From the Department of Evil Media

Aren't we done with this schmuck yet? First James O'Keefe III - the embarrassing would-be Bob Woodward of the hyperactive conservative blogosphere -- makes a point of going after ACORN (forget the work which the organization does on behalf of the poor, they apparently deserve to be demolished for daring to voice liberal beliefs), then he gets arrested trying to tamper with the office phones of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and also tries to trick a female CNN reporter into getting onto a boat he'd filled with sex paraphernalia. Now he's doing a lousy job of trying to prove that National Public Radio is ... what? Staffed by people who think that a good percentage of hardcore Tea Partiers are quasi-racist whack-jobs? That simply shows good sense...

O'Keefe is not a reporter. He is a sleazy propagandist whose manufactured scandals are simply matches applied to an already mountainous pile of kindling.

So, why, then is anybody listening to or watching anything the guy does? And why (as Ira Glass plaintively asks) is NPR not only peremptorily firing people over this but not fighting back at all? As NPR itself and several other entities who finally bothered to watch the entire O'Keefe video have discovered, the guy concocted a hatchet job packed with misleading edits and innuendo. (The somewhat pleasant surprise in all this is that the first people to break this story were actually over at Glenn Beck's site, The Blaze.)

Of course, it's probably too late -- Congressional Republicans are already out for blood and they think they have their moment (note Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan's recent lament that his fellow deficit-hatin' Tea Partiers seem to naively think that the budget crisis can be solved "by cutting waste, fraud and abuse, foreign aid and NPR"). The organization's decision to simply fire people and curl into a defensive crouch isn't exactly going to make the problem go away.

Note, though, that none of the people calling for an end to government funding of PBS and NPR ever point to actual examples of liberal bias, they just assume it. Because, let's be honest, any radio station with all that serious news reporting and any television channel showing that many non-country music concerts and documentaries about things besides World War II and Ronald Reagan is clearly crawling with God-hating libruls. As Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga) said:

I never listen to NPR. As I travel across Georgia, I tune in to hear Glenn Beck or Rush, Hannity or catch the news or just relax to good ole country music. NPR is too snooty for my taste.

Well, that's an argument that's hard to beat. So take in all the Frontline and On the Media and This American Life that you can now, folks...