| Congress: Don't cave to Sarah Palin. Stand up for NPR! Dear Friend, National Public Radio recently fired Juan Williams after he appeared on Bill O'Reilly's show on FOX News and made some controversial remarks. Now, Sarah Palin and other professional right-wing demagogues are exploiting this issue as an excuse to push Congress to defund NPR, which is something conservatives have wanted for decades. Whatever you think about the Juan Williams controversy, we cannot allow the right wing to dictate public policy by throwing a fit. And we cannot allow Congress to lie down when confronted with hypocritical, fake outrage from the Right. Tell Congress: Don't cave to Sarah Palin. Stand up for NPR! Click here to automatically sign the petition. For years, NPR has allowed Juan Williams and Mara Liasson to accept payment for appearing on FOX News while maintaining their roles as journalists with NPR. We've long believed it was inappropriate for NPR journalists to accept payment from a clearly partisan propaganda organ such as FOX News. And we still believe that NPR should have policies that prevent its journalists from accepting paid positions from FOX, the Republican Party, Tea Party groups and other organizations within the right-wing noise machine. Sarah Palin and others like her are cynically using the controversy over Juan Williams' remarks and his subsequent firing as a pretext to push for a longstanding goal. It's been said that NPR receives 98% of its funding from non-government sources. But that's highly misleading. The government — through the Center for Public Broadcasting — provides a significant source of funding for NPR and NPR member stations, which is part of what allows NPR to present news that hasn't degenerated into the infotainment we regularly get from most of the corporate media. And the right wing is not just talking about taking away funding from NPR. Sen. Jim DeMint is reportedly introducing a bill that would zero out funding for ALL public broadcasting, including NPR, PBS, Pacifica and more. So governmental defunding could not only destroy NPR as we know it, but also deal a significant blow to the entire public interest media sector. Time after time, the right-wing noise machine creates an echo chamber of reprobation and consternation that prompts weak-kneed Democrats to fold faster than you can say, "FOX News isn't really news." It happened with ACORN. It happened with Van Jones. It happened with Shirley Sherrod. We can't let Sarah Palin and the right wing bully Democrats into selling out such an important part of our media landscape. Tell Congress: Don't cave to Sarah Palin. Stand up for NPR! Click here to automatically sign the petition. Thank you for working for a better world. Becky Bond, Political Director
CREDO Action from Working Assets | 
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