Npr

FRANK RIZZO used to say, "Never write a letter, and never throw one away. " He was not a man of the voice mail or e-mail era, but the Rizzo Rule is still good. It was violated big-time last week when a twentysomething woman left this message at the office of a conservative Web site: "Hi, my name is Rachel, and my telephone number is ----. I wanted to tell you that you're evil, horrible people. You're awful people. You represent horrible ideas. God hates you and he wants to kill your children.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is returning to national radio in a deal with National Public Radio, the orchestra announced yesterday, restoring a part of its profile beyond its own backyard. Performances will not be live; they will be culled from concerts during the course of this season in Verizon Hall, airing in two formats on two NPR radio shows, SymphonyCast and Performance Today. The orchestra's first appearance on Performance Today will be tonight in some markets and on WHYY's high-definition-radio service and Web site.

ISHOULD have been gleeful when NPR fired Juan Williams. He not only insulted me personally by taking a verbal swipe at the cultural attire worn by Muslims when he admitted that he "gets nervous and worried" when he's "on a plane with people who are wearing Islamic garb," but he also offended millions of other Muslims like me who pray five times daily to Allah. Shame on him for stoking the flames of fear that continue to spread throughout the Western world against Muslims who aren't responsible for the horrendous acts of terrorism committed by a few fanatics.

THE HOUSE of Representatives voted yesterday to end federal funding to National Public Radio. Republican supporters said it made good fiscal sense. Democratic opponents called it an ideological attack that would deprive local stations, especially rural ones, of access to programs such as "Car Talk," "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition. " The bill passed along mostly partisan lines. The prospects of support in the Senate are slim, so this may be a lot of yammering about nothing.

National Public Radio fired senior news analyst Juan Williams yesterday. The sacking followed comments by Williams on Bill O'Reilly 's show on Fox News (Williams is a frequent contributor on Fox). He told O'Reilly, "When I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they're identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous. " Commenting on convicted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad , Williams also said, "He said the war with Muslims, America's war is just beginning, first drop of blood.

WASHINGTON - NPR president and CEO Vivian Schiller has resigned in the wake of comments by a fellow executive that angered conservatives and renewed calls to end federal funding for public broadcasting. The chairman of NPR's board of directors announced Wednesday morning that he has accepted Schiller's resignation, effective immediately. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik said in a tweet that Schiller was forced out by the board. A hidden-camera video of an NPR executive calling the tea party racist and saying the network would be better off without federal money has led to that executive's immediate resignation.

WHEN I first met him, Juan Williams was maybe 19 or 20, a student at Haverford College and an intern at the old Philadelphia Bulletin. At a glance, he was indistinguishable from a lot of college kids. He was studious, articulate and seemed to fit in at the small, elite suburban campus. But he was cut from a different cloth. He grew up in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant section, went to Haverford on a scholarship. His parents were hardworking, blue-collar workers from Panama.

IT'S ALWAYS troublesome when someone who gets paid for speaking his mind gets fired for speaking his mind, so it's especially troublesome that NPR chose to fire longtime commentator Juan Williams . Yes, Williams' comment that he gets nervous every time he sees a Muslim on a plane was bigoted - and the fact that millions of Americans may agree with him doesn't make it less so - but NPR has chosen to employ him for 10 years because it seemingly valued...

National Public Radio, which already lost veteran newsman Bob Edwards to satellite radio, is going to lose Los Angeles-based newsmagazine host Tavis Smiley, too. In an e-mail sent yesterday to undisclosed recipients and posted on Jim Romenesko's media page on the Poynter Institute Web site (http://poynter.org), Smiley says he won't renew his contract with NPR, making the Dec. 16 edition of The Tavis Smiley Show his last. His show is on 9 p.m. Mondays through Fridays on WHYY-FM (90.9)

Author and political pundit Bill O'Reilly has no problem asking the tough questions on his television and radio shows. But when he didn't like Terry Gross' line of questioning on Fresh Air, her Philadelphia-based National Public Radio show, the Fox News Channel personality abruptly signed off. O'Reilly was on the phone in New York on Tuesday, about 40 minutes into a taped interview to plug his book Who's Looking Out for You? Gross was in the studio at WHYY-FM (90.9). O'Reilly told Gross he objected to her recent interview with Al Franken, whose book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right skewers him and other conservatives.

WHYY-FM has won the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award for excellence in broadcast and digital journalism. WHYY shared the award with Harrisburg station WITF-FM and NPR for a jointly produced series of radio and Web reports on issues related to natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. The awards were announced at the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York City on Wednesday morning. The announcement praised the project, "StateImpact Pennsylvania," as "an important model for reporting on local issues.

Dance of the lowercase companies! Kate Watson-Wallacer and Jaamil Kosoko, dancer/choreographers who recently formed anonymous bodies, and Megan Bridge and Peter Price, who make up a team they call fidget, have paired up this weekend at Christ Church Neighborhood House. Both partnerships engage in dance theater, live music, on-site installation, multimedia, social justice and political themes, and audience involvement. In a trend that's been growing, if diminutively, they titled their show "us. " Another trend that's been around for a while has the performers on stage and going through their paces before the show begins.

ORAL ARGUMENT last week in the Supreme Court in FCC v. Fox Television Stations questioned whether "fleeting expletives" on TV are protected speech under the First Amendment. The Federal Communications Commission seeks to punish Fox TV for a live broadcast of an excited award winner uttering the "F" word to express her joy. The Appeals Court held that such censorship violates the First Amendment. Several justices wanted to protect children from "indecency," which has no definition, and on that score alone they would violate the First Amendment.

Charles Waldo Bailey 2d, 82, former editor of the Minneapolis Tribune and coauthor of the Cold War thriller Seven Days in May , died Tuesday of complications from Parkinson's disease at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, N.J. "He was a newspaperman. He was a journalist. He loved newspapers and he really believed in the role of newspapers in the community," his daughter Victoria said. "His reporters, his writers, really liked working for him. " A Boston native, Mr. Bailey became a Tribune reporter in 1950 after graduating from Harvard University.

In the late 1960s, Nessa Forman would show up at 7 a.m. in the composing room of the Evening Bulletin, the only woman there. As the first-edition deadline neared, she directed the men who moved columns of metal type into the forms that produced that day's feature pages. Though not long out of graduate school, Ms. Forman was already respected. On Saturday night, Ms. Forman, 68, vice president of corporate communications and public affairs at WHYY Inc. from February 1983 to July 2007 and arts and leisure editor of the Bulletin when it closed in January 1982, died of pancreatic cancer at Penn Hospice at Rittenhouse.

Fox News commentator and former NPR news analyst Juan Williams calls himself the worst kind of bigot on the very first page of his new book, Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate (Crown, $24). "I am a bigot," he writes. "I hate Muslims. I am a fomenter of hate and intolerance. I am a black guy who makes fun of Muslims for the entertainment of white racists. " Williams, who will discuss the book Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Free Library of Philadelphia's Central Library, is, of course, being sarcastic.

The news media haven't figured out what label to pin on James O'Keefe, the wily troublemaker whose hidden-camera sting could be the smoking gun that leads to a cutoff of further federal funding for NPR. The press has resorted to all kinds of fanciful descriptions, dubbing O'Keefe a conservative activist, guerrilla documentarian, gonzo journalist, modern-day muckraker, independent filmmaker, citizen-journalist, daredevil videographer and video-sting impresario....

WASHINGTON - With wounds still fresh from a hidden-video scandal, NPR was dealt another blow Thursday when the House approved a bill that would block the flow of taxpayer dollars to the media organization. The legislation, approved along party lines, 228-192, was rushed to the floor by Republican leaders a week after an NPR executive was caught on tape appearing to make disparaging remarks about conservatives and the tea party movement. The executive and NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller resigned over the issue, even as questions linger over whether the comments were fairly represented by the conservative activist who edited the video.

THE HOUSE of Representatives voted yesterday to end federal funding to National Public Radio. Republican supporters said it made good fiscal sense. Democratic opponents called it an ideological attack that would deprive local stations, especially rural ones, of access to programs such as "Car Talk," "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition. " The bill passed along mostly partisan lines. The prospects of support in the Senate are slim, so this may be a lot of yammering about nothing.

WASHINGTON - NPR president and CEO Vivian Schiller has resigned in the wake of comments by a fellow executive that angered conservatives and renewed calls to end federal funding for public broadcasting. The chairman of NPR's board of directors announced Wednesday morning that he has accepted Schiller's resignation, effective immediately. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik said in a tweet that Schiller was forced out by the board. A hidden-camera video of an NPR executive calling the tea party racist and saying the network would be better off without federal money has led to that executive's immediate resignation.