{"id":3039,"date":"2010-10-21T08:32:07","date_gmt":"2010-10-21T12:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=3039"},"modified":"2010-10-21T11:52:02","modified_gmt":"2010-10-21T15:52:02","slug":"npr-fires-juan-williams-over-muslim-comments-on-fox-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/10\/21\/npr-fires-juan-williams-over-muslim-comments-on-fox-news\/","title":{"rendered":"What do you think of NPR firing Juan Williams?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Juan Williams has been a regular voice on NPR for years, providing some reporting and regular political punditry.<\/p>\n

His role has often been controversial, in part because he also spends a lot of time offering his views on Fox News.<\/p>\n

According to various news reports, NPR finally cut Williams loose yesterday after he made the following comments (quoted here from a transcript on the Huffington Post<\/a> website) to Fox’s Bill O’Reilly.<\/p>\n

“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

NPR media reporter David Folkenflik tweeted<\/a> about the controversy yesterday, sending the following message<\/p>\n

NPR terminates contract of longtime analyst Juan Williams for comments made on Fox News about Muslims. More to come.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

During his appearance on Fox, Williams argued that political correctness is clouding our view of the conflict between the West and Muslims.\u00a0 Watch the video here.<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

NPR issued a statement which says that Williams’ comments were “inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”<\/p>\n

Last year, NPR asked Fox news to stop identifying Williams as an NPR news analyst, though as of yesterday the cable news network was still doing so.<\/p>\n

NPR’s decision is certain to be controversial.\u00a0 In a blog post this morning, Time magazine columnist Mark Thompson suggested that public radio executives were censoring a dissenting viewpoint.<\/p>\n

\n
“And you thought 1984 was 26 years ago,” Thompson wrote, adding, “We’ll be right back after this fund-raising break.”<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
My own take on this is complicated by the fact that I’ve never been a fan of Williams’ punditry, which often struck me as Washington-conventional-wisdom stuff with very few fresh insights.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
The comments he made on Fox weren’t particularly incendiary, but they were — again this is my own view — typically superficial and not very insightful.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
The idea that the big threat to our security comes from people who board planes wearing the traditional dress of their cultures isn’t bigoted exactly, but it is shockingly ignorant.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Juan Williams has been a regular voice on NPR for years, providing some reporting and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[19],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3039"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3039"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3040,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3039\/revisions\/3040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}