This is, after all, what writer Neal Stephenson calls “The Age of Scrutiny:” there is no such thing as a private conversation or opinion any more.  Like that fact or hate it, but you must accept it: too many cameras, too many people who can afford them, and data storage just gets cheaper and cheaper.  It is also an age that has elevated hypocrisy to the first rank of sins; better by far to be a forthrightly unpleasant person in public than to be one who is unpleasant in private, but who never acts on it in public.  Combine the two, and hi-jinks ensue.

The best part of this is not senior NPR executive Ron [Schiller]‘s [oops!] shrugging off the casual references to Jewish-run media; or the way that NPR’s reputation of despising anybody who isn’t a liberal Northeastern intellectual is apparently justified from the top down.  It’s not even that NPR thinks that you are probably a racist and definitely an uneducated ingrate with ambitions above your class.  All of this we already knew, after all.  No, what’s the best part of this is these quotes from Schiller:

Well, frankly it is very clear that we would be better off in the long run without Federal funding.

[later, when asked whether NPR could survive without funding.]

NPR would definitely survive and most of the stations would survive.

Nobody tell NPR head Vivian Schiller (no relation), who spent Monday doing her best to couch removal of Federal funding in terms of the Book of Revelation.  Oh, and she apologized for firing Juan Williams – which said firing was something that Ron Schiller took the time to victory-lap.  All in all, this was one comprehensive stomp-on-your-own-message that NPR did: I’m almost impressed at their own urge for self-destruction.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Let me save the push-backers some time: Georgetown is in DC; DC has a one-person consent law for recording conversations.

PPS: Hot Air had the same reaction that I did.

PPPS: A colleague would like me to note that we have thus far only seen excerpts. Clearly, since NPR has nothing to hide, it should be the first to demand that the full, unedited tapes be made available for Congress to fully study as part of its decision on whether or not to keep funding NPR.