Let's take the case of former National Public Radio senior news analyst Juan Williams, who not only worked for NPR but also worked as a commentator and analyst for Fox "Fair and Balanced" News.
Williams, an African-American news analyst and author of several books on civil rights, went on the Fox TV show, The O'Reilly Factor, and followed up on a statement by O'Reilly, who said that we had a "Muslim problem."
Anybody who has ever felt the sting of racial or ethnic prejudice knows what they want to do when someone hurts our children or our loved ones. O'Reilly makes his living by throwing the red meat of racial and ethnic intolerance to the very people whose families have been hurt by this material but who really don't know better.
I have never been an O'Reilly fan, but I have to confess, I have never particularly cared for Juan Williams' work. Fox has used him on their shows and on their panels in order to demonstrate that they are "fair and balanced." To make their case, they have always identified him as an NPR senior analyst.
Then when they put him on a panel with a bunch of sneering, right-wing sharks, he loses whatever debate he is in. He looks lame, very lame. I haven't been shy about sharing my views on Williams and have criticized the guy for allowing himself to be used in that way.
So, it was with great surprise that when I woke up last Thursday morning and learned that NPR had fired Williams for the remarks he made on The O'Reilly Factor. After O'Reilly's rant, Williams went on to admit that when he got on a plane and saw someone dressed in Muslim garb, he got worried.
To be fair, he also made it clear that this was his problem and in a follow-up with O'Reilly, acknowledged that stereotyping was not a good thing. It didn't take me long to figure out that Williams was expressing an opinion. It may have been intolerant and stereotypical; saying it out loud may have been ill-advised.
Maybe the guy was selling out to curry favor with O'Reilly and his audience. I don't know what his motives were and neither do you. I do know that I am not happy with NPR or its administration for what they did. When I went on with my opinion at 7:32 in the morning, I said so.
NPR should not have fired Williams.
Here's what I wrote:
We are deeply distressed by NPR's actions in the firing of Juan Williams. On its face, there is certainly a First Amendment issue here.
It seems to us that this action was precipitous. There are those who think that Juan Williams was used by Fox to justify much of their mean-spirited, right-wing panel discussions, with Williams offering a very weak defense of a liberal point of view.NPR never prohibited that, so why now? Why was Cokie Roberts permitted to appear on ABC? It appears that he is being fired for what he said, and as an analyst, isn't that what he is paid to do? I suggest that NPR reconsider this action, which smacks of more than a little hypocrisy and gives the American right-wing the opportunity to once again call for the defunding of public broadcasting.
The member stations began checking in as soon as the news broke.
(Remember -- the member stations are independent entities with different management, policies, and budgets.) Some were aghast. Some said that they were in the middle of fund drives and people were withdrawing pledges because they were so angry.
I'm not the president of NPR, but if I was I wouldn't have done what NPR's CEO, Vivian Schiller, did. As everyone's mother once advised, I would have counted to 10. Schiller told us in her e-mails that NPR's rules and regulations had been broken.
She told us that news analysts couldn't offer personal opinions. This is where Schiller and I take different forks in the road. Dan Schorr sure did. Cokie Roberts sure does when she comes on. Even their reporters, acting under a guise of objectivity, do it every day.
Just the way you create a story does that. Now Williams comes off as a martyr -- with a $2 million contract from Fox. I'm still shaking my head.
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What kind of person says such a thing with a smirk on their face? Her style is a better fit for FOX.
What we're starting to see in this country is that you can't even mention race or religion or anything else that could possibly offend anyone without fear of immediately being fired. This is just crazy! What ever happened to America being a country that encouraged free and open discourse? That has seemingly been thrown out the window and replaced by this new hypersensitive atmosphere where any topic that could hurt a minorities feelings is totally taboo. Its a dangerous way to go. People don't understand things that are never talked about. We fear what we don't understand. We hate what we fear.
Which isn't to say that Williams was fired for the side his opinion fell on. He was fired for promoting corrosive biases. Which is exactly why he's worth $2 million to the right-wing ringmasters at Fox News.
Yes, he is paid to analyze. What he said and was subsequently fired for was entirely his opinion, and an outrageously loaded/biased one, at that. This sentence shows me that you do not understand the issue. Sad.
Move on, there is nothing to see here.
IF -- IF she just had to feed her ego and get rid of Juan, why not just do what many bosses do? Make him an offer he had to refuse. There are 50 ways to leave your lover, and she picked the worst one.
Being one of the "sane people" at Fox News is no commendable task; if you were truly sane, you wouldn't let yourself be used as a foil to the BS they spew.
Way to go, NPR. You just made Fox News look fair
and balanced by comparison.
Time for Schiller to go. Maybe she and Rick Sanchez
can team up.
No, she didn't, but people who don't get the point might think that she did.
The point is Fox News is preternaturally biased and shameless about it. By hiring someone who got fired for bias they prove it again. They want you to confuse bias for freedom, because they want a country that is built on and cherishes bias instead of one that keeps people healthy and wealthy enough to be free.
NPR did the right thing. Williams and Fox did the wrong thing. Which is the status quo.
Unlike the author, I have been a longtime fan of Williams thanks to his Thurgood Marshall biography. The like got stronger when I discovered he made the "Eyes on the prize" series.
Williams spoke at Northwestern, and I got an autograph, at a Martin Luther King event a while ago. His message was that we have to start actually saying the uncomfortable things we feel in order to talk them out and solve the problems. For example, I actually feel the same way as he does when I see visibly different people (of many types).
I know it's wrong and I'm embarrassed about it. I actually taught a class of minority students and had horrified fears that I may treat them differently because I did feel different around them--but I can't talk about this problem with people and so of course I can't fix it. The truth is, these feelings are real, and the way we work through our problems is by talking about them with other people who have different perspectives.
So long as racial and religious prejudices remain taboo subjects, they will continue to plague our society, and I and everyone else who may have these feelings will never, ever get any better.
Williams was not fired for "a weak defense of a liberal point of view." He was fired for his weak grasp of journalistic ethics. You can't be a "senior news analyst" for a real news operation and go on a fake news channel and say ethnic slurs.
Williams is like a teenager who put an embarrassing picture of himself on Facebook and is now crying foul because he's being judged harshly for it.
How odd that this writer and so many others think of decency toward ethnic and religious groups as being "liberal," and speaking disparagingly of them is "conservative." Morally neutral perhaps, just liberal vs. conservative. Conservatism gets more poisonous all the time, and we just take that it for granted.
I understand that he was just offering up his opinion. He was paid to analyze, not opine. Also, the fact that Fox News hosts try to gain more credibility by having an NPR correspondent on their show is reason enough to fire him.