No time to post today. Jumping in the car and driving through Carmel and the Carmel Valley.
But just had to note this so you know where I stand on this-NPR got it wrong on Juan Williams. His statement was not bigoted, and represents how a lot of Americans feel. Whether Muslims and worthless Arabs like it. I don’t like gettting on planes with Arabs on them myself-sue me. That Williams stoops to talk to idiots like O’Reilly and Hannity is not the issue-and I think was at the heart of the firing.
But that doesn’t make it right. NPR needs a reasonable man, and if they can allow other folks on the network-they can have Juan Williams on the network. I like him-and hate to see this happen.
More later-the beach is calling!
Skippy, I agree with you today. Funny how the liberals cry about the lack of diversity, and he was the only Black on the air at NPR. Where are Jesse and Al and the rest of the NAACP on this? Busy chasing the racists at Tea Party rallies.
Well, not that chasing Tea Parties is a bad thing – especially if it is done with automatic weapons- but the whole thing is going to turn out badly fir NPR.
Yes, he should not appear on O’Reilly.
In fact i think O’Reilly should be more like Keith and NEVER have on anyone that disagrees with the host.
Who needs open, diverse dialogue?
Who needs to listen to other POV?
We all need to stay in out own little world.
By the way, this is meant to be sarcastic..I don’t want to have the mixup we had a few comments ago.
Now maybe Congresscan have the balls to defund NPR, it’s about time.
NPR and Fox are two very different organizations. NPR attempts* to project an unbiased take on the news, while Fox is all about presenting the official views of the Republican Party. What Williams said was perfectly OK for the latter, but not for the former. I also think that this is the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’m surprised NPR didn’t fire him over the “Stokely Carmichael in a Designer Dress” comment he made about Michelle a while back. You have to be of a certain age to understand how truly incendiary that remark is.
I also doubt that NPR would tolerate similar but liberal remarks by their staff; apparently they have banned their staff from attending the Stewart/Colbert rallies. If the “anti-Juan-Williams” had appeared on MSNBC and made similar remarks, he would get canned, too.
@Stein: NPR’s federal funding amounts to less than 2% of their budget, so defunding them won’t make much difference, except for a few more obnoxious fundraisers. Come to think of it, that’ll hurt.
*Notice I said attempts – there is no denying that NPR has a left-of-center view of the world. But they do try to stick to facts over personal opinions. On the other hand, as Colbert says, facts have a well-known liberal bias.
What JR Random said. It is just that if they did not like Williams being on Fox they should have addressed it sooner. This really makes them look bad and will hurt their upcoming pledge drive.
All that said I still think NPR is much better than most other media outlets- and Fox is nowhere in their league. Fox is a garbage outlet- nothing more. News for the learning impaired.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/
Wiki leaks and there actually were WMDs….
You are funny.
Fox balances the news and opinion by playing host to NPR types.
NPR retaliates by firing the NPR types.
Who is more objective and balanced in presenting both news and opinion?
It’s nice little network you have there.
Fox hardly balances opinions and it certainly is not doing so by having Williams on. Williams may have been less egregious than other Fox commentators-but that is not saying much.
The more I read about this, the more I see it had been coming for a long time. Williams wanted to have his cake and eat it too-and NPR had made their mind up long ago to not allow that. Their timing sucked though and they will be paying for it for a long time to come. They should have come to a parting of the ways when he went to work for Fox-but didn’t. So now they will pay for tha error in judgment.
John Stewart summed up Fox pretty well and its a big arguement that he makes why they deserve total scorn within the news industry. What Fox News is great at is – it’s almost like if you watch a weather map of how a hurricane starts and how it has to – and it builds and the whole, and there are cyclonic, you know, the guys in the morning go, you know, what happens is that night Hannity will be like, is Barack Obama a socialist who is indoctrinating your children? And then in the morning they will come on and go, some people are concerned about socialism in the White House. They feed each other, and what happens is there is no cold water, so the storm just builds and builds and builds.
Skippy, John Stewart’s writers did that for him, I doubt if he could have come up with that on his own. But Curtis brings up a good point, at least Fox tries to have an open discussion. You may not like Williams, nor Geraldo, or Colmes, but at least they get prime time viewing. Even O’Reilly let Williams host the Factor in the past when he has been gone. Can you say that organizations such as NPR, MSNBC or CNN would let someone who is visibily their polar opposite in terms of issues host a show? I doubt it.
Funny how people are saying Williams had it coming to him. When he was making documentaries and writing books on the Civil Rights struggle, he was the darling of the left. But with his being on Fox, I guess he was getting off the NPR “plantation” and getting involved in “white people’s business.” (I can say that, since according to NPR thinking since I am a member of Juan’s “ethnic background” I can make those comments, since it is part of the Black Experience).
You may not like him, but let me ask, have you even read any of his works or seen his award winning documentary on the Civil Rights movement? I have, and enjoyed them. Though he has opinions that I don’t agree with totally, he at least is willing to talk and not just follow some blind ideology.
“Williams wanted to have his cake and eat it too-”
Skippy, why not? Fox is a private business, that happens to be in the news business. NPR is not a private business. Yes it does present the news, but the whole concept is that it is a public forum. So in a way they are not competitors.
I get drilled into my head on what is acceptable for me to do as a public employee with the ethics training and all of the AFN commerical. I can’t campaign using my offical title and using government computers, I can live with that. But I still have the right as a private citizen to do the same, on my own time.
So Williams had to drop the fact that he worked for NPR while appearing on Fox, it’s a stretch but I can go along with that since NPR receives appropiated government funding and Fox doesn’t, they are in effect a government organization. But to sack him for speaking his mind, is out of line.
Schiller wrote in an internal memo, “We’re profoundly sorry that this happened during fundraising week.” No doubt!
James Fallows has a good take on this: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/10/why-npr-matters-long/65068/
JR,
That’s a great article and I was planning on doing a post on it. I think the way he draws the distinction between NPR and Faux News is right on the mark.
Maurice,
NPR does let people who are in opposition on all the time. Unlike on Fox though-they do demand a certain level of intellectual intergrity.
That would be all the disgraced losers they cherish as their bondsmen? Debra Kerns Goodwin whossname, huge award from plagiarism? Their in depth coverage of the ONE and his preacher of 20 years? Tina Brown? “sheesh, even garrison keiler had it with that loser. There was the guy that wrote the book that said almost nobody in continental America had weapons and it was all a myth and made up all his sources and won the prestigious book prize.
Fading giant. Nobody listens to them anymore outside the dying hardcore that used to listen acceptingly to Radio Pacifica and believe every single word.
It’s an evil we’ll soon be shed of.