Former NPR analyst Juan Williams said in an op-ed that NPR should be defunded by the federal government.
In an op-ed for The Hill newspaper, Williams--whose firing from NPR in October caused a political firestorm--said that he had only come to this view in the last week. His about-face puts him in line with House Republicans, who voted to defund NPR last week.
Williams said that he only changed his mind last week, when he saw a fundraising letter from Democratic Rep. Steve Israel criticizing Republicans for voting to defund the network.
"He is openly asking liberal Democrats to give money to liberal Democrats in Congress so they can funnel federal dollars into news radio programs designed to counter and defeat conservative Republican voices," Williams said.
He also wrote that NPR's management had turned it into a political football. "No journalist should have to work with one finger in the political winds, anxiously waiting to see if Democrats continue to be pleased with what they hear on NPR as a counter to what they don't like hearing from Rush Limbaugh," Williams said.
Williams has turned into a harsh critic of NPR following his firing. Among other things, he compared it to Richard Nixon; said that "they prostitute themselves for money"; and, in an exclusive interview with The Huffington Post, said that NPR exhibited "the worst of white condescension" in firing him.
He repeated some of that criticism in his op-ed, saying that NPR condescends to "conservatives but also the far left, the poor - anybody who didn't fit into leadership's marketing design of NPR as the elitist voice of comfortable, liberal-leaning, highly educated, upper-income America."