Oh, that's right. Bashing Muslims is okay in this country. How silly of me.
Anyway, we have this little nugget from Josh Silver of FreePress.net:
The reactionaries of the far-right are clawing and scratching at their latest red meat: National Public Radio's decision to fire Juan Williams for comments he made about Muslims on Fox News Channel.
It's hard to work up too much sympathy for Williams -- a once esteemed journalist who has repeatedly embarrassed himself in recent years as a soloist in Bill O'Reilly's amen chorus. He was warned multiple times by NPR about providing commentary on Fox News that violated his employment contract. And his reward for the noxious comments that cost him one job was a new $2 million contract from Fox, announced Thursday.
But that hasn't stopped Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Michelle Malkin, Andrew Breitbart and, of course, O'Reilly from seizing on this contretemps to resuscitate a long-standing right-wing pipe dream: to gut NPR's federal funding altogether. And like clockwork, after a day of increasingly frenzied rhetoric from the usual suspects, South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint announced he will introduce legislation on Friday to do just that.
Adam Serwer (posting at Greg Sargent's Plumline) had this:
For his part, Thinkprogress editor Faiz Shakir told me this morning that he wouldn't have fired Williams, and that the purpose of the original post was to "highlight a comment that was incorrect for a larger audience so that we all can better understand why that comment doesn't help us move in the direction of the kind of society we want to live in."
Since Williams was let go, conservatives have been calling for NPR to be "defunded" over the incident, with Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner suggesting a "left wing radio network" shouldn't be receiving public funds. Sarah Palin has returned to her bizarre understanding of the First Amendment, which is that people who share her views have a right to be paid for them. I suspect part of the reason conservatives are upset is that they're not used to seeing a news organization react with such outright panic to transient public outrage from the left the way the media usually reacts to heat from the right. Few on the right thought CNN's hasty decision to let go of Octavia Nasr was a threat to freedom. Williams himself seems to think his own firing is the kind of thing that leads to Soviet-style forced labor camps, which is the kind of reasoning that really is more at home on Fox News.
However poorly NPR handled the Williams incident, the notion that NPR is "left wing" is ridiculous. Williams' presence on the network is emblematic of the network's milquetoast approach to political analysis. The reason Williams was let go wasn't because of the all powerful left, but because NPR is so concerned with the perception of bias that it didn't want one of its analysts associated with a network that works as a staging ground for Republican presidential hopefuls. NPR's commitment to a contrived form of journalistic objectivity may be counterproductive from the point of view of informing its audience, but there's no question that even prior to this incident Williams' appearances on FOX went against NPR's code of ethics, which advises employees to "not express views they would not air in their role as an NPR journalist."
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