No, I think you pretty much nailed it.

nope, I’d say you pretty much have it..

Silly Amanda!  How can you possibly expect the rules to be applied logically and consistently, without regard to political philosophy?

IOKIYAR:  Know it, live it…

You forgot a few mentions of Bill Ayers and crap, but otherwise you’re good.

Roy gets it too:

“I wouldn’t have fired Juan Williams, because I would never have hired Juan Williams in the first place.”

Oops! link technical thing fail:

http://alicublog.blogspot.com/

The PC cover story reduces the credibility of NPR. They should couch it in business terms, as in “it is NPRs longstanding policy…..”, which the wingnutteria will have more trouble refuting, and just call this last peccadillo “the final straw”.

Why are leftys so crap at this game?

Interesting that you buy the right wing frame, Eric.  Why is overt and deeply stupid bigotry, in your opinion, sacrosanct?

So we all got angry when Shirley Sherrod was fired for telling her story how she overcame racism. Now when Juan Williams gets fired for essentially the same reason, then its okay. Am I missing something here?

Uh, no, she was fired for appearing to tell a story where she was behaving and feeling in a racist way, kiki.

Read up on it and get back to us.

Juan Williams wasn’t fired for telling a story about how he overcame racism.  He was fired for telling a story about what a racist asshole he _currently_ is.

Yes, kiki, your brain.  You left it on the kitchen table with your lunch when you left the house this morning.  Get back to us this evening when you’ve had a chance to pop it back in.

When a liberal is fired we hear :
Of course they have free speech, but they have to understand their employer has the right to fire them (or advertiser has the right to stop advertising).

When it is a conservative, we only hear that their free speech rights are being violated.

As always IOKIYAR.

In the case of Mr. Williams, I do think it was actually “the final straw”.

@11

Yeah, some stupid race baiter edited her story to make her look like a racist abusing her office. When the full story came out people were outraged that her name had been smeared and what should have been an inspirational story was twisted into something hateful. I am well aware of what happened.

Have you seen the full interview with Juan Williams? After admiting her “gets nervous” when seeing people in muslim garb on an airplane he spent every moment after that defending muslims saying that we cannot discriminate and give into fear. He talked about not blaming the majority of muslims for the actions of a violent minority of radicals. Sounds like good advice to me.

It was the “respectable” journalists were hitting the fainting couch over his use of salty language.  For right-wingers, the Wiegel teapot tempest was at least as much about conspiracy-mongering over the existence of Journalist.  OMG!  Liberals are talking to each other!  Scandal!

Starting a sentence with, “I’m not a bigot, BUT” says to me the speaker is not working on whatever ‘ism that follows the “but.”

Please point, kiki, to where he said he overcame it.  He actually said that because he gets nervous, and that we can’t have an open discussion because of “political correctness”.

Anyway, Juan Williams was doing a bad job, and Dave Weigel was doing a good job.  That’s the crux of this.  I’d be defending Williams if he wasn’t a toady in general.  But this was a straw and his NPR job was the camel’s back.

The stupidity of his comments was the egregious problem.  Why would you think that Muslim terrorists intent on taking down a plane would go out of their way to draw attention to themselves wearing “Muslim garb”?

The PC cover story reduces the credibility of NPR. They should couch it in business terms

It is being couched in business terms, for good reason: as on-air talent he was a representative of the NPR brand, and his racist comment (the “I’m not a bigot ... but…” phrasing nails it) detracted from the brand’s goodwill.

At one of the news outlets I worked for, an on-air personality made a less egregious racist/sexist comment on-air—he was suspended for 6 months.

Are you opposed to a corporation protecting its brand? Are non-profit corps excepted from that duty?

@Amanda

Why would you think that Muslim terrorists intent on taking down a plane would go out of their way to draw attention to themselves wearing “Muslim garb”?

Because they are just like those gay activist terrorists intent on destroying our country.  I mean, sure, they don’t deserve to have their rights taken away or to be attacked on the street, but when they just shove their lifestyle down our throats like that, whether “they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims” or doing all sorts of disgusting deviant sexual acts like hand-holding, well…you have to get nervous, don’t you?  You have to worry about your safety and the future of your country. 

Same as those atheists intent on secularizing/Satanifying our country by refusing to join us Real ‘Merkans in prayer.

The stupidity of his comments was the egregious problem. Why would you think that Muslim terrorists intent on taking down a plane would go out of their way to draw attention to themselves wearing “Muslim garb”?

That damages the brand, too. Whatever one thinks of NPR, they explicitly promote themselves as a more thoughtful alternative to the MSM.

NPR’s biggest hypocrisy was in the memo they released in which the CEO said it was a violation of NPR’s ethics policies for its reporters and analysis to appear places and doing “punditry.”  If that was the policy, why was Juan Williams allowed to appear, for years, on Fox News Sunday’s journalists’ roundtable, and why hasn’t Mara Liasson been canned for the same reason?

Shirley Sherrod withdrew with dignity, letting her real words speak for themselves (and gaining a lot of support and respect in return).  Juan Williams immediately went running to Faux, whining that the big, bad NPR bullies were being mean to him.  It’s not only the context of their original remarks, but how they behaved afterwards that is telling.

BTW, I emailed NPR last night to show support, and called their switchboard this morning.  The poor operator who answered thanked me for my comment and, when I asked her if they were being flooded with angry hateful calls, said, “Yeah, it’s been a… uh, busy week.”  She seemed glad to hear a friendly voice.

“Muslim garb”, eh?  So if we see some suburbanite in a minivan plastered with Christian bumper stickers, wearing a WWJD bracelet and 2-lb cross around his neck, we should immediately be nervous because he could be a bomb-throwing, doctor-murdering, hate-speech terrorist?  I mean, who would dress like THAT if he wasn’t identifying as a Christian first, and not an American?

Wrong as usual, Dana. From the Wapo article on the subject:

NPR officials say they have repeatedly told Williams that some of his statements on Fox violate NPR’s ground rules for its news analysts. The rules ban NPR analysts from making speculative statements or rendering opinions on TV that would be deemed unacceptable if uttered on an NPR program. The policy has some gray areas, they acknowledged, but it generally prohibits personal attacks or statements that negatively characterize broad groups of people, such as Muslims.

The article lists other incidents, and directly addresses the issue of alleged damage to the brand. If NPR didn’t document the repeated warnings, Williams should sue. Somehow I think he won’t.

It’s all about the tribalism, baby.

I really wish NPR had said that Juan Williams had been violating policy for a while now, and that this was the last straw.

Isn’t that what they did say, #30?

Personally, I don’t like it when someone gets fired for having an opinion.  However, this is an obvious case of being paid to voice opinions using NPR’s label.  He wouldn’t have been on FOX without the NPR job.

NPR did the right thing to Juan Williams, this is not a case of free speech.

making public statements implying that millions of people who are innocent of any crimes are potential terrorists because they share a faith that’s different from most of conservative America?

No no. It’s not because they share that faith. It’s because they deliberately choose to “garb” themselves so as to frighten Juan Williams, rather than abandon their religious mode of dress out of concern for his fee-fees, as is only right and just.

So you see, they created this whole situation, and now Juan has to pay for it? Outrageous.

“The practice of firing folks for stating their opinions and views when they aren’t even on the job is disgraceful and genuinely harmful to modern political debate.”

But he was “on the job”—he was being a pundit via a broadcast media outlet. If a Doctor was working in a weekend clinic to make extra money and he/she violated medical conduct ethics, his primary hospital of employment would also be in the right to fire him/her from that job. Conduct on Fox news, using his NPR title, is conduct as a journalist/pundit. Just because he’s working professionally on another news outlet doesn’t mean that he’s “not on the job” as a professional.

Why exactly should anyone be crying for him? He got a $2 million raise and a three-year contract renewal from FOX because of this!

I think you are right Thealogian and this Juan Williams thing is just some punkass going on tv and spewing hateful and bigoted statements and getting caught while on the job.  But in the typical right-wing worldview, the bully is the victim and the victim is the bully.  NPR will probably get the ACORN treatment for this shit.

Apparantly, it’s shocking to the baggers that liberals and progressives aren’t angry at NPR over Juan Williams firing, because: a) Williams is black; and b) Williams is (according to them) a “liberal”.

If you have wingnut relatives who spend considerable time watching Fox News everyday and you try to point out the absence of anything resembling even a remotely liberal voice on that network, they’ll typically rattle off some of the following names… Juan Williams, Alan Colmes, Doug Schoen, Pat Caddell, Mara Liasson, Geraldine Ferraro, Bob Beckel, Geraldo Rivera, and/or Shepard Smith. The wingnuts seem to believe that this group represents a balancing viewpoint, but the problem is half of these alleged “Democrats” are brought in simply to tell the Fox audience how terrible elected Democratic leaders supposedly are. Which results in hearing things like, “Even Alan Colmes thinks this president is a radical, and he’s a LIBERAL!!!” at family gatherings.

Alan Colmes is married to wingnut Monica Crowley’s sister. Doug Schoen is Mark Penn’s business partner and a has-been who hasn’t been relevant among prominent Democrats since the 1990s. Pat Cadell is even less relevant than Doug Schoen - his last major political consulting gig was for Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. Geraldine Ferraro conveniently became a regular Fox contributor as tension was mounting among Democrats during the contentious 2008 primaries. After Obama had won the nomination, she became FNC’s token go-to PUMA to tell America how none of Hillary Clinton’s primary voters would vote for Obama in the general election… funny how that worked out.

The point is that while several of these people have been involved with the Democratic Party at some point in their careers, none of them can really be regarded as an ideological ally to the left.

Dick Morris’ is regularly introduced as a former White House advisor to Bill Clinton, even though the man has spent the last 15 years trashing the Clintons, the Obamas, and the Democratic Party as a whole. This douchebag is actually predicting 80-100 House seats flipping to the GOP, and that the GOP will win the Senate and pickup as many as 13-14 Senate seats.

In any case, no, Juan Williams is not a “liberal”. While he may be to the left of most Fox News anchors, one could reasonably argue that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan would probably be to the left of most Fox News anchors. A year ago, Marco Rubio was seen as a raving lunatic wingnut, and today, he’s actually viewed as a somewhat mainstream GOP candidate compared to many of his fellow candidates in other races. People like Christine O’Donnell, Joe Miller, Sharron Angle, and Carl Paladino have managed to make Rubio look a lot more sane, relatively speaking. And unfortunately, a big consequence of the shift in perception is that Rubio is nearly a lock to win his U.S. Senate race in Florida less than two weeks from now.

There is a lot of irony in Williams’ comment that the sight of Muslims in traditional religious garb on an airplane makes him nervous. The one time in the last ten years in which a group of Muslim men were able to hijack planes and carry out a terrorist attack, none of them was dressed in “traditional garb” - they were all clean shaven, wearing khakis and button-down shirts, and dressed in stereotypically Western apparel.

Great post, Amanda.

Zifnab’s arguing that Williams should have been fired for going on the Bill O’Reilly show, in contravention of NPR values/policy; but not for airing his bizarro prejudice against Muslims-on-airplanes. I disagree.

NPR was right to give the guy a long leash. If he went on O’Reilly and talked some modicum of sense, he would have been earning his pay by elevating the discourse, or at least not letting it sink any further. But when Williams went on O’Reilly and started playing the “reasonable conservative” who’s still scared shitless of Muslims, that was a bridge too far. Good.

I realize that the term “garb” just means like clothing, but it sounds like when some people use it, it sounds like they want to say “rag” or imply “filthy clothing.”  Or they are a close to saying “garbage.”  Williams could have just said “clothing”, but said “garb” and I think he chose that connotation, or am I looking too far into it?

Also, this happened a week after O’reilly spewed Islamophobia on the View which made Whoopi and Joy leave.  Fresh off the controversy, you would think nobody would want to be seen with Bill O’reilly?

@ Murrow Fan,

I am stuck in STL this weekend with my racist relatives, and they seem to think that I will be on their side for the reasons you stated—they think I should be up-in-arms because a black with a mexican name got fired. They keep calling me down to watch the O’Reilly Factor with them and think that this will be the thing to get me on their side. I just want to scream.

I got you Chet.  Williams in a way reminds me of that lady from Harold and Kumar Escape from Gitmo who looks at Kumar and imagines him dressed up as Bin Laden and freaks out.

Letting someone say “Muslims dressed like Muslims scare the shit out of me, because they’re terrorist killers” on NPR without consequence is the exact definition of coddling bigotry.

I agree, though that isn’t specifically happened. Williams got fired by NPR for comments he made while appearing as a paid contributor on The O’Reilly Factor, not while he was doing his radio show on NPR.

Nevertheless, if you are a member of the media and you say or do things in other media outlets which reflect poorly on you (and to a degree on your other employer), that employer is well within their rights to can you.  I think Williams’ termination was entirely justifiable, though it may have actually made him richer - on the same day hee was fired, he signed a 3 year deal to continue at Fox News that will pay him $2MM - roughly $667,000 per year.  Following Wiegel’s firing from the Washington Post, he was quickly offered a contract to appear as a regular contributor on MSNBC, and he was also hired by Media Matters.

I was listening to Make It Plain with Mark Thompson show earlier today on XM radio, and he had Dr. Marc Lamont Hill on to discuss the Juan Williams firing from NPR. Hill, who is African-American, was himself once a paid Fox News contributor, and he is unapologetically left leaning. Almost exactly one year ago, Hill was publicly fired by Rupert Murdoch during a News Corp. shareholders meeting, a fact Hill discovered on Google, with no efforrt being made by News Corp. to inform him of his termination before making it public to a large group of shareholders and media members at the meeting. Unlike most of the milquetoast Fox News “Democrats”, Hill stood firmly by his liberal beliefs, a fact which annoyed many in the Fox News hierarchy.

Anyway, a plausible theory being floated by the timing of Williams’ termination by NPR is that it has given Fox News a great opportunity to distract the electorate from noticing that the Democrats are fighting back in their campaigns and gaining in the polls, and November 2, 2010 might not be the monstrous electoral bloodbath most wingnuts are predicting.

I don’t think Williams is a full-blown teabagger himself, and he probably holds at least some liberal-leaning opinions. Two years ago on the night that Obama was elected, he was very clearly choked up and crying in reaction to the historic moment he just witnessed. He gave a genuinely heartfelt characterization of how big of a deal it was for a nation that was built with slaves to finally elect an African-American to the highest office in the country.

Anyway, Fox News pundits are gonna be spending the next 11 days bemoaning Williams’ “martyrdom” at the hand of the evul librul NPR, because they want people to take their eyes of the prize. Let them rant and act like tools until the cows come home, but I hope CNN and MSNBC don’t waste too much time getting sucked into covering this silly nontroversy while they should be covering the lunacy of many of the Teabagger candidates out there.

Unfortunately, it very much is an issue of free speech even if it isn’t an issue of Constitutionally Guaranteed free speech.  When you can get fired for something you said on another show in a completely different capacity, your employer is actively censoring you pretty much at all times.

Sad to say, that’s the way it usually works for on-air talent and high-profile editors and columnists—they are contractually bound to follow certain loose but still restrictive guidelines on their speech if they represent the brand in other public venues. It sucks, but apparently that’s the price of those big and well-paid full-time media gigs. Anyone who doesn’t think Fox News will impose similar strictures in his new contract (and some informal limits as well) also likely believes that they’re “fair and balanced.”

Where I share your concern (and this is a tangent) is in the increasingly common attempts of corporations (and not just media outlets) to impose similar strictures on the speech of any employee of the company, because they all supposedly represent the brand whether they’re doing it actively or not. That’s different from Williams’ case, however—he appeared on Fox due to his status as an NPR analyst, and was identified as such by the hosts and on chyrons.

I don’t think Williams is a full-blown teabagger himself, and he probably holds at least some liberal-leaning opinions.

It’ll be interesting to see the effect the Uncle Rupert’s wingnut welfare has on Williams. This article gives an idea of what he’s already done to the Wall Street Journal—the extreme free market sludge has begun leaking from the op-eds into the news section.

Part of the job of a big-name commentator is to represent your outlet at outside media appearances. So, your employer has a right to hold you to some standards in those appearances. We can argue about whether NPR’s existing standards are reasonable, or whether they were applied fairly in this case, but it’s clear that NPR should have the power to fire commentators for inappropriate behavior during public appearances.

It’s totally unreasonable for employers to treat rank-and-file employees as “brand representatives” in their off work hours. If your job is to run a cash register or drive a forklift, or balance the books in the back office, that’s your job. Your job ends when you clock off work.

Did NPR give Williams the opportunity to apologize? If he’d been my employee, I would have given him a chance to apologize. What he said was clearly bigoted, but I don’t think it was egregious enough to warrant a summary dismissal. Williams’ comments were pretty mild compared to those of Rick Sanchez who accused his own employer of being part of the international Jewish media conspiracy and smeared Jon Stewart as a racist based on no evidence.

I wonder if Williams refused an opportunity to apologize, knowing he had a sweet deal with Fox. Now NPR looks like the knee-jerk liberal firing squad and Williams gets a cushy slot at Fox.

The wingnut complaint mirrors the standard division between institutional/structural racism and “civility”. It’s always OK for your crazy bigot relative to politely spout lies about queers, blacks, hispanics, asians or whoever, but if you call them a bigot you’re spoiling the party and should leave.

Did NPR give Williams the opportunity to apologize? If he’d been my employee, I would have given him a chance to apologize.

I assume that Juan Williams had received several warnings from NPR regarding his Fox News antics so that this time, nor likely told him, “it’s not like you didn’t know your behavior was inappropriate. We can you multiple chances and you blew it.”

And I do sympathize with NPR because Juan Williams’ behavior on Fox did make the rest of NPR’s coverage of politics look bad.

It’s totally unreasonable for employers to treat rank-and-file employees as “brand representatives” in their off work hours. If your job is to run a cash register or drive a forklift, or balance the books in the back office, that’s your job. Your job ends when you clock off work.

I agree entirely with this; the only caveat I would throw in is that if you are a rank-and-file employee and you make a media appearance that identifies you by your employer, your company does have a right to expect you not to say things which are disparaging of the company.

As far as your job ending when you clock off work, you would be surprised how much control some companies exert over their employees activities off the clock. I don’t know if this policy is still in force since the buyout by InBev, but up until at least two years ago, Anheuser-Busch had an absolute sero-tolerance rule on employees getting charged with DWIs - if you were convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol, you were immediately fired without warning. The notable exception to that rule was August Busch IV, who drove his car off the road killing his female passenger while he was an undergraduate at Arizona State University back in the 1980s. No charges were ever brought and he was never breathalyzed, but he left the scene of the accident with his passenger dying in his car, which for anyone other than a member of American brewing royalty (or Ted Kennedy) would have certainly resulted in criminal charges.

Murrow Fan, you’re right. In an at will employment economy like ours, employers have basically as much control over their employees’ off-the-job conduct as they care to exercise. They can’t discriminate against certain protected categories of people and they can’t fire workers for organizing or legally striking, but those are pretty much the only ground rules.

That’s one reason why it’s so advantageous to be unionized and to have a contract that says you can only be fired for just cause.

Did anybody else see that Juan back in 1986 opposed such an attitude about black people being kept out of jewelry stores?  Here: https://www.msu.edu/course/psy/442/cialec4.htm

THE LAZY MAN’S SUBSTITUTE

“And I certainly would not close my door to, say, all young black men - not even to those who are casually dressed and behaving nervously.”

There is a lot of irony in Williams’ comment that the sight of Muslims in traditional religious garb on an airplane makes him nervous. The one time in the last ten years in which a group of Muslim men were able to hijack planes and carry out a terrorist attack, none of them was dressed in “traditional garb” - they were all clean shaven, wearing khakis and button-down shirts, and dressed in stereotypically Western apparel.
Comment 39—Murrow Fan

Well, you see, that emboldened them to show their true colors. No pun intended.

Did NPR give Williams the opportunity to apologize? If he’d been my employee, I would have given him a chance to apologize. What he said was clearly bigoted, but I don’t think it was egregious enough to warrant a summary dismissal
Comment 48—Lindsay Beyerstein

I understand the impulse to let him apologize, or at least to create the policy in the first place so it dictates that he have a chance to apologize, but I’m not sure what kind of apology he could have made. I see no room to claim he misspoke or was misinterpreted or whatever; anything following “what I meant was” would be bigoted or contradict the meaning of the words or both.

don’t know if this policy is still in force since the buyout by InBev, but up until at least two years ago, Anheuser-Busch had an absolute sero-tolerance rule on employees getting charged with DWIs
Comment 51—Murrow Fan

That falls under the heading of subjecing the company to bad publicity.

My example would be random drug testing. Even when it’s ostensibly only to find employees who are high on the clock, it’s not really possible to distinguish.

From tonight’s Weekend Update on SNL:

SETH MEYERS: FOX News on Thursday hired news analyst Juan Williams just one day after National Public Radio fired him for making disparaging comments about Muslims, marking the first time someone has been fired and hired for the same comment. Following Williams’ firing, several leading Republicans including Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Sarah Palin, accused NPR of censorship and called for Congress to cut off federal funding for NPR. So in case you were wondering how much Republicans hate NPR, they’re siding with a black guy named Juan.

So, so true.

Countdown begins ....one…two…three…

Countdown: you’re doing it wrong.

npr is a hypocritical pile of bullshit that wouldn’t be able to cut it without government funding.

Obviously, it’s too much too ask for a racist troglodyte inbred such as yourself, but if you bothered doing even the least amount of research, you would quickly realize that 98% of NPR’s funding comes from the private sector, not the federal government. The largest single donation ever made to NPR was from the estate of Joan Kroc, the widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc… NPR received a $225 Million bequest in 2003 from Ms. Kroc’s estate. NPR also receives significant funding from the Gates and Ford Foundations.

@Tyro

You are forgetting crazy wingnut troll logic rules: up is down, left is right, Conservatives are compassionate, liberals want to take rights away.  Our friend here makes perfect sense, you just have to stop thinking for a few minutes.

I am sure he is one of the people who rightly called NPR to threaten never to watch their programs again.

Plus, we shouldn’t discount the possibility that he is counting up to the countdown.  Of course he would show off his counting ability.  It is probably the only one he has.  (He’s been topped already though, Chet was recently bragging about his ability to go up to 60.  On a good day, PAULSALATA could get maybe halfway there.)

It’s the new rule with liberals the instant one disagrees with your position call them a racist.

Nah, they just point out your open racism as shorthand for the general idiocy, ignorance and bitterness that infects your opinions on a wide variety of issues. It’s sort of like you use “liberal” to describe anyone who’s smarter, more knowledgeable, and more secure and happy in their lives than you are.

You’d kill for my friendship Alienist, A foul smell.

I actually think that an alienist (if we’re going to use the archaic term) would do you a lot of good.

I am sure he is one of the people who rightly called NPR to threaten never to watch their programs again.

As long as he doesn’t confuse it with PBS, thereby boycotting Sesame Street, there may be hope for him on that “count-up” skill.

when I asked her if they were being flooded with angry hateful calls, said, “Yeah, it’s been a… uh, busy week.”

Didn’t someone from NPR quip that they could tell the angry O’Reilly/Fox fans because they called NPR and claimed to be long-time viewers who would never watch NPR again?

@louC

Yeah, there’s a link to that in my comment (#60).  I wonder what they all think that “R” stands for…