Blessed be National Public Radio’s Ombudsman Alicia C. Shepard. The Republicans in the House made their first attempt at defunding NPR on Thursday. They lost the vote, but surely it’s not the last time they’ll try—capitalizing on outrage over NPR’s firing of Juan Williams.
Meanwhile Fox News chief Roger Ailes has apologized to the Anti-Defamation League for calling NPR executives Nazis. He should have used the term “nasty inflexible bigot,” instead, Ailes explained.
British air observer, 1940; source: wikipedia commons
But damn the torpedoes—Shepard had something else to write about in her latest blog post. “NPR does not publish staff email addresses,” she noted on Friday. “It should.”
Listeners often write in to say that they find it “arrogant and standoffish” for an outfit that presses for access to sources not to provide access to itself, she adds. “At the very least, NPR should allow reporters the choice to add their email addresses to online versions of stories and to their bios.”
“We live in a world of constant communication,” Shepard’s post concludes. “It’s not fair or right for reporters to go after sources’ emails and not provide their own.”
NPR, bringing you the spirit of London in 1940: “Keep calm and carry on.”
