“It’s a half minute news story”

thus Sayith Carl Bernstein Watching Morning Joe, because of the resignation the NPR statement and the current fight was forced to cover the story. Yet although they played the key segments (stressing it was “edited” and that is was O’Keefe’s group while not mentioning that O’Keefe wasn’t in the video, nor mentioning the 2nd NPR person in the videos) the topic was instantly about how much of a non story this was, how unimportant it is and why we shouldn’t care.

Thus the show is able to say: “Yes we covered it.”, without giving it any credence.

Alas for them they had Cokie Roberts and her husband scheduled so it was impossible to not touch on it again. Again it was called a distraction, Cokie stressed how the small stations would suffer without federal funding and how much separation there is from the actual journalism and the exects.

This tells me that they can’t ignore it. The trap was the crank call against Walker. Morning Joe and the MSM went long on it, the media ate it up. Because they did and because it was Walker is still in the news. it became impossible to totally ignore it.

This is going to undermine democrats in the senate big time which already had problems:

In November, the same week that George Soros declared war on Fox News by giving $1 million to Media Matters, NPR announced it had accepted a $1.8 million grant from Soros’s Open Society Foundations for a 50-state local reporting initiative.

The grant, coming so close to Williams’s firing, stuck in conservatives’ craw.

“When NPR receives million-dollar gifts from Mr. Soros, it is an insult to taxpayers when other organizations, such as MoveOn.org demand that Congress ‘save NPR and PBS’ by guaranteeing ‘permanent funding and independence from partisan meddling,’ as the liberal interest group did last month,” DeMint wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week.

The increased scrutiny is certainly not going to be healthy for them.

Update: Vivian Schiller just resigned. Apparently this is no longer a half minute new story. Over to you Carl.

Update 2: That half minute keeps getting longer and longer doesn’t it? Ron Schiller is now out of Aspen too, and apparently Vivian didn’t resign, she was fired.