{"id":1141,"date":"2005-06-07T01:47:42","date_gmt":"2005-06-07T08:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2005\/06\/whose_klose_call_got_npr_repor\/"},"modified":"2005-06-07T01:47:42","modified_gmt":"2005-06-07T08:47:42","slug":"whose_klose_call_got_npr_repor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2005\/06\/whose_klose_call_got_npr_repor.html","title":{"rendered":"WHOSE KLOSE CALL GOT NPR REPORTER FIRED?"},"content":{"rendered":"

National Public Radio made a huge mistake<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> ousting its veteran
\narts reporter David D’Arcy and is still trying to cover it up<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>. The latest
\nattempt came during an investigation by the National Labor Relations Board when the network
\nrefused to produce documents that would allegedly clarify why he was fired and Tom Cole, a
\nunionized NPR staff editor who supervised the story, was disciplined.
\n

<\/P>
\n

<\/A>D’Arcy, left, who freelanced for NPR for 21 years, was fired in January
\nafter the Museum of Modern Art complained about a story he did exposing the museum’s
\ninvolvement in a case of Holocaust art theft (the Egon Shiele painting “Portrait of Wally”) and
\npointing out the contradictory stands on Nazi-looted art restitution expressed by both MoMA and
\nits billionaire board chairman Ronald Lauder, who also happens to collect Shiele paintings.<\/P>
\n

In addition to firing D’Arcy, NPR ran a “correction”<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> to the story that
\nexperts on the restitution of Nazi-looted art say is misleading and brazenly inaccurate, not to
\nmention damaging to D’Arcy’s reputation for thorough, in-depth reporting on the issue of
\nHolocaust art theft.<\/P>
\n

“NPR failed to provide documentation about mysterious activities on this matter, which they
\nsay is confidential,” says Ken Greene, who sought the NLRB investigation as a union official of
\nthe American Federation of Television and Radio Artist’s Baltimore-Washington chapter. “They
\ncited attorney-client privilege for information we requested. We say this information was not
\nbetween attorneys and clients but between managers.”<\/P>
\n

The “mysterious activities” involve “what happened during three weeks, from Jan. 6 to 27,”
\nhe said. That is around the time MoMA is alleged to have brought pressure on NPR in phone calls
\nand other communications with NPR President and CEO Kevin Klose and NPR news executives.
\n“They never asserted attorney-client privilege about this information until the NLRB
\ninvestigation,” Greene added. “But the union expects the information to be disclosed when we
\nsubpoena witnesses for an <\/A>arbitration hearing.”<\/P>
\n

The NLRB investigation was dismissed, and NPR avoided the charge of unfair labor
\npractices. The best prospect for sorting out the mystery, it now seems, should come at the
\nhearing, which has been tentatively scheduled for several alternative dates in July, Greene
\nsays.<\/P>
\n

Another source, who asked not to be identified, confirms that NPR “didn’t want to produce
\ncertain documents they say is privileged because of possible litigation against NPR by D’Arcy.”
\nIt’s worth noting, however, that D’Arcy has not sued NPR, has never threatened to do so and,
\naccording to a third source, would be reluctant to take that course of action.<\/P>
\n

<\/A>These documents, sources tell me, would show that MoMA threatened
\nby fax, phone, e-mail and\/or letter not to cooperate with NPR reporters on future stories if it did
\nnot repudiate D’Arcy’s piece, even though nobody at NPR — including Klose, left, who was
\ndirectly contacted by MoMA, according to a source — had ever claimed D’Arcy’s report was
\nfactually inaccurate.<\/P>
\n

Further, D’Arcy has sworn in an affidavit for the union’s arbritration hearing that in the first
\nweek of January, after his story aired but before MoMA began applying pressure to top NPR
\nexecutives, NPR assistant managing editor Bill Wyman praised it. “He told me, ‘This is just the
\nkind of journalism I want the culture desk to be doing.’ He told me that. At no time during the
\npreparation of the story or during the editing was any criticism raised about the way I went about
\nreporting it.”<\/P>
\n

The reason for firing D’Arcy, as it now stands, is not inaccurate reporting. It’s that he violated
\nNPR’s ethical standards for failing to report the story in a “fair and balanced” way. In a
\nconversation with NPR management, D’Arcy was accused of “making Ronald Lauder look like a
\nhypocrite … and MoMA’s trustees look like bad Jews.”<\/P>
\n

If you read the transcript of D’Arcy’s report, broadcast on Dec. 27, you’ll see it says, “At
\nMoMA’s opening last month, Lauder talked about guidelines for institutions and collectors.” If
\nyou listen to the report, you hear the ambient noise of the opening. Lauder was at the opening and
\ntook questions from the press. D’Arcy asked Lauder, one-on-one, what should happen to art
\nidentified as objects seized by the Nazis, which had not been returned. Lauder said it should go
\nback to the families who had owned it.<\/P>
\n

“That was the question, that was the answer,” D’Arcy recalls. “Lauder also said he thought
\nMoMA was doing a better job of looking into its collection [for looted art] than other museums in
\nEurope had done. We talked quite a bit about collecting art from Middle Europe. I got a general
\nstatement about MoMA policy from its chairman and sought to clarify their implementation of the
\npolicy with MoMA’s legal counsel.”<\/P>
\n

<\/A>Yet MoMA has argued in court that the Schiele painting in
\nquestion, “Portrait of Wally,” right, which was Aryanized from Jews who feared for their lives in
\n1939, is no longer legally stolen and, therefore, their heirs have no legal basis for a claim to
\nownership either in the United States or in Austria. “Wally” was on loan to MoMA in 1997 from
\nthe Leopold Foundation in Vienna when heirs of Lea Bondi Jaray — from whom “Wally” was
\nstolen — spotted the picture and asked the museum not to ship it out of the country so they could
\neventually reclaim it. The museum insists it is bound by a loan contract to return “Wally” to the
\nlender.<\/P>
\n

As to the allegation in NPR’s posted “correction” that he did not allow MoMA to reply to
\ncritical comments, D’Arcy says: “That’s ridiculous. Moma knew what it didn’t want to talk about
\nand declined to comment, in writing. MoMA knows this better than anyone. Its awareness of the
\npublic relations risk in trying to explain a conflicted position in the Schiele case may account for
\nits refusal to talk with other reporters besides me, like Morley Safer of CBS News and Marilyn
\nHenry of ArtNews.”<\/P>
\n

And D’Arcy adds, “while I was preparing the story, an NPR editor sat in on at least two of
\nthe interviews in which critics characterized MoMA’s activities. The editors knew the nature of
\nthe criticism being directed at MoMA in this case. These criticisms had been raised for the past
\nseven years.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

National Public Radio made a huge mistake ousting its veteran arts reporter David D’Arcy and is still trying to cover it up. The latest attempt came during an investigation by the National Labor Relations Board when the network refused to produce documents that would allegedly clarify why he was fired and Tom Cole, a unionized […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1141","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-ip","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}