Juan Williams: Why NPR fired him—and Fox embraced him

For someone who’s supposed to be a liberal, Juan Williams just launched quite a “conservative crusade,” said Michael Calderone in Yahoo News. Williams was fired last week from his news analyst job at NPR after an appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News. The public radio network was never thrilled with Williams’ frequent appearances on Fox. But last week, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller said Williams had “crossed the line” when he told O’Reilly that when he sees people in “Muslim garb” boarding a plane, “I get worried, I get nervous.” The veteran journalist was summarily fired. Fox quickly turned the controversy “to its advantage,” said Keach Hagey in Politico.com, offering Williams a contract for nearly $2 million while leading the attack on NPR, a perennial conservative target, as a bastion of political correctness. Now Republicans are demanding that the federal government withdraw the funding that makes up about 2 percent of NPR’s budget. “I think it’s reasonable to ask why Congress is spending taxpayers’ money to support a left-wing radio network,” said House Republican leader John Boehner.

“They finally found a way to get rid of Juan Williams,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. NPR’s insistence that Williams had engaged in offensive personal commentary is simply “preposterous.” How is speaking honestly about reasonable personal feelings “bigotry”—especially since Williams promptly added that “it would be wrong to call all Muslims ‘extremists’ because some are terrorists”? What’s really going on is that “NPR’s progressive political base was unhappy with Mr. Williams’ appearances on Fox as existentially incompatible” with its liberal worldview. NPR certainly doesn’t mind when marquee correspondents Cokie Roberts and Nina Totenberg mouth liberal talking points. (Totenberg once notoriously wished “retributive justice” in the form of AIDS on Republican Sen. Jesse Helms—or on his grandchildren.) But as we learned in the fight over the Ground Zero mosque, crying “anti-Muslim bigotry” is now the Left’s favorite tactic for silencing its opponents.

Few acts are more hypocritical than right-wingers’ “wrapping themselves in the flag of ‘free expression,’” said Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com. These same people “remained silent or vocally cheered on the viewpoint-based firings” of many others, including White House correspondent Helen Thomas for critical remarks about Israel, and CNN editor Octavia Nasr for expressing sadness over the death of a beloved Muslim cleric with supposed connections to Hezbollah. Where were these First Amendment champions then? The Right was outraged by Williams’ firing only because the demonization of Muslims as a “Dangerous Menace” is critical to its worldview; stoking fear of Muslims justifies “endless war” in the Mideast, surveillance and torture, and blinkered support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. It is at Fox, of course, that the “fear-mongering campaign of defamation and bigotry” reaches its hysterical crescendo. Williams can now bray along.

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Neither Fox nor NPR listeners will benefit from this fiasco, said Ross Douthat in NYTimes.com. Williams was one of very few pundits who speak to both those audiences. Now he’s gone from NPR, and “aren’t Fox News’ millions of viewers considerably less likely to have their assumptions challenged now that one of their more liberal commentators has a highly personal reason to drift rightward?” This whole “imbroglio just guarantees that both NPR listeners and Fox News watchers will find themselves wound a little tighter in their respective ideological cocoons.” We all lose.