NPR's Watergate Moment

Just like in Watergate, where the initial players tried to write-off the scandal as a “third-rate break-in,” the bigger story lies in the power wielded by executives trying desperately to cover their tracks and pretend they didn’t do something extraordinarily odious. We are witnessing a cover-up. An effort designed to disguise the fact that National Public Radio was very seriously intending to receive an anonymous donation from a front group dedicated to spreading Sharia around the world and was associated with a known terrorist organization.

As the old Washington cliché goes, it’s not the original crime that gets you in trouble, it’s the cover-up. And so it goes for NPR’s response to Project Veritas’ blockbuster investigative report that has already resulted in the ouster of the two top executives at the publicly-funded broadcast network.

NPR’s immediate response, as reported by their own reporter, David Folkenflik was:

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.

This bit of damage control was repeated in just about every piece of main stream coverage on the scandal. Big Journalism pointed out on the day the scandal broke, that NPR’s subsequent statements insisting that they suspected something fishy with the group as they continued their vetting process (even as recently as last week) proves that their initial insistence that they had repeatedly refused the donation offered by a Muslim Brotherhood front group was patently false and proved that the pubic was not getting the full truth about NPR’s behavior. Why did NPR continue to vet a group that they repeatedly refused a donation from?

Now, as the dust settles and the public is told to move along, there’s nothing more to see at this latest train-wreck for tax-payer funded radio, the lack of curiosity on behalf of the media with regard to this conflicting story is dumbfounding.

Any reporter covering a Republican Presidency caught in a scandal of this kind would ask the obvious follow-up question after being fed a line like “we repeatedly refused to accept.” Why has no one asked: “Can you provide any evidence, an e-mail, a letter, a note from a meeting, anything to prove that you repeatedly refused the donation?”

If the executives at NPR saw fit to take a limo ride to a posh Georgetown restaurant to spend two hours discussing Madeira wine and racist tea-baggers with the potential Sharia donors, wouldn’t they have also taken the time to put something in writing to these fine gentlemen politely refusing their donation?

This is the scandal the main stream media is refusing to cover. It is much easier for them to play snippets of Project Veritas’ video and hypocritically tsk-tsk to themselves about the lack of objectivity shown by Ron Schiller. But they are following their inherent biases by not following up on the real scandal here. Our publicly-funded radio network was ready and willing to take blood money from a group dedicated to the subjugation of women and the annihilation of free speech.

James O’Keefe has promised more, blockbuster video on this story. If it shows that NPR was more than complicit and never once refused to accept a donation from the Muslim Brotherhood front group, will the media finally start covering the real scandal here? Will they finally recognize that we are witnessing a cover-up that reaches the highest levels of NPR and is continuing even today?