The Simeone Saga – With Updates

NEW UPDATE: From Bob Edwards’ Facebook Page:

God forbid that someone who believes in public radio values also embraces social and economic justice. That’s so 1970’s! Opera lovers for justice must be quashed like a bug. It’s a dangerous scourge that threatens Wall Street contributions.

My sincere apologies for a long absence.   Considering how the blogs generated and perpetuated a ridiculous brouhaha, maybe be it would be best if I’d sit back and be quiet, but the tale of Lisa Simeone participating in Occupy DC has been too entertaining too ignore.  In fact, it hit the top of Yahoo News this morning.  Scroll down for update as of 10/21 at 10:25 pm PDT

In case you’ve been hibernating in a cave and haven’t caught the story,  Roll Call, The Daily Beast, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post and others were reporting yesterday that the talented classical music radio host Lisa Simeone had been fired from her hosting job at Soundprint and possibly from NPR’s World of Opera.  The former is true; the latter isn’t.

Now that the dust has settled, the funny part of the story emerges.  Some of the blogs implied she was fired from NPR, which wasn’t true.  Lisa no longer works for NPR even though her superb on-air work airs on NPR stations; for the past few years she has been a freelancer.  She was, however, fired from her hosting job at Soundprint because of NPR’s rules about not participating in political activities.  From Erik Wemple at the Washington Post:

“What I have spent the morning doing is just trying to explain the complicated arcana of public radio, trying to explain to people, so they understand why they got the story wrong,” says Simeone.

Simeone worked for more than 15 years as a freelancer on Soundprint, a documentary radio show out of Laurel. Last night she had a talk with her boss, Moira Rankin, president of the Soundprint Media Center…

Rankin quizzed Simeone about her involvement as an organizer of the October 2011/Stop the Machine protests. (For the record, and per Simeone: She had no official connection or duties as a spokesperson for Occupy DC whatsoever; all reports indicating as much are incorrect, including the NPR post that claims to correct the inaccuracies in all the other accounts.)…

Yet Rankin did indeed invoke NPR guidelines in firing Simeone. “We adhere to NPR standards,” says Rankin…

Soundprint has almost no connection to NPR. It doesn’t get NPR funding and runs primarily on money from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health… Even so! Soundprint does sell its programming to public radio stations that happen to be NPR members.

There you have it in a nutshell.  If it airs on stations that carry NPR programming, its host is subject to NPR’s rules.  Of course, you can carry that to absurd extremes.  The thousands of comments on the blogs are almost unanimous in the opinion that Soundprint overreacted. NPR has been rushing around madly trying to do damage control.  Wouldn’t it have been nice if they had just said, “we think Lisa does outstanding work, and we defend her individual right to free speech, just as we defend this country’s right to a free press.”  If she wasn’t neutral enough for them on the air, they could have asked her to be more neutral.  Do they also want to control the religious and sexual practices of their contractors?

Fortunately, the producer of NPR World of Opera, WDAV in Davidson NC and the producer of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra broadcasts (yours truly) didn’t fall for the hype.  A talent like Lisa doesn’t come along every day, and her politics have no bearing on her reporting about classical music, unless you believe that annoying and pervasive whine that classical music is “elitist.”

Here’s a spoof in Time Magazine online that Lisa calls “flippin’ hilarious”: NPR Listeners May Finally be Protected From Opera Bias.

I haven’t included all the links, but if you want to read the various blog posts, and I especially recommend the comments, you can search under News/Lisa Simeone.

Go Lisa!

Update: Huffington Post is now reporting that NPR will drop distribution of World of Opera, and WDAV will self-distribute the show.

NPR spokeswoman Dana Davis Rehm said the network disagrees with the station on the role of program hosts but respects its position.

“Our view is it’s a potential conflict of interest for any journalist or any individual who plays a public role on behalf of NPR to take an active part in a political movement or advocacy campaign,” she told The Associated Press. “Doing so has the potential to compromise our reputation as an organization that strives to be impartial and unbiased.”

Rehm said any host with NPR attached to their title is a public figure representing the network as a whole. But she said “reasonable people can have different views about this.” She said the negotiations with WDAV were civil and amicable.

Amazing to me that NPR escalated this instead of quietly letting it go.  The comments are pretty negative toward NPR.