Juan williams, fox news: a wedding of convenience

Juan "'You're exactly right,' Bill" Williams has been fired from NPR. Fox News snapped him up full-time and can no longer claim that he's their "resident liberal." He never was; he played one on FNS while giving lip service to objective analysis on public radio.

His nominal job at NPR was the only respectable thing left on the once-respectable news resumé he built on years of radio. Now he can be just another Fox News hack giving Billo and Hannity soft-balls to hit out of the park. Nevermore will we suffer his mealy-mouthed "objectivity" on Sunday mornings on Weekend Edition. We're happy about that.

He joins Fox News' stable of five or six actual black people on the "you decide" network.

He got axed around one of his groomings of Billo Reilly and his low-info audience:

"I mean, look, Bill, I'm not a bigot ... But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they're identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous," Williams said.

Here's a pretty good reason why an objective journalist shouldn't feed the monsters that feed off Fox News and right-wing talk radio.

Remember when the Analyst Williams described Michelle Obama as being like "Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress."

This latest incident is one of many that has pissed-off many longtime NPR listeners who once believed in Williams' credibility, first as a reporter, then as an analyst. Williams wasn't paid as a commentator but frequently strayed into commentatin' in the well-paid confines of Fox.

We hope Mara Liasson reconsiders what her contract with the Murdoch right-wing tabloid empire does to her credibility everywhere else.

Eric Boelert of Media Matters writes:

"I'm not suggesting Liasson has said anything as offensive as Williams, or that she has that kind of track record while appearing on Fox," Boehlert writes.. " I'm just saying that if you look at NPR's code of ethics, there's simply no way Liasson should be making appearances on Fox."

Reputable journalists do not work for Fox News - they never should have, but especially now that it has been so thoroughly exposed as a 24/7 political operation --  not only in the biased coverage it chirons and headlines every day, but by the outright cash it gives to right-wing political operations. 

Comments

[Puget Sound]

glad to see ya back, merci.
(you make me smile everytime i pass by the updike exit on i-5)

anyway, it's clear that you have a low opinion of who juan williams is by positing that he is some sort of stephan fetchit character.

he is far from that. he is a reasoned and thoughtful liberal in the traditional sense (ie not a ph(J)oanie). he will listen to the other side of the argument and consider other points of view.
what he brought -and will bring- to Fox Opinion shows is a thoughtful counterpoint. if you had a chance to listen to what he said on O'Reily he was making a very valid point. yes, he had an irrational fear of people in muslim garb and that he knew he had an obligation to get past it.

the current crop of liberals have become fairly intolerant. it's almost like they are now what they accuse Fox of being. Sherrod was not denounced on Fox for what she said, rather she was denounced by the NAACP and then canned two hours later by the Obama Administration.
Talk about intolerant and being unwilling to listen to the facts.

stop letting this irrational fear of Fox make you all pull the Chicken Switch. it's getting weird.
can't wait to see how jon stewart skewers this as he did so well with the shirley sherrod fiasco.
if you didn't catch it, check it out:
here

[Tommy008]

a littel bird told me...... some Seattle Times news headlines in 2014....... two "elderly schoolteacher women" known to be rabid posters on Blatherwatch arrested for refusing to leave a Mariners game wearign matching "Fuck Bush" T-shirts.......entire collection of Blatherwatch poster Tommy008's Bwatch posts , spanning ten years or so, nominated for a Pulitzer.......... KIRO midday "hometown boy" radio host fired for exploding into tirade against female KIRO newswoman/ ONAIRsidekick , WHOM HE CALLS A "DANG LIB" forced onto his show against his will by "Mormon bastards"

[Puget Sound]

tommy
Maybe you'll see the headline:
"Monson relegated to Weekend HawkTalk as co-host Tommy takes over midday slot'

[Puget Sound]

So far the anti-Fox move has been a failure but it's clear that the same man who has been pushing the 'fairness doctrine' effort to silence Fox has some 'splaining to do.

From Investors.Com on the George Soros connection in all this.

"On Oct. 18, Soros donated $1.8 million to National Public Radio to hire 100 new reporters for a project targeting state governments called "Impact of Government."

With the news industry laying off reporters, his idea is to fill a gap in coverage with all these spare journalists. But the new jobs won't precisely amount to truly independent ones — the reporters will have implicit obligations to Soros, who signs their paychecks.
...

"The strings seem to be showing on the Soros donation to NPR, too.

Days after the Soros windfall was announced, National Public Radio fired liberal news analyst Juan Williams after he expressed an inoffensive personal view on the popular Fox News Channel.

Up until then, opinions by NPR correspondents and analysts had been expressed in abundance, but Williams' statement on Fox, because it was expressed on Fox, amounted to apostasy. The firing sends a message that Fox is beyond the pale and must be silenced.

If it sounds far-fetched, then how does one explain that Soros also made his first direct donation to Media Matters last week, reportedly at $1 million, just after donating to NPR?

Led by disgraced journalist David Brock, Media Matters is a fringe-left nuisance organization that spends much of its time trying to dig up dirt on Fox News. Its Web site actually has a whole section devoted to criticizing Fox opinions and claiming they are lies."

[KS]

PutS - You gave us a double shot of the article by IBD, that I also posted yesterday. The utilization of Media Matters and Moveon.org references is typically baseless attacks on any opposition or propaganda. BW is laughable and loses credibility whenever they reference these - just sayin'.

[Puget Sound]

KS, I did it to rub the nose of the usual suspects twice. They deserve it. LMAO.

Mark Judge has a great point in this article today about the Juan Williams issue and Liberal intolerance today.

"The point is, political correctness makes for bad journalism. It kills curiosity. It encourages clichés and snuffs out adventurousness. Conservatives like to get splenetic about the corrupt liberal media, but these days when the Washington Post hits my door in the morning and I open it up, what I mostly feel is…boredom. And sadness. What wonderful, beautiful stories and people are in my city that weren’t covered? What brilliant conservative writer am I not reading because he was never allowed through the door? Why am I wasting my time waiting for Dana Milbank to have an original thought? What, exactly, is the point of Post-owned Slate?"

The same goes for NPR. Why is it that Liberalism has become so stale? Why is it so scared of opposing opinions and frequently tries to stifle debate with the obligatory 'racist' comment.

The irony is that squelching debate never really works in the long run.

[Tommy008]

Middays with Tommy008, Puget? i do have a tiny bit of radio experience broadcasting my poetry reading on KRAB FM ( the old 107.7 frequency that bacame The Edge) back in the late 60''s. My friday afternoon lead in for Dori would be "don't forget to listen to Pee Wee Monson sunday morning on Halktalk pregame. Give the little man a shot." hahah wouldn't that chap his hide/ teehehehe well off to see The Town AT pACIFIC pLACE DOWNTOWN. meetings with Moemon bastards next week about the show.

[Carrey]

Yes Sir!
Muslims get married too. and they do it wonderfully. :)

[Tommy008]

I was thinking a bit more about the oppressive "group think" on National Public Radio. I just realized who the members of the NPR Clique are. These people in their forties fifties and sixties that are the highest profile types on NPR (or founding members that may make only an occaisional contribution now like Susan Stamberg,etc.) are Savage's Red Diaper Doper Babies. These are the kids of the New York City and tri-state area ( n.j. N.Y. Conn.) parents who were leftists radicals in the late forties and fifties. Many of their parents were card-carrying Communists, comrades of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and sent their kids to the Marxist summer camps in the Poconos that Savage talked about. Little ten-year-old Nina Totenberg, could hve been one of the kids at the Marxist summer camp in 1954, wearing her red bandana. NPR- Red Diaper Doper Babies. Bingo!

[Coiler]

Oh my, get Nixon on the phone!

[KS]

the Red Diaper Doper babies have a robust Seattle chapter - alive and well, some of them are amongst us. They support McDermott wholeheartedly and even laud the mayor of Seattle, although the support has been waning - since the $4/hr. downtown parking rate has been thrown on the table.

[Tommy008]

Vivian Schiller, of Larchmont, New York, is CEO of NPR. She graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in Russian and Soviet Sudies..............

[Tommy008]

Ron and Don won't say it but i will- NPR is an obnoxious, snobby, narrow little clique for those with the right ethnicity, who went to the right schools and come from the right poliitical background- liberal to communist.

[Coiler]

Ok Dan Smoot, we hear you.

[Tommy008]

Dan Smoot? That the best you got? How weak, how Joanie-esque.