The Republicans on the House Rules Committee will hold an emergency meeting Wednesday to consider legislation to permanently prohibit federal funding of National Public Radio (NPR) after conservative activist James O'Keefe released a video smearing the news organization.
The bill, H.R. 1076, was introduced by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO), who is leading the effort in the House to eliminate all federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the parent organization of NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service.
Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) office told Politico that he will bring the bill to the House floor on Thursday.
The video, created by conservative prankster James O'Keefe's "Project Veritas," showed activists Shaughn Adeleye and Simon Templar posing as members of the fictional Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) and meeting with NPR Foundation President Ron Schiller and NPR Senior Director of Institutional Giving Betsey Liley.
The video was heavily edited to make it appear as though Schiller laughed when he was told that the fake Muslim group advocated for sharia law. The edite video also made it appear as though Schiller said the tea party was filled with racists, that NPR would be better off without federal funding and the he lamented Jewish control of newspapers.
Immediately after the heavily edited video was released last week Dana Davis Rehm, NPR's senior vice president of marketing, communications and external relations, released a statement condemning Schiller's remarks.
"The fraudulent organization represented in this video repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept," she said.
"We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for," Rehm added.
The NPR Board of Directors accepted CEO Vivian Schiller's resignation the next morning on acceptance that the video was a truthful representation of Schiller's remarks.
However, after reviewing an mostly unedited copy of O'Keef's video several days later, Rehm now has concluded that O'Keefe "inappropriately edited the videos with an intent to discredit" NPR.
Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member for broadcasting and online at the Poynter Institute, told NPR's David Folkenflik that there are two ways to lie: "One is to tell me something that didn't happen. And the other is not to tell me something that did happen." "I think that they employed both techniques in this," he concluded after watching the raw video.
The edited tape completely ignores that "six times ... over and over and over again" the pranksters were told that donors cannot buy favorable coverage on NPR, Tompkins noted.
Even Glenn Beck's The Blaze website observed Thursday that O'Keefe used "editing tactics that seem designed to intentionally lie or mislead about the material being presented."
"The clip in the edited video implies Ron Schiller is giving simply his own analysis of the Tea Party. He does do that in part, but the raw video reveals that he is largely recounting the views expressed to him by two top Republicans, one a former ambassador, who admitted to him that they voted for Obama," they wrote.
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