, who’s ripping the gop apart over at esquire?
Yutsano
@Joel: Is it bad I squeed? Cause I did.
burnspbesq
@ornery:
Has it not occurred to you that it costs money to run a national radio network, that subscriber funds are insufficient for that purpose because of the obvious free-rider problem, and that Congress has persistently refused to fully close that funding gap?
NPR takes money from the organizations from which it takes money because without that money, there would be no NPR as we know it.
Purity trolls who can’t do third-grade arithmetic or read financial statements add nothing to any conversation into which they insert themselves.
gaz
I loathe comcast, and am a very reluctant customer. I am fortunate, in that I have a job that is 100% telecommute, but that means I’m obligated to have fast, reliable broadband. Comcast is the only game in town, where I live.
I’d use DSL, but it’s slow, and is verizon, who couldn’t manage a tupperware meet, much less a digital network. They are a bad joke.
I used Clear, and love them, but while I still have a mobile hotspot account with them they are too unreliable (coverage is weak in this area) for my purposes. =(
I hate comcast. I fucking hate comcast. Hate. Them.
Am I wrong to consider them a monopoly? Why are there no other cable providers wherever I go?
Where in the hemorrhaging fark is an anti-trust case when you really need one?. meh.
piratedan
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/07/8683508-gop-sabotages-economy-meme-now-with-bumper-sticker
Carol from CO
CMD came before JW (I think). npr got so much winger flak after they fired Juan Williams they are hyper sensitive to anything that might be interpreted as “librul media” accusations – and they’re scared spitless of the wingers in congress who want to do away with their funding.
dww44
@gaz: have different issues with mine, Cox Cable. In the lead up to the 2009 digital switchover, they ran ad after ad targeted at their cable subscribers saying that we had no problems because we had Cox and we were covered.
In the last year they’ve taken 4 or 5 channels and turned them into digital only, including the local coverage of city council meetings and the public school education channel. When I complained (after a monumental effort to get to a human to complain to), I was told that it wasn’t their fault that we didn’t have free access to local government. It was “the government’s fault”. I asked what government she meant. Of course, she couldn’t answer.
John C
Am I missing something here? This looks ironic only when viewed superficially. “Advocacy” for Comcast customers who claim to be suffering the tyranny of poor products and customer service is not political advocacy, which is how Garfield articulates the mandate in the WNYC employment agreement.
Where is the irony that Garfield hasn’t been fired, but Curran–who became a poster child for one of the largest ideological protests of the year–has?
To me, it’s a much more interesting question to ask if WNYC’s employment policy needs revising. The fact that Curran signed it at hire, along with the rest of the staff, and then violated it, doesn’t seem to be in debate.
pjcamp
And Lisa Simeone, who has not a damn thing to do with news, has her entire show (about OPERA for god’s sake) canceled by NPR for speaking favorable about OWS. Something is seriously warped down there at NPR. Not only are news staff not allowed to have opinions (saving the sainted Garfield) but staff on entertainment shows aren’t either.
Alan
@Jay Rosen: Jay, maybe you can explain to me here why it’s ok to pitch a story about your own participation in a political movement? You’re a J-School professor at NYU. If a student came to you with a completed assignment that was them reporting on their own political advocacy, would that merit a passing grade? I posted a comment on your blog, but it doesn’t seem you responded to that point. Seriously, I’m not a journalist, but it does not seem ok to me.