The head of National Public Radio tried to bury the harassment charges against his top editor.
The left-wing Washington Post reports that NPR “leaders were aware of at least four complaints against” Michael Oreskes, NPR’s top editor, prior to his resignation last week after two allegations went public. With charges of a cover-up floating about, NPR chief Jarl Mohn has taken a four-week leave for what he says are medical reasons.
The brewing NPR scandal comes down to the left-wing news outlet’s decision to keep Oreskes on, even though top management knew of four harassment allegations against him, according to the Post.To make matters worse, the Post reports that in just the last ten days, five more NPR staffers claim to have been harassed by Oreskes.
Going forward, the problems for Mohn and the taxpayer-subsidized NPR are quite obvious. By not acting appropriately and/or effectively enough to end Oreskes’s alleged behavior — meaning serious disciplinary action or termination — the alleged victims piled up. The possible liability issues ramifications here are the stuff of trial lawyers’ dreams…and taxpayer nightmares, for we subsidize this apparent den of executive harassers and enablers.
The details of the seven(!) NPR allegations are not yet known. We do, however, know something about Oreskes’s alleged M.O. via reporting last week from the Post. This includes unwanted kisses, proposals for a “room service lunch, a creepy personal ad, and using the promise of employment to keep the women on the hook.
For the overall national, establishment media, this is also bad news. In just a month, no fewer than eight members of the elite media have been hit with allegations that range from harassment to misconduct to assault. In many of those cases, we have been told that “everyone knew,” but no one did anything.
On top of NPR and the New York Times, other news outlets embroiled in this growing scandal include NBC News, MSNBC, ABC News, Rolling Stone, the New Republic, and Mother Jones. The prominent names include Matt Taibbi, Mark Halperin, David Corn, and Leon Wieseltier.
While this very same establishment media excoriate Fox News over that network’s alleged harassment problems, they were all covering up much, much worse behavior allegedly committed by their very own over the course of decades.
I believe a brilliant, bestselling political philosopher has written, bestsellingly, about the tendency of a certain class of individuals to cast aspersions on others that would, by rights, more accurately describe their own behavior.