Karl Frederick
10-20-2011, 10:00 AM
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 (https://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-radio-host-fired-occupying/1319118373
Karl Frederick
10-20-2011, 08:47 PM
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/archive/2011/10/well-good-for-wdav/247102/#:
Well, Good for WDAV
By James Fallows
Oct 20 2011, 4:11 PM ET According to this update (https://yubanet.com/usa/NPR-Gets-Producer-Fired-for-Occupying.php) just now, the classical music public radio station WDAV (https://www.wdav.org/default.htm), 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 (https://www.npr.org/blogs/thisisnpr/2011/10/20/141548554/correcting-media-inaccuracies) to the contrary (https://www.theatlanticwire.com/business/2011/10/public-radio-opera-host-fired-after-speaking-occupy-dc/43913/) 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 (https://www.npr.org/programs/world-of-opera/).
It looks bad enough that Paul Robeson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 (https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-News-Undermine-American-Democracy/dp/0679758569)!) 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<strike>, or even if Ira Glass is doing PR for Scientology</strike>. [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
10-21-2011, 02:25 PM
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 (https://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-radio-host-fired-occupying/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.