Juan 'the lottery' Williams
The incident last week in which National Public Radio fired analyst Juan Williams caught me by surprise and had me puzzled at first. I have always enjoyed his observations on NPR's Morning Edition. I have no problem with correspondents showing up in various places other than their home employer. It allows for the possibility of a greater diversity of opinion on any given outlet, gives the hosts someone fresh to talk to, and gives the visitors a bit of extra income. There is an element of "when it Rome..." to all this, but that's to be expected. So it seemed at first that NPR had over-reacted and was going against the grain or spirit of this little game. Even as the history of NPR's concerns and discussions with Mr. Williams came to light, NPR's objections seemed overwrought. Journalists and commentators play different roles in different organizations. You are invited to somebody's table as foil or fulfillment, it's rarely less than obvious. My best guess, when Mr. Williams showed up on Fox within 24 hours with a multi-year $2 million contact in hand, is that Williams and Fox News had already made this deal and what occurred was little more than accomplishing the thing with maximum noise and public relations. The storm and fury one saw on this signified very little.
Even if this is not the case, I have only limited sympathy for Mr. Williams. On the day of the first interview he gave us a poorly worded, poorly thought out off-the-cuff comment: "But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they're identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous." A nod to his host Bill O'Reilly's sensibilities, but later in that same interview he offered some resistance to the proposition that Islam attacked us on 9/11 saying it was wrong to generalize in that way, Juan Williams at odds with NPR over dismissal. On the second day's interview, he doubling down on his comments. Repeatedly asserting they were OK because they were honest opinions (as though that covered it, I never doubted the Klan honestly disliked black people) and intimated they were popular opinions. I imagine they are, limited to Fox viewership and the Fox commentariat line. But that reeks monstrously of situational ethics.
The comment was frankly and starkly bigoted. A text book example of prejudice and the symbolic assailant, what can be called Identity Politics America's degraded public debate | Benton Foundation:. Especially the cloying between-the-lines assertion that the individuals Williams was describing were being aggressively in-your-face Muslim, in their public dress and manner, when it was in their place to tone that down so as not to offend or afear Mr. Williams or Mr. O'Reilly. Many suggested a simple substitution test on Mr. Williams observations: draw up a list of national religious and ethnic nomen and start running them into that statement. Try them out on your friends and associates, strangers in bars. See who breaks your nose first, because someone will. I, for my part, would be worried to see a well-dressed cuff-linked pundit or Wall street executive board a plane I was on. Men like these nearly cratered the world economy two years ago -- and failed through no grace or action of their own. They would have no problem flying a plane into the ground at 700 knots. And with no fear for themselves, because they all hold solid gold pearl-inlay parachutes.
Fox news is not a really news organization. It is a partisan editorial platform covered with the faintest fig leaf of denial. No one on Fox news is a journalist or should think of themselves as such. However in this incident NPR appeared crabby and thin skinned. NPR CEO Vivian Schiller's comment about Williams keeping this between himself and his psychiatrist was abysmally churlish. And it was a bad reaction Amid anger, regret over Williams's firing, NPR staffers fear financial backlash. I do not want NPR to be pushed and prodded around until they find themselves re-created as a straw man; labeled the progressive-democrat political network. That's Pacifica's job. NPR should consciously and actively try to to resist this, not letting themselves get boxed into a corner where they are used to justify Fox news.
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