If outfits like NPR become any more "transparent," even with nuclear-powered floodlights we won't be able to see a damned thing

The new "transparency" appears to be indistinguishable
from the old Cheney-style "total secrecy."

by Ken

We have a development to catch up on in the matter of NPR's plausibly denied crusade to get that bitch Lisa Simeone smoked, but before we get to that, we have to register a linguistic development that had previously escaped my attention: the growing use of "transparent" and "transparency" by organizations as smokescreens to hide their intention to become opaque to the point of total impenetrability.

In the NPR case, you may recall, the emergency communicators were swearing up and down that they had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the Soundprint broadcast's decision to fire host Lisa Simeone after a 15-year association because she participated in the Occupy DC protest. The NPR flacks, outraged by the suggestion that they were involved in any way with the firing, and would apparently have us believe that the charge made by the Soundprint producer who fired Simeone that she had violated NPR ethics, came to the producer in a vision. Meanwhile the NPR enforcers, under pressure from a rising rumble from the Right-Wing Noise Machine, were engaged in openly acknowledged conversations with station WDAV, which produces another show Simeone has long hosted, World of Opera, which NPR distributes, concerning her future on that broadcast.

This is where the story got amusing. The NPR flack bragged about how transparent they were being, apparently in acknowledging that they were engaged in discussions with WDAV. NPR's senior veep in charge of propaganda, you'll recall, had already acknowledged that they "of course take this issue very seriously." And yet the designated flack, abrim with transparency, adamantly refused to comment in any way on those ongoing discussions. Can transparency get any more opaque than that?

At the time I just thought the "transparency" claim was amusing. But just recently I encountered a well-meaning progressive concerned with the search for a new head for an organization that deals with a certain community's human rights claiming that if the organization were to solicit the views of members of that community who aren't necessarily members of the organization, this would be a blow for transparency. Well, no, it wouldn't. Even this gentleman wasn't suggesting that the organization would be required, or even expected, to take any of that community "input" into account, acknowledging that the hiring decision would ultimately be made whatever damned way the organization intended to make it, and the decision-making process would be nobody else's damned business.

This isn't transparency. It's more or less the exact opposite. And so too NPR's "transparency" in maintaining secrecy on the pressure it putting on WDAV to shitcan Lisa Simeone from World of Opera. This, you'll recall, WDAV refused to do.

Oh yes, the development. As David Swanson, whose earlier report I drew on in my earlier post, notes in a Saturday post, "Unable to Get Simeone Fired, NPR Drops 'World of Opera.'" (Details from HuffPost Media's Brett Zongker.) Way to go, team NPR!

David comments:

Clearly Soundprint deserves its full share of condemnation in all of this, and WDAV merits strong support. WDAV will be distributing "World of Opera" on its own and should have our backing. But NPR has lowered itself to the bottom rung of our communications system. Mara Liaason can opinionate on Fox News while providing an objective god's-eye view on NPR. Scott Simon can publish opinion columns in corporate newspapers while reporting the facts. Cokie Roberts can take corporate speaking fees that could cover most people's mortgages without being perceived as in any way tarnished. But Lisa Simeone cannot introduce operas while having taken the unforgivable step of supporting a nonviolent movement on behalf of the lower 99% of us. Despicable.

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