NPR chief sorry over handling of Williams' firing

The Williams dismissal also came shortly after the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, a frequent target of conservative critics, donated $1.8 million for NPR to hire people to report on government in all 50 states.

One danger for NPR is that Williams' exit calls attention to the network's lack of on-air diversity, said Richard Prince, who blogs about diversity for the Maynard Institute of Journalism Education. Williams was one of its few nonwhite personalities. NPR has two programs hosted by black women, an on-air reporter who is black and another who has just been hired, a spokeswoman said.

More than 100 people called or e-mailed Cincinnati's NPR affiliate, WVXU, with the majority complaining about the decision, said Rich Eiswerth, the station's CEO, president and general manager. Two people canceled their memberships, he said.

"In my opinion, this is going to be a tempest in a teapot," Eiswerth said. "The news cycle being what it is — a week from now is a decade in the news cycle — I don't think it will have a big impact on NPR."

WAMC radio in Albany, N.Y., said it received several complaints, not necessarily from its members. "There was an organized right-wing attempt to use this to embarrass NPR," said Alan Chartock, the station's president. "NPR had it coming, because they really blew it."

But he said the decision to fire Williams might help fundraising for NPR stations in some parts of the country.

Fourteen percent of NPR listeners identified themselves as Republican, 40 percent said they were Democrats and 41 percent were independent, according to a survey taken in June by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Among all surveyed by Pew, the breakdown was 25 percent Republican, 33 percent Democratic and 34 percent independent.

"With their listeners, (Williams' exit) would be a positive," said Robert Lichter, author of "The Media Elite," a 1986 book that traced political leanings of journalists. "I don't imagine a lot of their listeners are regular Fox viewers."

An estimated $3.3 million of NPR's $166 million budget comes from federal grants, or less than 2 percent, rendering the political threat to strip its public funding a small issue. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting accounts for roughly 10 percent of the NPR affiliate stations' revenue on average — more for small, rural stations and less in the big cities, said Dana Rehm, NPR spokeswoman.

PBS, meanwhile, gets 15 percent of its budget through CPB funds — making the threat more meaningful.

"As far as members of Congress are concerned, we believe that they will understand the distinction between the different organizations," said PBS spokeswoman Jan McNamara.

The "vast majority" of people who called NPR to complain are not NPR members, Rehm said. The net effect on individual donations still is not known, she said. NPR has also checked with its corporate benefactors and found most remain steadfast in their support, she added.

NPR hopes that listeners and other journalists will appreciate their efforts to stand strong about removing all appearances that their employees are biased, particularly with the strong cable news trend in the opposite direction. NPR already earned a reputation for prissy purism among some critics when it wouldn't allow staff members to attend comic Jon Stewart's Washington rally this weekend, fearing their presence would send a political signal.

"There's no question that point has been lost in the heat of the entire controversy," Rehm said.