The PC sword strikes down yet another good man

Quote:

So NPR fired Williams. This makes them look like prissy tyrants to Fox News, and it has Republicans yapping about cutting their funding. But this just demonstrates another one of the asymmetric assumptions surrounding the Fox News operation: why should NPR care what the Fox News audience thinks about it? Fox News looks like a bunch of idiot cavemen to the NPR audience, and it wants to look that way. NPR's disgust makes Fox News swing its caveman club around even more proudly. So why can't NPR be just as proud of offending Fox?

Who loses here? NPR gets rid of Williams, which it always wanted to do. Maybe it loses some funding for being so un-American, and Archer Daniels Midland will have to come back and help out. Williams gets $2 million and becomes a prize martyr for Fox News. Fox News has something to yell about. Howard Kurtz has something to offer evenhanded semi-opinions about. I get a blog post at the end of a long day. Why did Williams get fired so fast? Because everyone was having such a good time.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/scocca/

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

Quote:

"And now they have used an honest statement of feeling as the basis for a charge of bigotry to create a basis for firing me. Well, now that I no longer work for NPR let me give you my opinion. This is an outrageous violation of journalistic standards and ethics by management that has no use for a diversity of opinion, ideas or a diversity of staff (I was the only black male on the air). This is evidence of one-party rule and one-sided thinking at NPR that leads to enforced ideology, speech and writing. It leads to people, especially journalists, being sent to the gulag for raising the wrong questions and displaying independence of thought."

On Thursday night, again on Fox News, he told O'Reilly about his former employer, "These people don't have any sense of righteousness -- what's right here. They're self-righteous."

"I don't fit in their box," he said. "They were looking for a reason to get rid of me because I appear on Fox News. They don't want me talking to you."

http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/10/21/npr.analyst.fired/index.html?section=cnn_latest

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@Fido,

Juan Cole is the professor.

1 Reply

FRIDAY, OCT 22, 2010 00:01 ET
Juan Williams' real crime: Hack punditry
Forget his remark about Muslims: His political commentary is somewhere between mediocre and awful
BY STEVE KORNACKI

It may be, as Joan Walsh argues, that Juan Williams should not have been fired by NPR. And it's probably true, as Glenn Greenwald contends, that speech-based dismissals of media figures -- whether it's Williams because of what he said about Muslims and terrorism or Helen Thomas because of her comments on Jews and Israel -- are simply wrong.

But even if the rationale is flawed, it's hard to get too upset, because as political commentators go, he's just not very good.

Sure, there are worse offenders out there. And it can be tough for even the most nimble pundit to distinguish him or herself; after all, how many different ways are there to point out that the economy is in rough shape, President Obama's poll numbers are shaky, and Republicans are poised to score big gains in the midterms? At his best, Williams manages to be just average enough to blend in with all of the other left-of-center political analysts.

But I can't remember him ever advancing any kind of groundbreaking argument, or introducing some dramatically new and intelligent perspective on a major topic. What I can remember him doing -- a lot -- is using flawed, shoddy and easily debunked logic to make arguments that were (seemingly) designed to make conservatives say, "Ah, now there's a reasonable liberal."

A perfect example of this came back in April, when Williams penned an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal that took liberals to task for (supposedly) obsessing over racism within the Tea Party movement. The piece was an instant hit on the right, where the racism charges had touched a defensive nerve. His argument, though, amounted to an intellectually lazy claim that Democrats were alienating "independent" voters by attacking the Tea Party:

But Democrats cannot win elections without capturing the votes of independent-minded swing voters. And that is where writing off the tea party as a bunch of racist kooks becomes self-destructive. The tea party outrage over health-care reform, deficit spending and entitlements run amok is no fringe concern...

Ugh. Never mind that the Tea Party movement represents the Republican Party base -- not "independent-minded swing voters." By one measure, 96 percent of Tea Party supporters who voted in 2008 cast ballots for John McCain. If anything, as Sharron Angle, Rand Paul, Joe Miller and Christine O'Donnell are demonstrating, the Tea Party movement and its excesses are actually helping Democrats this year, by scaring "independent-minded swing voters" away from the GOP. Granted, it was early in the election season when Williams wrote his column, but a basic grasp of recent political history would have told him that a vocal, angry, mobilized right-wing is an expected occurrence whenever Democrats run Washington: Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson all learned this the hard way.

But Williams wasn't interested in saying something intelligent about the Tea Party movement; he was happy to just accept the notion that it represents an independent force with cross-ideological appeal and to structure an argument around it. It was a classic example of hack punditry: No one learned anything reading it, but it did provide conservatives with a nice talking point: "Look, even a liberal like Juan Williams says this Tea Party-bashing is bad for the Democrats." It would be one thing if Williams' argument were valid and the Tea Party really was a constituency that Democrats need to court; but it isn't -- and he could have discovered that fairly easily.

This same instinct to offer thoughtless concessions to conservatives is, of course, what landed Williams in trouble this week, when he prefaced his comments about Muslims by telling Bill O'Reilly "I think you're right" -- hardly the first time he's employed such a tactic on Fox.

As I said, there are worse pundits that Williams out there. And who knows? NPR may end up picking one of them to replace him.

Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor. Reach him by email at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki More Steve Kornacki

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THURSDAY, OCT 21, 2010 18:01 ET
Juan Williams still doesn't get it, is rich anyway
Fox gives the former NPR analyst, who still refuses to acknowledge any prejudice, a multimillion-dollar new deal VIDEO
BY ALEX PAREENE

AP
Juan Williams
The firing of Juan Williams (and his subsequent full-time hiring -- at an insane $2 million -- by Fox News) for saying he is afraid of Muslims (and adding that it is OK and right to be afraid of Muslims) is the perfect sort of overwrought nonevent for our obsessively navel-gazing media-political establishment. Old bores of the traditional media love a tale of one of their own saying something stupid and getting fired for it (it is usually outrageous when this happens unless the stupid thing said was about the Jews). The right wing immediately goes into a tizzy whenever anyone, anywhere, can be spun into sounding like some sort of victim of liberal political correctness. (As an added bonus, conservatives now get to launch an ACORN-style campaign against "government-funded" NPR.) The news is of no interest to anyone in the world outside this sphere, beyond the segment of NPR's 20 million listeners who liked Williams so much that they called in today, weeping. (Which, truth be told, is probably a decent number of people -- folks who love public radio think of the people on it like family, in my experience.)

The good reason to fire Juan Williams is that he's predictable and boring and his appearances on Fox reflect poorly on NPR. This, for all I know, was the actual reason he was fired. But this is a very bad way to explain that firing:

A "news analyst" can't express "views?" Oy.

But Williams still can't acknowledge the essential bigotry of his statements. This, from Williams' defensive, deeply stupid column on his firing, is telling (emphasis mine):

Two days later, Ellen Weiss, my boss at NPR called to say I had crossed the line, essentially accusing me of bigotry. She took the admission of my visceral fear of people dressed in Muslim garb at the airport as evidence that I am a bigot. She said there are people who wear Muslim garb to work at NPR and they are offended by my comments.

That is really the perfect explanation for what was wrong with Williams' remarks, and it seems like the point at which an empathetic person might actually apologize. But Williams does not reflect on that, at all. Maybe he doesn't believe it's true. Maybe he thinks those people are somehow wrong to be offended. He's deluded enough, after all, to consider his firing for saying something stupid "a chilling assault on free speech" -- demonstrating a Palin-esque reading of the First Amendment that should embarrass the author of a biography of Thurgood Marshall. Maybe Juan Williams actually thinks being afraid of a religious or ethnic group solely because of the way they look or dress isn't bigoted (he keeps insisting as much!), in which case, NPR is justified in firing him -- as CNN was in firing Rick Sanchez -- for reasons of stupidity.

But because he is a useful pawn in the war on the Liberal Media and their relentless politically correct Muslim-Coddling, he is now one of the best-compensated pretend liberal news analysts in the nation.

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene

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@plainoldme,

plainoldme wrote:

Juan Cole is the professor.

True; and you are both Smart... Thank you..

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Has anyone considered that the $2M contract Williams signed with Fox was already in the works and that was part and parcel of his firing?

1 Reply

@plainoldme,

Quote:

Has anyone considered that the $2M contract Williams signed with Fox was already in the works and that was part and parcel of his firing?

Are you suggesting that Williams is the kinda guy who would try to get fired, and that he did? Doubtful. This looks like the firing was an unwelcome surprise to Williams and that Fox took the opportunity to Embarrass PBS and the scuttle the plans of the peeved PBS staffers who wanted Williams to suffer for his alleged crimes.

I expect that over the years Williams had had some discussions about moving full time to Fox, because is was seeing his role at PBS reduced and he knew that many people at PBS were not happy with him. I suspect that at some point Fox told him that they were not interested because they had enough liberals, but that this changed when hiring Williams gained the added benefit of sticking it to PBS and arguing that Fox is more representative of America's values then PBS is.

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@hawkeye10,

Why would you doubt that Williams would play NPR against FOX for dollars? He was already going on NPR with one line and FOX with noticeably different one so it's hard to say he's taking a principled stand. In the last several months more prominent reporters than him were dismissed for making bigoted remarks. Thomas and Sanchez were both scuttled for making less noxious remarks, so if I'm in his shoes, I'm pretty sure what's going to happen if I go on a talk show and make racist remarks. At the same time, FOX is looking for a black face who can claim some liberal street cred and still toe the line on their key issues. Either it was a brilliant play on his part or he is an idiot who got lucky. I'm figuring the former.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

Have you ever heard of conflict-of-interest?

1 Reply

@plainoldme,

Quote:

Have you ever heard of conflict-of-interest?

sure. Are you claiming that there is a conflict of interest in working for a media outlet that is bais to the left as well as one that is bias to the right? I am thinking that the answer is no, it is a skill to keep employed this days if on is as moderate at that.

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@hawkeye10,

actually i'd be more likely to accept the views of someone who isn't completely in one camp or the other, i don't get party politics at all

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There was a conflict of interest in regard to ethics when Williams was playing the part of both news analyst and commentator. In an interview on NPR John Watson, who is an associate professor of communications law and journalism ethics at American University, explained the conflict thusly:

Quote:

As I understand management's position, he was fired on a basis of professional ethics. As a news analyst, he's in a position very, very closely aligned with a news reporter in the sense that his comments have to based in accord with the fundamental prime directive of journalism, which is provide the people with information they can rely on in making decisions about issues that are important. If the bearer of these messages indicates a bias, any information she or he provides really can't be relied on.

In response to host Michel Martin's question: "But why can't a person who's an honest broker perform in any venue?" Watson answered:

Quote:

I don't see a two-level distinction among people who participate in the mass media. I see news journalists, news reporters. I see news analysts and then I see commentators. Okay. And there is a separate set of ethical directives for all three. Analysts and news-based journalists pretty much follow the same ethical principles.

Commentators are different significantly because they are permitted and encouraged to show a bias or a position. Okay, so confusing a commentator with an analyst is incorrect because different ethical principles apply. As I understood it, Juan Williams was a news analyst. And as a news analyst, your biased if it appears publicly, is unethical. Whereas if you're a commentator, your bias is what you trade on.

In terms of journalistic ethics Williams crossed the line.

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@engineer,

I'm guessing it was a ploy to get out of a non-compete agreement.

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@hawkeye10,

I do not see NPR as biased toward the left.

1 Reply

@plainoldme,

Really? you don't hear it?

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I would rather know what people are thinking, too. Isn't that how you choose your politicians - listen to what candidates have to say and then vote? I admit that knowing what they think can sometimes be quite disillusioning, but I'd rather be disillusioned and informed than ignorant of the truth about them.

I would prefer not to hear most journalists' opinions and find it irritating when they interview each other on such issues. I'd much rather hear from people who've studied the subject and have a broader base of information.

1 Reply

@Mame,

Mame wrote:

I would rather know what people are thinking, too. Isn't that how you choose your politicians - listen to what candidates have to say and then vote? I admit that knowing what they think can sometimes be quite disillusioning, but I'd rather be disillusioned and informed than ignorant of the truth about them.

I would prefer not to hear most journalists' opinions and find it irritating when they interview each other on such issues.
I'd much rather hear from people who've studied the subject and have a broader base of information.

SO STIPULATED, Mame.

David

1 Reply

@OmSigDAVID,

OmSigDAVID wrote:

Mame wrote:
I would rather know what people are thinking, too. Isn't that how you choose your politicians - listen to what candidates have to say and then vote? I admit that knowing what they think can sometimes be quite disillusioning, but I'd rather be disillusioned and informed than ignorant of the truth about them.

I would prefer not to hear most journalists' opinions and find it irritating when they interview each other on such issues.
I'd much rather hear from people who've studied the subject and have a broader base of information.
SO STIPULATED, Mame.

Politicians think??? If so they need some new brains or more of them... 100 Senators, one rep for every 600+K... Get effing real... If we had one for every 30K like our founding fathers it would be too few... Just because they limit number to maximize profit does not mean they have less fingers in every bit of legislation... There are all kinds of people involved, but they answer to no one... Politicians are followers... Do you see how the people respond to courage of any sort??? They send people to do as they are told, but with 600+K telling them what to do from districts they themselves divide, they can pretty much do as they like so long as it can be spun as what the people want... So they follow the poles...They are totally reactive except for when the let ideology do their thinking for them... They are useless...

David

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To argue against professional journalists -- many of whom have degrees in political science and law degrees -- who have had the state or federal government as their beat for many years is to argue against expertise and competence.

There is a right-wing movement against expertise and competence.

I want to hear Nina Tottenberg interpret the mood of the SC. I want to hear those journalists who have covered the Defense Department, the Senate, the State Department for years and who thoroughly understand the currents, foibles and folklore of those institutions interpret the latest news for me.

I do not want to hear from some yokel who can not locate Washington, D. C. on the map shove his uninformed opinions in my face.

1 Reply

The PC sword strikes down yet another good man

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