NPR Gets Radio Host Fired for Occupying

[Karl Frederick]

National Public Radio on Wednesday discovered that a woman named Lisa Simeone who produced hosted a show about opera called "World of Opera" had been participating in a nonviolent occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., organized by October2011.org. That same day, NPR persuaded a company for which Simeone worked to fire her, cutting her income in half and purging from the so-called public airwaves a voice that had never mentioned politics on NPR.

Read more:
https://www.truth-out.org/npr-gets-r...ing/1319118373

[Karl Frederick]

National Public Radio on Wednesday discovered that a woman named Lisa Simeone who produced hosted a show about opera called "World of Opera" had been . . . .

UPDATE from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...wdav/247102/#:

Well, Good for WDAV

By James Fallows

Oct 20 2011, 4:11 PM ET According to this update just now, the classical music public radio station WDAV, in North Carolina, will not dismiss Lisa Simeone from her role as a freelance (ie, non-employee) host of an opera (ie, non-political) program carried by NPR, just because she has also been a spokesperson for the Occupy DC movement. The reports to the contrary over the past 24 hours boded ill for all who seemed to be involved, starting with NPR -- though, who knows, their sizzle might increase the audience for the next few installments of World of Opera.

It looks bad enough that Paul Robeson (Wikipedia pic) was blacklisted as a singer for his political views -- and at least that was on accusations of being an actual Communist during the tensest Red Scare/ Cold War era. Are we really going to start pushing people out of roles like hosting an opera show, because they side in their free time with a movement that an increasing number of mainstream politicians have said they endorse?

For the moment I won't go through the whole parsing of what outside roles are and are not appropriate for mainstream media figures. (You could look 'em up in a book!) The rules are and should be different for full-time employees of NPR than for a contractor like Simeone.* And they obviously should be different for news reporters, or editors or analysts, than for opera-show hosts. Whatever version of the rules you might come up with, there is no sane version of them that should have led to a panic over Lisa Simeone's role on a music show.

So, good for whoever it was in the WDAV management with the sense to have an "oh calm down" reaction in the face of this non-scandal. And, yes, I would say the same thing if it turned out that the Car Talk guys were also spokesmen for the Tea Party, or even if Ira Glass is doing PR for Scientology. [On two minutes' reflection, bad analogy, since This American Life does so many stories that are "political" in the broadest and best sense.]
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* Or a contractor like me. I have never been an NPR employee but have done contract work for various programs over the years: in the 1980s and 1990s for Morning Edition, and now for Weekend All Things Considered. But -- to belabor the point -- I think different rules should and do apply to me than to a music-show or car-talk host, because I'm on there to talk about politics and the news.

[peggykarp]

National Public Radio on Wednesday discovered that a woman named Lisa Simeone who produced hosted a show about opera called "World of Opera" had been participating in a nonviolent occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., organized by October2011.org. That same day, NPR persuaded a company for which Simeone worked to fire her, cutting her income in half and purging from the so-called public airwaves a voice that had never mentioned politics on NPR.

Read more:
https://www.truth-out.org/npr-gets-r...ing/1319118373

Lisa Simeone produced Soundprint, consistently excellent program and one of the few NPR programs of any value anymore. Over the last few decades she has done a lot of wonderful work. I hope this is reversed.