The Price For Appeasing The RW Hate Machine: NPR HQ Threatened

[KharmaTrain]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/26/AR2010102604909.html?hpid=topnews

NPR received a bomb threat Monday, five days after its decision to fire news analyst Juan Williams sparked a hugely negative reaction.

Sources at the news organization said the threat was received via U.S. mail and was immediately turned over to local police and the FBI. The organization did not publicly disclose the threat or release details, on the advice of law enforcement officials.

The letter didn't reference the Williams firing specifically, but people at NPR, who spoke about it on the condition of anonymity, said the timing and tone suggested it was sent after Williams's widely publicized termination.

<snip>

This was to be expected...when you stir up the great unhinged the threats are sure to follow.

Discuss...

[EFerrari]

1. Looks like we've passed the tipping point for violence.

And I hope someone at NPR has a moment of clarity and rethinks everything they've done to empower these people.

[Sirveri]

6. NPR empowered these 'people'? Did you mean to say Faux News empowered them?

:shrug:

[EFerrari]

7. No, sadly, I mean NPR.

I don't know what the tee off in funding or Bush meddling was but they have been empowering the radical right for a while. Remember they assigned that horrible bigot David Horowitz to trash Howard in the obit?

http://www.alternet.org/story/145643/zinn-ophobia_at_npr

That was just a very high profile instance. I stopped listening a few years ago because like PBS (who tried to disappear Bill Moyers) they swung to the mendacious right.

[Sirveri]

9. I'd call that caving as opposed to empowering.

I certainly wouldn't say they're encouraging conservatives to go out and bomb people who happen to disagree with them.

[EFerrari]

10. What they do is more low key on the order of Brian Lamb

who gives air time to radical, poisonous right wing demagogues with no credentials whatsoever and pretends that they are journalists, historians, or some other kind of expert.

[yellowwood]

2. O'reilley says to Williams

"I've got your back."

[foxfeet]

5. "Here, let me rub it with a falafel."

[mediaman007]

3. I'm guessing that Williams sent the threat. Most people don't even know who he is!

The one's who do, don't have the attention span or the initiative.

[EFerrari]

4. LOL

:)

[peacetalksforall]

8. They don't even know that NPR is Republican when they deliver and comment on news

and politics - must of the time.

They don't know that Helms, Thurmond, Dan Burton and the Republican Congress got NPR to switch from fairly neutral to Republican right in subtle and not so subtle ways - to the point where some Democrats are turned off and won't donate what they used to donate, if anything.

It was a betrayal by NPR. The crazy right doesn't know their history.

NPR is in a can't win situation and they should shout out in protest and explanation starting with a simple distinction between working for and being paid by both networks, saying something on one that he would never say on the other, his record for doing this in the past, their policy, and the fact that it was something that should never have been stated by someone like him, even in an auto-biography.

We will see his true mettle in what he now says on Fox.

If NPR was what they used to be and knowing what we know about FOX - NPR would not have kept him in the past. Letting him go at this point in time is a good sign. They still have some mettle down there someplace.