The Firing of Juan Williams From NPR

[Flint]

Some of my best friends are slightly middle-eastern-looking 20-something guys dressed normally and nervously looking around, studying the situation.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

it's the slightly middle-eastern-looking 20-something guys dressed normally and nervously looking around,

Oh if I could only be one of those again. Now I no long look around. Too old.

[classicman]

Originally Posted by tw

Or must he conform to the Fox 'incite hate' attitudes so often promoted in Fox?

I was always troubled why Juan Williams let himself be a punching bag in a new organization whose purpose is defined by a lie about being fair and balanced.

Originally Posted by Flint

Fox bad. Juan bad. Fire Juan! lol

round and round we go.

It seems that there has bee a lot of discussion on Salon about this as well. The vast majority were people who HATED that he was affiliated with Fox. I wonder their reaction if it were MSNBC instead.

[xoxoxoBruce]

The NPR Ombudsman, who had to deal with the public backlash, explains NPR's position, while admitting they handled it badly.

Juan Williams once again got himself into trouble with NPR for comments he made at his other job, at Fox News. And NPR's reaction has unleashed an unprecedented firestorm of criticism directed not at Williams – but at NPR.

Instead, this latest incident with Williams centers around a collision of values: NPR's values emphasizing fact-based, objective journalism versus the tendency in some parts of the news media, notably Fox News, to promote only one side of the ideological spectrum.

The issue also is whether someone on NPR's payroll should be allowed to say something in one venue that NPR would not allow on its air. NPR’s ethics code says they cannot.

So if you work for NPR you're never off duty, they own your ass.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

So if you work for NPR you're never off duty, they own your ass.

That is as it should be. On any job if your after hours activities make you ineffective you should be let go. NPR listeners, of which I am one, want reporters we find credible. If you appear on a Fox entertainment program your credibility with me is gone. That goes for all their reporters. They shouldn't be appearing on the talking head Sunday shows regardless of network either. They are either serious journalists or they are not. It is time for NPR to draw a bright line between journalism and pop entertainment. NPR has a chance to turn this in their favor. Make some good minority hires and acknowledge that their liberal world view does skew their reporting in as much as they always look first for a government role when a problem presents itself and they could gain from this.These problems don't make them Fox though. NPR doesn't invent controversy and manage and build it over days and weeks. They actually report what happens.

[glatt]

The NPR vice president, Vivian Schiller, tells employees she regrets how she handles the incident.

Morale at NPR is very low right now. I think they know Schiller seriously fucked up and they are about to lose their funding when the Republican win in two weeks.

In a meeting with employees that had been scheduled before the Williams story broke, Schiller acknowledged that NPR didn't manage the firing well, but offered no specifics. She said NPR would conduct a "post-mortem" next week to review how the firing was handled, according to employees who attended the meeting, which was closed to the news media. Schiller didn't say who would handle the review or what the consequences of it might be.

....

Staffers said that at the Friday meeting, Schiller apologized again for telling an audience in Atlanta on Thursday that Williams should have kept his comments about Muslims between "himself and his psychiatrist."

"There wasn't anger" among NPR employees at the meeting, "but I did get a sense of despair and disappointment," said one NPR journalist, who asked not to be named because employees are not authorized to speak on the record about the matter. "I got the impression that [management] felt they had acted rashly and without deliberation. When [Schiller] made the psychiatrist crack, it just made matters much, much worse."

Schiller is making mistakes this week. Maybe she should take a step back and let someone else take the helm for a bit.

The reason,according to NPR?

Washington-based NPR said the firing was the culmination of a long series of run-ins with Williams in which he was warned to stick to news analysis and not veer into personal opinions or inflammatory commentary. NPR executives have also said they have been concerned that Fox News has used Williams, an avowedly liberal analyst, to paint NPR itself as a liberal news organization rather than a nonpartisan one.

[Undertoad]

NPR executives have also said they have been concerned that Fox News has used Williams, an avowedly liberal analyst, to paint NPR itself as a liberal news organization rather than a nonpartisan one.

Knee-jerk intolerant irrational anxiety about Fox News.

It doesn't work the way they think, you know. When we look back, FNC's greatest triumph will be how massively it terrified its non-watchers -- thus convincing its watchers that it's not just A force but THE force to be reckoned with.

What has NPR done? Promoted the shit out of Fox. And made Juan Williams the pre-eminent liberal name known by the right... just as he will not work for NPR anymore.

O'Reilly's ratings are up 15% this week.

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by Flint

Some of my best friends are slightly middle-eastern-looking 20-something guys dressed normally and nervously looking around, studying the situation.

Worry if you see one that bulges around the midsection or has a fuse sticking out of his shoe.

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

So if you work for NPR you're never off duty, they own your ass.

Same concept as drug testing, and that is much more prevalent. If you do drugs on your own time, and your corporate pee test comes back hot, you are toast.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Griff

They actually report what happens.

He was not a reporter, but an analyst, who gives an interpretation, an opinion. On FOX it would be called a spin.

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

Same concept as drug testing, and that is much more prevalent. If you do drugs on your own time, and your corporate pee test comes back hot, you are toast.

Which is also wrong.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

He was not a reporter, but an analyst, who gives an interpretation, an opinion.

That is exactly what NPR needs to get away from. TV is not a forum for analysis. TV is pictures, gut reactions, and emotions not analysis.

One of the most irritating things NPR has done is to put washed up lefty reporters on Weekend Edition as radio analysts. Wouldn't it be possible to let the consumer analyze the news instead of hitting people over the head with spin?

Maybe there isn't a market for news, but NPR could try.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Shawnee, I'll break it to you gently: the people who hate Fox News bitterly are NOT among the winners. They're not, in a fundamental way, pro-democracy, for they are pro-something else; they're not capitalists, they do not value cultivating virtue -- in a word, they aren't in connection with anything that makes a life worth having lived it.

[classicman]

UG - Thats just total BS. They just have a different vision of how to do things.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Wrong is also "different." I stand by my contention (and sotto voce acknowledge your satire). The Left found virtue inconvenient, and affects to despise it -- one more stupid thing the Left does among a whole gallimaufry of statist stupidity. Stupid because there's nothing the Left does that improves upon virtue. It ends up being a philosophy of whores.

[spudcon]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

Same concept as drug testing, and that is much more prevalent. If you do drugs on your own time, and your corporate pee test comes back hot, you are toast.

Drug use and freedom of speech are not comparable. Everyone trashes Fox news for being biased, but NPR is not just left biased, it is bigoted.

[Shawnee123]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Wrong is also "different." I stand by my contention (and sotto voce acknowledge your satire). The Left found virtue inconvenient, and affects to despise it -- one more stupid thing the Left does among a whole gallimaufry of statist stupidity. Stupid because there's nothing the Left does that improves upon virtue. It ends up being a philosophy of whores.

I'm glad to see consistency in the calling of the whores. That words lends as much credence to your statements as it does to mercs. You bastard.