Some NPR footnotes:

Tuesday night, Vivian Schiller, president and chief executive of NPR, released this statement: “Ron Schiller’s remarks are contrary to what NPR stands for and are deeply distressing to reporters, editors and others who bring fairness, civility and respect for a wide variety of viewpoints to their work everyday.”

The video, released by conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe, shows Mr. Schiller and a colleague in a meeting at a Georgetown cafe with the two men pretending to be from the fictitious Muslim Education Action Center. The men tell Mr. Schiller that they are considering donating as much as $5 million to NPR because of what they describe as the substantial “Zionist coverage” by other news organizations.

Mr. Schiller criticizes conservatives, saying the Republican Party has been “hijacked” by groups hostile to Muslims. “The current Republican Party is not really the Republican Party,” Mr. Schiller says. “It’s been hijacked by this group….” Mr. Schiller is interrupted by one of the “Muslim Center” men, who says, “The radical, racist, Islamophobic, Tea Party people?”

Nodding, Mr. Schiller says, “And not just Islamophobic but really xenophobic. I mean basically, they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America, gun toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist people.”

Mr. O’Keefe was behind other undercover videos targeting liberal groups, including the community-organizer Acorn.

In an interview, Mr. O’Keefe said that the idea for the investigation came about a couple of months ago. “I’ve always had a degree of contempt for the mainstream media and wanted to expose it for what it was,” he said. “What better place to start than media outlets that get taxpayer money and go from there.”

Mr. O’Keefe said he has additional materials related to NPR and plans to release them soon. He declined to say what those materials are though he said there will be more information about the donation that NPR says it refused to accept.

NPR came under fire last fall after it fired news analyst Juan Williams for comments he made on Fox News about being nervous around Muslims on an airplane. Mr. Williams’ firing elicited calls by Republican members of Congress to reexamine the news organization’s federal funding. On Monday, Ms. Schiller, the chief executive, said after a speech the organization “handled the [Juan Williams] situation badly.” In the video released Tuesday, Mr. Schiller, who isn’t related to Ms. Schiller, says NPR would be better off free of federal funding.

In one of its statements, NPR said, “The assertion that NPR and public radio stations would be better off without federal funding does not reflect reality. The elimination of federal funding would significantly damage public broadcasting as a whole.” Mr. Schiller had been expected to leave in the spring to begin a new job with the Aspen Institute.

I must say that for an entity so practiced at building and maintaining improbable cultural narratives, NPR has been remarkably scattershot and sloppy at producing a plausible narrative for their own now-documented contempt of flyover country, the TEA Party, the real working men and women (as opposed to the idealized pets and noble savages these leftists like to pretend to champion), and those “anti-intellectuals” who refuse to accept dogmatic progressivism and the soft tyranny of government as the height of civil society (and yet, for all their clumsy gun-toting bourgeois mediocrity, somehow continue to manage to avoid getting caught on tape showing their asses to the whole world, unlike certain pasty white “intellectual” red-diaper babies I could name…).

(h/t Terry H)

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update: Consequences!

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update 2: The more things change, the more assholes stay assholes. Or however that saying goes.