The most serious issue facing NPR may be whether Williams’s firing will cause lasting damage to public broadcasting’s finances. Many conservative lawmakers and politicians – including House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) – have called on Congress to curtail or eliminate federal subsidies for public broadcasting…

In a meeting with employees that had been scheduled before the Williams story broke, Schiller acknowledged that NPR didn’t manage the firing well, but offered no specifics. She said NPR would conduct a “post-mortem” next week to review how the firing was handled, according to employees who attended the meeting, which was closed to the news media. Schiller didn’t say who would handle the review or what the consequences of it might be…

“There wasn’t anger” among NPR employees at the meeting, “but I did get a sense of despair and disappointment,” said one NPR journalist, who asked not to be named because employees are not authorized to speak on the record about the matter. “I got the impression that [management] felt they had acted rashly and without deliberation. When [Schiller] made the psychiatrist crack, it just made matters much, much worse.”