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Public Radio Fires People Who Support Occupy Wall Street
By
John Del Signore
Published Oct 28, 2011
Modified Oct 28, 2011
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By
John Del Signore
Published Oct 28, 2011
Modified Oct 28, 2011
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[UPDATE BELOW] Journalists are supernatural space beings from the planet Objectivity who can eradicate their personal opinions to report facts without any bias whatsoever. But this Occupy Wall Street drama has exposed some fake journalists for what they really are: pitiful humans vulgarly and inextricably enmeshed in the society they are reporting on. A New York Times freelancer who was arrested while covering an Occupy Wall Street march was taken off the story after a right-wing website posted a confusing video of her talking politics. And two public radio staffers have been canned for participating in protest marches; Gawker has their story today.
For the past seven months, Caitlin Curran has been working as a freelance web producer for the WNYC show "The Takeway." Earlier this month, she was photographed at an Occupy Wall Street march holding a funny protest sign declaring: "It's wrong to create a mortgage-backed security filled with loans you know are going to fail so that you can sell it to a client who isn't aware that you sabotaged it by intentionally picking the misleadingly rated loans most likely to be defaulted upon."
Curran explains that the photo was quickly disseminated around the Internet, and she thought it would be interesting to do a "Takeaway" segment on the sign's origins (which she explains in the Gawker story). So she sent an email to her boss pitching it. And the next day she was fired. Her boss was "was inconsolably angry, and said that I had violated every ethic of journalism, and that this should be a teaching moment for me in my career as a journalist."
Baltimore-based freelance journalist Lisa Simeone was also fired that same week in a similar situation, after conservative site The Daily Caller criticized her (and NPR) for supporting Occupy D.C. Simeone, who hosts the nationally syndicated “World of Opera” program and “SoundPrint,” told the Baltimore Sun, "I find it puzzling that NPR objects to my exercising my rights as an American citizen—the right to free speech, the right to peaceable assembly—on my own time in my own life… I've never brought a whiff of my political activities into the work I've done for NPR World of Opera. What is NPR afraid I'll do—insert a seditious comment into a synopsis of Madame Butterfly?"
NPR, which has been blasted by conservatives for liberal bias in the past, has a code of conduct which permits certain volunteer nonprofit, nonpartisan activities, such as participating in the work of a church, synagogue or other institution of worship, or a charitable organization. Partisan volunteer work would seem to violate that code, but Curran insists Occupy Wall Street is non-partisan:
It's unclear to me how our participation, on our personal time, in a non-partisan movement warrants termination from our jobs. If the protest is so lacking, in terms of message and focus, then how can my involvement with it go against The Takeaway's ethical policies? In other words, if I'm associated with a party-less movement (and barely associated, since that was only the second time I've attended an Occupy Wall Street event), and have never exercised bias in editing "The Takeaway's" website, what's the harm.
Update 5 p.m.: And NPR spokesperson tells us Lisa Simeone is "not NPR’s employee" and that she "remains host of 'World of Opera.' "
Tagged
journalism
NPR
occupy wall street
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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