The Blaze compared the edited and ready-for-air video with the lengthy unedited raw video of the NPR executives talking with the pretend Muslims attempting to goad them into saying outrageous things. The analysis found numerous shady and misleading edits and elisions. The report all but absolved former NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller of saying anything all that offensive to conservative Americans. The Blaze even reveals that the “raw” video was altered and censored for reasons unknown.

The Blaze’s Scott Baker concludes, “even if you are of the opinion, as I am, that undercover reporting is acceptable and ethical in very defined situations, it is another thing to approve of editing tactics that seem designed to intentionally lie or mislead about the material being presented.”

So. Point Glenn Beck!

This post went up days ago, and Beck has been greatly enjoying the praise and attention he’s received for being so fair and balanced. And then, as Politico reports, he lightly trashed O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart:

“The problem with this whole thing is does James O’Keefe have enough credibility to continue to do” undercover video journalism? Beck asked his listeners. That kind of journalism, he said, is “just really not something that you necessarily want to get into. But if you do it, you damn well better not lie on the tape. You don’t now take what you have and edit something to make them say something that they didn’t say. I mean, you have no credibility then.”

Beck went on to claim he’d been “cautious” with the ACORN videos (which is stretching it) and made reference to the Shirley Sherrod incident, which is generally not talked about on the right except to say that somehow Breitbart was totally right.

Andrew Breitbart is more responsible than anyone else for transforming James O’Keefe from a small-time Young Republican stunt-puller to a major figure in the conservative media sphere, and so Breitbart is connected to all of O’Keefe’s schemes, even though he always claims that O’Keefe is an independent operator. While he will never, ever admit it, O’Keefe’s blatantly deceptive editing practices have embarrassed Breitbart before — in addition to the Shirley Sharrod mess, which fatally damaged Breitbart’s credibility in the non-right-wing press, Breitbart didn’t seem to know himself that James hadn’t actually entered those ACORN offices dressed in his Ricky’s pimp costume — which may account for why Breitbart’s “Big” sites didn’t play their usual hype role with the NPR videos.

(Another wrinkle: Scott Baker, the author of the Blaze’s piece, is a former Breitbart associate.)

Just as GOPers will only trash national jokes like Michele Bachmann off-the-record or when they absolutely have to, members of the right-wing press and the conservative blogosphere will only publicly criticize prominent right-wing media figures when they stop commanding a decent following. So no one on talk radio or at Fox will say that they’re embarrassed by O’Keefe — or that Breitbart’s websites publish an endless stream of barely literate garbage — so long as those sites remain in good standing with the movement. But as Beck’s ratings have fallen and as his nightly stories have grown less and less useful to the movement, he’s come under sustained attack from various “grown-ups” in the brotherhood of conservative pundits.

Looks like he won’t go out without taking a few people with him, though! Not that Fox or anyone else want to give his new mission any attention.

Schiller resigned as NPR’s CEO Wednesday to limit the damage from hidden camera footage of a fellow executive deriding the tea party movement as “seriously racist.” Conservatives called the video proof that the network is biased and undeserving of federal funds.

From the news organization’s perspective, the timing was exceptionally bad. The battle for funds will be the toughest yet, with Republicans in the new House majority looking to cut all federal funding of public radio and television.

It’s the latest blunder for the news organization, which publicly admitted fumbling the firing of analyst Juan Williams over comments he made about Muslims. Then NPR had to apologize to the family of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords when it falsely reported the congresswoman’s death.

Vivian Schiller said staying on as chief executive would only hurt the looming battle over funding, which public broadcasting officials claims would force some stations to fold.

“We took a reputational hit around the Juan Williams incident, and this was another blow to NPR’s reputation. There’s no question,” she told The Associated Press.

The video showed two conservative activists posing as members of a fake Muslim group at a lunch meeting with NPR’s top fundraiser, Ron Schiller, who is not related to Vivian Schiller and who also resigned. The men offered NPR a $5 million donation and engaged in a wide-ranging discussion about tea party Republicans, pro-Israel bias in the media and anti-intellectualism.

“The current Republican Party is not really the Republican Party. It’s been hijacked by this group that is … not just Islamophobic but, really, xenophobic,” Ron Schiller said in the video, referring to the tea party movement. “They believe in sort of white, middle America, gun-toting — it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.”

He also said NPR “would be better off in the long run without federal funding,” a statement most Republicans agree with.

Last month, when the House voted to eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides money to public radio and television stations, no Republicans stepped forward to defend it. Sen. Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican, introduced similar legislation in the Senate last week.

Similar efforts to strip funding from public broadcasting in 2005 and in the 1990s were unsuccessful, but DeMint’s spokesman Wesley Denton said, “I don’t expect the vote to be the same as it has in the past.”

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Oregon, said this is the first time he hasn’t been able to get interest from any Republicans to co-chair the Public Broadcasting Caucus that he founded a decade ago.

Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the Republican co-chair of the caucus last year, said he would leave it entirely because “NPR has crossed the line to political bias.”

Cutting funding for CPB will meet fierce resistance in the Democratic-controlled Senate, however, and President Barack Obama favors continued support. White House spokesman Jay Carney noted that both Democratic and Republican presidents have supported such funding in the past.

The CPB is receiving $430 million in the current fiscal year and will get $445 million in fiscal 2012. CPB handed out nearly $94 million in grants to more than 400 public radio stations — not all of which are NPR affiliates — in fiscal 2010.

NPR itself typically gets only about 2 percent of its budget from CPB grants, but many of its 268 member stations rely heavily on them. NPR affiliates get an average of 10 percent of their funding from CPB, and some small and rural stations get more than 40 percent of their funding that way, although NPR could not provide exact figures.

A cut in funding to CPB would hit public television stations harder than radio stations. By law, 75 percent of CPB’s grant money must go to TV stations.

NPR board chairman Dave Edwards said NPR would make a strong case about the importance of federal funding.

“It is absolutely true that without federal funding, a lot of our public radio and public TV stations in the system could go dark, and that will happen in some of the smallest communities we serve,” Edwards said. “In some cases, public broadcasting remains that community’s primary connection with the outside world.”

Howard Liberman, a longtime broadcast communications attorney who represents NPR affiliates, said many stations were unhappy with Vivian Schiller and the release of the video was the final straw. He pointed to the Williams controversy and other moves by Schiller that have alienated stations, such as shortening the organization’s name from National Public Radio to NPR and trying to drive listeners toward NPR’s website.

“This was just the last in a series of things that have shown to the members and the stations that this ship is not running very well,” Liberman said.

It’s not clear how the latest setback will affect fundraising, but when Williams was fired after he said on Fox News that he felt uncomfortable when he sees people in “Muslim garb” on airplanes, a number of major stations said they were meeting or surpassing their fundraising goals. Vivian Schiller took heat for Williams’ departure, in part because she sacked him over the phone.

NPR listeners interviewed by the AP were divided over whether the video was a sign of problems within the network.

“They are obviously biased,” said Frank Stefano of Erie, Pa., a 46-year-old facilities administrator who says he will stop supporting public radio unless changes are made. “They need to come out with a plan that says, ‘Look, here’s what we’re going to do to fix this.’”

Linda Feltz Crews, a retired human resources director from Orange Park, Fla., said in e-mail that the dust-up actually makes her more likely to contribute to public broadcasting. “There’s been lots of great reporting by NPR and I would hate for this mess to permanently affect their ability to continue operating,” she said in a Facebook posting.

Robert D. Charter, 49, a payroll administrator from Dallas, said it was probably better that Vivian Schiller resigned, but he fears for the future of public broadcasting.

“I’m afraid in this politically charged environment that there are people out there in Washington who would do anything to harm a venue that is enjoyed and probably even cherished by a lot of Americans,” he said.

The video of Ron Schiller was posted by conservative activist James O’Keefe on his Project Veritas website. O’Keefe is best known for wearing a pimp costume in hidden-camera videos that embarrassed the community-organizing group ACORN. He also made headlines when he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor last May after he was accused of trying to tamper with the phones in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in New Orleans. O’Keefe didn’t return a request for comment.

NPR said it was appalled by Ron Schiller’s comments. He was president of its fundraising arm and a senior vice president for development, and was not involved in NPR’s reporting.

“While the meeting I participated in turned out to be a ruse,” Ron Schiller said, “I made statements during the course of the meeting that are counter to NPR’s values and also not reflective of my own beliefs. I offer my sincere apology to those I offended.”

PBS spokeswoman Anne Bentley said the TV network also was contacted by the same fake Muslim group that met with Ron Schiller, but halted discussions after it was unable to confirm the organization’s credentials.

Ron Schiller resigned immediately after the video emerged, but he had told NPR before it was made that he planned to leave to become director of the Aspen Institute Arts Program. The Aspen Institute confirmed Wednesday that he would not be taking the job, in light of the controversy.

Another NPR executive, Betsy Liley, was at the lunch with Ron Schiller. She said little, although she can be heard laughing when one of the men says his group referred to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.” She has been placed on administrative leave.

——

AP Television Writer David Bauder in New York, Darlene Superville and Ben Evans in Washington and David Dishneau in Hagerstown, Md., contributed to this report.

NPR rejected the bogus Muslims’ bogus contribution, but Schiller’s words got him suspended yesterday. And today we learn that NPR’s CEO, Vivian Schiller (no relation), has resigned too.

In a saner cultural moment, a serial liar like O’Keefe would not be taken seriously by the rest of the media or by a board of directors. Here’s why (courtesy TPM):

Previous tapes by O’Keefe’s group have later turned out to be misleadingly edited, including the video that launched them to stardom featuring O’Keefe posing as a pimp in front of ACORN offices, so it’s worth taking the overall footage with a grain of salt until further details emerge. Last year, O’Keefe’s credibility took another major hit when he reportedly tried to invite a CNN reporter onto his boat to try and seduce her as a prank, an effort that was revealed when one of his own colleagues blew the whistle to the press.

But just as the White House dumped Shirley Sherrod the moment Andrew Breitbart’s doctored video of her supposedly damning admission of racism surfaced, NPR’s board chose not only not to fight but to cave in immediately to O’Keefe’s tactics. By not fighting back, NPR has invited an open season on truth, and ushered us into a new age of mistrust.

You should go listen to O’Keefe’s tapes of Ron Schiller’s statements — first, to see that much of what he said is harmless and reasonable, but more important, to ask yourself whether you have any expertise or standing to determine the recording’s authenticity. How can we possibly trust O’Keefe’s reports when the essence of his technique is deception? Who knows how this recording was edited or doctored? Does the phrase “consider the source” mean anything any more?

Sting operations conducted by law enforcement officials have a dubious record themselves, but at least they require oversight and must meet court standards of evidence. For public actors like James O’Keefe, the oversight, we assume, is performed by the media. The press prides itself for serving as truth’s first line of defense, democracy’s bullshit filter. This week it failed in a big way.

The larger problem here isn’t Viv Schiller’s ultimate fate, and it’s not even the final disposition of congressional funding for NPR — an institution I admire in many ways but which, let’s face it, we’d survive without.

The problem is we are crediting creeps and letting liars take over our public discourse.

This is hardly a partisan concern. Roughly similar tactics caused major headaches for Wisconsin’s embattled Republican governor recently, when he got taken in by a caller impersonating conservative billionaire David Koch. (This led Wisconsin’s Legislature to start talking about outlawing prank calls.) Increasingly, public deception carries little apparent cost.

If a James O’Keefe can win attention and scalps by ruses and lies, why should he stop? And does any public figure have a big enough megaphone and a strong enough spine to say to him, “Have you no decency?”

BONUS LINK: Jeff Jarvis: “The stations’ interests and NPR’s interests are no longer aligned.” 

NPR’s management clearly couldn’t figure out how to handle the embarrassment. They apologized for remarks they weren’t responsible for and fired a man who was on his way out anyway. NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller (no relation) has resigned.

And now the other Schiller, the one who hates Tea Party bigots, is not going to take his new job with the Aspen Institute. Ruined for the crime of having liberal personal opinions!

Again, this Schiller’s crime was indulging a potential donor politely, which was his job, and expressing his personal opinions, which — while offensive to white Tea Partyers — are not particularly outrageous or uncommon. They are, in fact, the mirror of what Tea Partyers think about liberals. It is not news that half of America hates the other half.

One man who’s altogether thrilled about this is former NPR commentator Juan Williams, who was fired for saying something bigoted into a non-hidden camera and declining to apologize for it. That firing was handled poorly as well — Williams was on notice for a number of stupid statements and simply letting his contract expire would’ve saved everyone a culture war battle — but Williams landed comfortably on a pile of Rupert Murdoch’s money at Fox News, where he is an official Fox Liberal with experience in the heart of the vast liberal media conspiracy.

In an “exclusive” interview with FoxNation.com, Fox’s weird openly conservative Internet community thing, Williams repeatedly confirmed what everyone at Fox already “knows” about everyone at NPR:

“This was an act of incredible condescension,” said Williams. “The rank hypocrisy of his remarks was telling for me. They will say things to your face about how there’s no liberal orthodoxy at NPR, how they play it straight, but now you see it for what it is. They prostitute themselves for money.”

Juan is exactly right: They do prostitute themselves for money, because that is how capitalism works.

So Juan Williams, who was fired for expressing perfectly common views that upset a bunch of uptight liberal p.c. police ninnies, is thrilled that a man was fired for expressing perfectly common views that upset a bunch of upstanding brave conservative American heroes.

The video was posted Tuesday by James O’Keefe, the same activist whose undercover videos have targeted other groups opposed by conservatives, like the community organizing group ACORN and Planned Parenthood.

Schiller had planned to resign from his position before the video was shot and was expected to depart in May. In a statement Tuesday night, however, he said his resignation would be effective immediately.

The video drew swift reaction from Republicans in Congress, who are renewing efforts to cut funding to public broadcasters. NPR and PBS have long been targets of conservatives who claim their programming has a left-wing bias. Similar efforts in the 1990s and 2005 were not successful, although public broadcasters take the threat seriously.

O’Keefe, best known for hidden-camera videos that embarrassed the community-organizing group ACORN, posted the video Tuesday on his website, Project Veritas. The group said the video was shot on Feb. 22.

“We’ve just exposed the true hearts and minds of NPR and their executives,” O’Keefe said in a letter posted on the site. He asked supporters to sign a petition urging Congress to review NPR’s funding.

“This disturbing video makes it clear that taxpayer dollars should no longer be appropriated to NPR,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said in a statement. He added that executives have “finally admitted that they do not need taxpayer dollars to survive.”

The budget bill passed by the House last month would end funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports programs distributed on NPR and PBS. CPB is getting $430 million in the current fiscal year.

Attacks by conservatives on NPR gained momentum last year when analyst Juan Williams was fired for saying on Fox News that he feels uncomfortable when he sees people in “Muslim garb” on airplanes. Schiller defends the Williams firing in the video.

The heavily edited video shows Schiller and another NPR executive, Betsy Liley, meeting at a pricey restaurant in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood with two men claiming to be part of a Muslim organization. The men offer NPR a $5 million donation. NPR said Tuesday it was “repeatedly pressured” to accept a $5 million check, which the organization “repeatedly refused.”

“The current Republican Party is not really the Republican Party. It’s been hijacked by this group that is … not just Islamophobic but, really, xenophobic,” Schiller said in the video, referring to the tea party movement. “They believe in sort of white, middle America, gun-toting — it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.”

NPR receives about 2 percent of its revenue from federal grants, while its member stations get about 10 percent of their funding from federal and state governments.

“It is very clear that we would be better off in the long run without federal funding,” Schiller said, saying it would allow the organization to become an independent voice and clear up the misconception that it is largely government-funded.

Schiller conceded that if the funding were lost, “we would have a lot of stations go dark.”

NPR disavowed his statements.

“The assertion that NPR and public radio stations would be better off without federal funding does not reflect reality,” Davis Rehm said.

Sens. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., introduced a separate bill Friday to cut off funding for CPB.

“There’s two issues at stake here in regards to taxpayer funding for public broadcasting: We can’t afford it, and they don’t need it,” DeMint said in a statement Tuesday.

Schiller did not respond to a message left at his Aspen, Colo., home. His resignation from NPR was announced publicly last week and he has accepted a job as director of the Aspen Institute Arts Program. He is not related to Vivian Schiller.

A national coordinator for the group Tea Party Patriots, Mark Meckler, wrote an e-mail to supporters about the video.

“At a time when the country is upside down by more than a trillion dollars, can we really afford to provide huge subsidies to entities that openly state that they don’t need the money?” he wrote. “Let’s take his advice and pass legislation that would defund the clearly biased news organization that is out of touch with Americans across the country.”

Through a publicist, O’Keefe agreed to respond to e-mailed questions but did not immediately reply.

Project Veritas identified the men who met with Schiller and Liley as Shaughn Adeleye and Simon Templar. Their assumed names were “Ibrahim Kasaam” and “Amir Malik,” and they claimed to represent the Muslim Education Action Center, a group they said had ties to the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.

About the Williams firing, Schiller said, “What NPR did, I’m very proud of, and what NPR stood for is non-racist, non-bigoted, straightforward telling of the news.”

Liley says little in the video, although she can be heard laughing when one of the men says his group referred to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.” NPR would not say whether any action was taken to address Liley’s comments or appearance in the video.

The full text of NPR’s announcement about Schiller reads as follows:

It is with deep regret that I tell you that the NPR Board of Directors has accepted the resignation of Vivian Schiller as President and C.E.O. of NPR, effective immediately.

The Board accepted her resignation with understanding, genuine regret, and great respect for her leadership of NPR these past two years.

Vivian brought vision and energy to this organization. She led NPR back from the enormous economic challenges of the previous two years. She was passionately committed to NPR’s mission, and to stations and NPR working collaboratively as a local-national news network.

According to a CEO succession plan adopted by the Board in 2009, Joyce Slocum, S.V.P. of Legal Affairs and General Counsel, has been appointed to the position of Interim C.E.O. The Board will immediately establish an Executive Transition Committee that will develop a timeframe and process for the recruitment and selection of new leadership.

I recognize the magnitude of this news — and that it comes on top of what has been a traumatic period for NPR and the larger public radio community. The Board is committed to supporting NPR through this interim period and has confidence in NPR’s leadership team.