That time I got fired by NPR...

🥩Once again, right-wingers just looove to go after public broadcasting🤪

In case you missed it, there’s a bit of a dust-up over at National Public Radio this week.

A senior business editor at NPR wrote a column about the extreme wokeness of the public broadcaster.

Gasp! Stop the presses! NPR is woke?

And of course, now the right-wingers are calling for defunding one of their favorite woke punching bags.

Again.

This is just another scene in a long-running theater production featuring a large cast of characters: real journalists who are always terrified of losing their jobs, right-wing media types who crave another click-bait “controversy,” Big Bird, Ernie and his live-in lover and devout Marxist, Bert.

And at one time, I was among that cast of characters.

Let’s go waaaay back, to the dawn of the days of what came to be known as the “Tea Party,” a loose collection of anti-government conservatives who initially called themselves “tea-baggers” . . . before they did a Google search on that term.

They appeared at protests wearing tea bags on their hats as an homage to the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution — it seems so quaint compared to our Trump-era insurrectionists, doesn’t it?

At the time, NPR was running my political animation every week and they published this cartoon . . .

The cartoon appeared on their Opinion pages, which at the time featured actual strong and varied opinions.

Months after this cartoon ran — during which time the “tea-baggers” rebranded themselves as the “Tea Party” — the conservative site RedState saw the cartoon and ginned up the right-wing masses.

Cue NPR panic.

Then Bill O’Reilly called NPR and me out during his televised rant. (Apologies, I’m still tracking down that video clip, which is apparently hard to find now that O’Reilly isn’t at Fox News.)

The ombudsman at NPR wrote a column backing me up while at the same time throwing me under the bus.

If you read it, it sounds like they’re not backing down even though they (now) don’t like the cartoon.

The right was of course outraged that NPR didn’t immediately fire me and lose all its gub’mint funding.

Once they publicly stood up for Opinion and Journalism, NPR called me to say they were taking a “temporary pause” on running my cartoons, you know, just until they found a conservative political animator who could balance my perspective.

Like much of online news-land, fear of opinion ensued and eventually led to watered-down Opinion Lite.

I guess I’m partly to blame.

It turns out opinion didn’t belong on NPR’s opinion pages.

Go figure.

Consider this another post about Why Crowdfunding Is So Important — without you, opinionated cartoons and satire might not be seen at all.