NPR news analyst Juan Williams gets nervous about people who put religion before anything - it's a sentiment shared by most of the progressives who listen to taxpayer-funded National Public Radio - but he was wrong to say it, according to NPR, so they fired him.
It isn't just conservatives who are siding with freedom of speech over political correctness - though Whoopi Goldberg and Bill O'Reilly on the same side is a rarity.
For their part, NPR was essentially correct; a news analyst, unlike Bill Moyers or any of their commentators, has to have some measure of objectivity. It's not to say NPR does - as I have noted before, the number of times when NPR stories have covered how lower taxes help poor people or how the environment is actually cleaner than 40 years ago is still sitting at zero - but they at least have a pretense of objectivity and their policy is Williams shouldn't say things on other media programs he wouldn't say in his role at NPR. This is a common policy at large media companies. They also weren't very happy with him because he is too right wing for them. Balance doesn't sell everywhere and their listenership is left (and rich enough NPR doesn't need any more from American taxpayers) so even one commentator out of 100 being right of center may grate on them.
NPR CEO Vivian Schiller really, really hates Williams, it seems, saying on Thursday that Williams should have kept his comments between himself and “his psychiatrist or his publicist" which was the first time I could document that Schiller went on record endorsing ultra-religious people. I guess Schiller is not aware Muslims are against abortion and pro- death penalty.
Williams believes his appearances on Fox made it a given he would be fired.
“I knew about their antagonism toward Fox. I knew they didn't like it,” Williams said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Fox also just offered him a three-year, $2 million contract.
