JEEZ! Even Jessie Jackson's Down On NPR!

Even Jessie Jackson of fame...and days of yore is down on NPR.:



It's not often that Jessie will criticize a leftist mouthpeice organization...but for once in his life, he has. 

“They’ve martyred Juan,” Jackson said, “taking him to another level both with his resources and his authority as a journalist.”   Jackson suggested that NPR’s decision seized on his comments about Muslims as “a pretext” that was primarily motivated by ideology.  “I think that some of this predisposition towards Fox was the reason for the gotcha,” Jackson said. “If they did not want his point of view, they should have said, ‘When your contract is over, you do not fit into our scheme of things.’ And then (he’d) go gracefully and with dignity. But to fire him in that way, and then to suggest he should see a psychiatrist, it was beneath the character and reputation of NPR.”

While NPR CEO Vivian Schiller has since appologized for her smarmy comments...it has done nothing to add to the now tarnished image of NPR. 

Personally, I greatly enjoy the local NPR music station, WBJC. From 1979 until 2003 I donated money twice a year to NPR...but I've long since stopped, nor do I think that my tax dollars should go to support this organization.  But I digress. 

Mr. Jackson rarely ever gets on the right side of a situation, but shockingly this time he has.  His charecterization of NPR's CEO is spot on.

During Wednesday’s interview, Jackson said the comments Williams made have been taken out of context. He said fear of Muslims is unjustified but real, just like incorrect stereotypes of African-Americans and Latinos. Conservatives have been pointing to a 1995 comment by NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg, in which she said that conservative Sen. Jesse Helms would get AIDS “if there’s retributive justice” after he proposed cutting AIDS research.“You know what Nina Totenberg said about Jesse Helms and AIDS? How ugly that statement was, for example,” Jackson said. “Juan was saying he gets anxious. It’s based upon these stereotypes. Many people get anxious when they saw blacks come in or they saw these Latinos walking in Arizona. So we have these unfounded fears, and we need to grow out of these unfounded fears. But he was saying something, I think, quite different.”

Mr. Jackson is right in this instance.