[disclaimer: lisa simeone is a friend of mine.]
now i am not really interested in the question of whether, strictly speaking, she violated npr's poicies. if the policy really is that no one associated with npr, or producing or helping to produce any sort of content for them, can explicitly advocate political positions, such a policy is ridiculous. first off, npr actually has people on-air expressing their actual opinions, people whose job it is to express opinions (often, though, these actual opinions are pure pablum, a la juan williams or cokie roberts). but say the post had a no-advocacy by employees policy and then started applying it to charles krauthammer or e.j. dionne, or for that matter to their music critics.
now, i can understand a news organization trying to limit the public expressions of opinions by its reporters. i have to say, i disagree with even this, because it is devoted to creating an impression of impartiality, rather than to achieving actual impartiality. it simply makes it a little less easy to assess the impartiality of any given piece. it's like banning the 'appearance of impropriety,' while letting the actual corruption proceed unchecked. it makes whatever bias is actually represented even less honest.
but to prohibit the off-air expression of political conviction on the part of the host of 'world of opera' or 'soundprint' is just ridiculous. you might as well prohibit placido domingo from endorsing herman cain or whatever. there is no possible justification of it whatsoever. if, like zurowick, you want to put the whole thing on whether simeone actually violated the "ethics" policy that is actually in place at npr, you're considering this thing far too narrowly. but if so, then the policy needs to be changed, not the world of opera. oddly i was listening to cornel west and tavis smiley hosting a show on an npr station just last night. believe it or not, they have publicly expressed their political positions.
npr is obviously so incredibly sensitive to accusations of bias that they react far too strongly to any hint, which ends up messing them up much worse. the treatment of juan williams was idiotic, and then the crazy overcompensation against the decision and the andrew breitbart thing was wackily overwrought; fire everybody etc. well, never accept state funding if you don't want to answer to jesse helms, as i used to tell karen finley. but also try to respond to these pressures calmly and thoughtfully, and try to continue doing your job in the right way. so i'd say they fired juan williams because they actually are basically a unanimously leftish organization that hates fox. then they had to thrash wildly the other way because the firing showed that. and ditching simeone is part of this thrashing. i don't know. get over it. hire ron paul to host your world of hip hop show or whatever. you're not going to have a whole huge staff and whole archipelago of contractors none of whom have any political opinions; let a thousand flowers bloom and then really really try to cover politically contentious subject-matters fairly. that is the best you can do.
[anyway, no one on the right or left actually has any opinions; all they have are social affiliations. an opinion on x is a relation of a person to x. what a democrat or a republican, liberal or conservative, has instead is a relation to a demographic segment, expressed in pseudo-propositions that the people in that segment parrot in unison. what matters is producing the right syntactical unit to express your belonging; it's not about what it seems to be about, or the items that would under decent circumstances be referred to by the nouns used. (alright myabe that's a little arch and hyperbolic.)]
