NPR: We probably shouldn’t have taken funding from Ploughshares Fund to cover Iran deal
posted at 7:21 pm on May 31, 2016 by John Sexton
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/05/31/npr-we-probably-shouldnt-have-taken-funding-from-ploughshares-fund-to-cover-iran-deal/National Public Radio’s ombudsman published a response to the government funded news channel’s decision to accept money from the Ploughshares Fund to cover the Iran deal in 2015. The ombudsman denies NPR intentionally did anything wrong but concludes it might be best not to accept similar donations in the future.
The piece was published Friday afternoon before the holiday weekend, a traditional time for document dumps that might embarrass an organization. NPR’s Elizabeth Jensen opens with the party line about the journalistic firewall the prevents donations from influencing reporting but then, to her credit, admits this case is a bit different:
This case is a bit different from, say, the money that NPR gets from the MacArthur Foundation in general operating support for investigative and international reportingor even the money it gets from the Gates Foundation to support the education blogand Goats and Soda global health blog. In this case, NPR’s money came from one side of a very partisan debate on a specific issue to fund reporting on a specific topic. And the money was not from a sponsor who in exchange would get on-air credit; in this case the sponsor money was going directly to support the reporting.
What critics are legitimately asking is whether there was a break in the firewall, since there is certainly an appearance that NPR opened itself up to be used as a propaganda organ of the administration via its reporting grant from Ploughshares. As one listener letter I received put it: “I am very disappointed in the decision by NPR to take $100,000 from the Ploughshares Fund, in order to sculpt the news cycle surrounding the Iran deal.”
exc - more blather at source
