“Al Qaeda is … planning new attacks on the US…. Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups … have silently declared war on the US; in turn, we must fight them as we would in a war.” — Steve Emerson, May 31, 2001…
NPR blacklisted Emerson in 1998, bowing to a pressure campaign by Muslim extremists who falsely libeled him as an anti-Muslim bigot. It was an outrageous charge: He always stresses that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and law-abiding. Nevertheless, NPR officials – including its national news editor – explicitly vowed to keep Emerson off the air. ”You have my promise he won’t be used again,” producer Ellen Silva wrote to Ali Abunimah of the American Arab Action Network. ”It is NPR policy.”
I had a similar experience with the PBS News Hour show – they interviewed me on-camera for a story on child support reform in California, a process that I was intimately involved in. I explained that the structural reorganization contemplated by the legislature was unlikely to produce results, since the basic problem was that the State of California demanded unrealistically large percentages of income from child support obligors, mainly fathers. I ended up in the cutting-room floor, and they went to Washington for a second opinion agreeing with the other side. Our tax dollars support this sort of spinning, of course. (Jacoby story linked by InstaPundit.)