Muzzled (4 page)

Apparently NPR did not agree. The day after my firing, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller told an audience at the Atlanta Press Club that I should have kept my feelings about Muslims between me and my “psychiatrist or [my] publicist—take your pick.” The videotape of her comment, complete with the look of pure contempt on her face as she spoke, appeared across the country on news shows throughout the day. She was criticized for her personal attacks on me by NPR’s own ombudsman. Schiller later issued a statement of public apology for her words on the NPR Web site, although she never gave me the courtesy of a personal call. A week later she sent a FedEx envelope to my house with a letter saying she was very busy, she did not know how to reach me, and I needed to contact her secretary to set up a time to talk with her. I wrote back that since she had had no time to talk to me before firing me I saw no need to talk to her now.

In the media, Schiller tried to justify the firing by saying that my defenders failed to appreciate that “news analysts may not take personal public positions on controversial issues; doing so undermines their credibility as analysts, and that is what’s happened in this situation.”

Some leading liberals rallied to Schiller’s side. Andrew
Sullivan said my admission of nervousness around people in Muslim garb at airports amounted to a “working definition of bigotry.” Playing on the fact that I am black, Sullivan asked if a white person who feared being mugged by a black man dressed in “classic thug get-up” wouldn’t be guilty of bigotry. Glenn Greenwald at
Salon.com
wrote that my comments amounted to “giving cover to incendiary right-wing attacks” on Muslims. Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC, claimed I was a bigot and “obtuse” and said NPR’s decision to end my contract was “anything but a First Amendment issue.” He added, with disdain for the people who voiced support for me: “We have to stamp it on people’s foreheads so they can read it backwards in the mirror.” Rachel Maddow at MSNBC said my words reminded her of appeals to white racism by Republicans in the South during the 1960s. And Michael Tomasky, a writer for London’s
The Guardian
, wrote of me, “[He chose] to ingratiate himself with O’Reilly and his viewers with that Foxy rhetoric. In a sense, Williams got what was coming to him.” He was the journalist who said, “Sleep with dogs, get fleas.”

To be candid, the attacks from these liberal intellectuals stung me. I grew up as a liberal in New York City. As a black child during the height of the civil rights movement, Republicans seemed to me to be a bunch of Archie Bunkers, the TV character who called his son-in-law a “meathead” for welcoming black people into his neighborhood and protesting the Vietnam War. This all led me to believe the right wing had a monopoly on cruelty, intolerance, and ideological rigidity. Now, at fifty-five, it was painfully clear to me that the left wing, represented by NPR and liberal lobbying groups, had become likewise intolerant of people who did not agree with
them. In demonizing Fox News and the right wing as a powerful conspiracy of wealthy, militaristic bigots—antiblack, antifeminist, and antigay—they hid their own prejudice against different points of view. They do not believe in tolerance. They do not care about open-minded debate. They care first and foremost about liberal orthodoxy. If you dare to challenge it or deviate from it even slightly, you will be punished.

My point is that what happened to me was not about me alone. It was an assault on journalism and honest debate. We need to protect a free-flowing, respectful national conversation in our country. Today, such honest debate about the issues becomes collateral damage in an undeclared war by those who make accusations of racism and bigotry whenever their political positions are challenged.

I use the emotionally charged word “war” very deliberately. My comments about Muslims on Fox were twisted and deliberately taken out of context by Weiss. She was able to use that distortion, along with a general view of Fox News as bad guys, to engage in a vigilante-style attack on me. NPR’s standards for its journalistic ethics, which I supposedly broke, seemed to apply only to me. When Nina Totenberg, NPR’s reporter on legal issues, famously said that a conservative U.S. senator and his children ought to “get AIDS from a transfusion,” she was not fired. Nor was NPR news analyst Cokie Roberts when she said that Fox’s Glenn Beck was un-American and called him a terrorist.

In their hubris and fury at me, Vivian Schiller and Weiss accepted the wacky idea that I legitimize Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity because I
talk
with them. Did they not notice that I was almost always challenging Bill and trading ideas
with Sean? Bill and Sean are major forces in American culture, media, and politics, whether or not I appear on their shows. And I believe it is important that they remain open to having their audiences hear different points of view. I continue to go on their shows and debate their ideas because I believe Americans of all political stripes are better off when they hear an experienced political observer offer an honest appraisal of the issues and the other side’s point of view.

Of course, condoning political polarization goes well beyond just NPR. One-party dominance and one-sided thinking have become the rule rather than the exception in much of the media. We are creating a culture in the newsroom where facts, context, and insight take a backseat to fear of complaints of insensitivity, accusations of racism, and all sorts of phony charges of bigotry. On the Left, the politically correct police are increasingly out in force. This leads people in public life to be sent to the media equivalent of the gulag—fired, shunned, silenced—for raising the wrong questions and displaying independent thought. When I see charlatans and prevaricators sacrificing the standards of journalism and free speech on the altar of political correctness, I am compelled to speak out.

Daniel Schorr, my fellow NPR commentator, who died last year, used to talk about the initial shock of finding himself on President Nixon’s enemies list. I can only imagine Dan’s disgust if he saw that NPR today has created one of its own.

A lot of people in this country are tired of being afraid to speak out. I think that’s part of why so many came out so strongly in support of me. Whoopi Goldberg, for example, who walked off the set when Bill O’Reilly made his initial
comment about Muslims being responsible for 9/11, came to my defense after I was fired. She said NPR sent the “wrong message” about the need for people to speak up about their feelings and have an honest, respectful discussion of tough issues. “NPR, get yourself together,” she said. Jon Stewart dedicated a segment of
The Daily Show
to defending the importance of giving people room to speak their minds. At his rally on the national mall, Stewart offered support for me, saying, “The press is our immune system—if we overreact to everything, we actually get sicker—and perhaps eczema.” James Rainey, writing a column in the
Los Angeles Times
, said Schiller and Weiss “treated a moment of candor like it was a capital crime,” while ignoring the rest of what I had to say in opposition to anti-Muslim rhetoric. “I thought this was the sort of candid conversation about race and ethnicity we were supposed to have,” he wrote. “Didn’t President Obama suggest that only open dialogue would chip away hardened misconceptions?”

The
Washington Post
editorial page made a similar point: “In a democracy the media must foster a free and robust political debate, even if such debate may, at times, offend some people.” The
Post
concluded that in debating O’Reilly I “was attempting to do exactly what a responsible commentator should do: speak honestly without being inflammatory.”

I believe I’ve been vindicated in the months since my firing. Ellen Weiss resigned in January 2011 in the wake of the public’s response to my termination and NPR’s investigation into how it was handled. A few months later, in March 2011, Vivian Schiller resigned following a scandal in which a former NPR executive was recorded on video making disparaging remarks
about the conservative and Tea Party movements and constituents. I believe the compounding controversies became too much for the NPR board and alerted it to the fact that the institution needed to be reclaimed and reoriented in a manner that would allow it to live up to its virtues and purpose. I hope it does.

As for me, this episode has proven to be an inspiring reminder of what we cherish most in this country—our ability to freely engage one another in honest debate over the issues and ideas that determine our lives. I am a proud American, a registered Democrat, a Christian, a straight male, a black immigrant, a father of three, and a grandfather. This country is interested in, and built on, the insight, opinion, humor, and racial and ethnic diversity—the wide range of human experience—that I and others bring to our work. Closing ourselves off from one another and one another’s honest opinions—especially at this crucial juncture in the nation’s history—is the last thing we should do, encourage, or accept.

My goal in writing this book is to help advance the national conversation beyond the familiar litany of anecdotes of who got in trouble for saying what. I want to look more deeply at the problems of censorship and political correctness in our society and show how they are undermining our ability to have meaningful discussions about important issues. I cast a critical eye toward the role of money and institutions, and the changing nature of the media, in our society. I want to explain how our national discourse fell into such poor health and what we can do to rehabilitate it. You may agree or disagree with my premise or my conclusions or both. What is important is that we have the debate and speak honestly. If people won’t tell one
another what they think, we run the risk that bad ideas will never be refuted and many good ideas will never be expressed. When our biggest concern is not whether our words are true but whether our words will result in punishment, then we are giving away our most precious freedom. It is not just our right under the Constitution. It is our duty as citizens of the greatest country in the world.

B
ARTENDERS ARE TOLD to avoid discussing two subjects with drinkers: religion and politics. The reason is pretty obvious. If the bartender offends a customer’s religious or political beliefs, the bartender might lose a tip. Even worse, the customer might stop drinking and walk out. The very worst case is if the customer keeps drinking, stays, and begins an argument that drags everyone in the place into a fight and ruins the night for the bar. A bunch of drunks arguing and then punching one another is bad news. It’s easy to see how the situation could get out of control. Given the potential for conflict and the incentive of getting money in the tip jar, it’s in the interest of the bartender to limit talk to sports and celebrity gossip.

I, however, am not a bartender.

My job is to be better informed than the average citizen and tell you directly what a professional analyst and newsman thinks is really going on behind the headlines. That is what I try to do. The best news analysts describe for their audience the motivations, the desires, the inside baseball behind the
basics of a daily news story—the who, what, where, when, and why. My views must be based on good reporting about current events, inside and sometimes off-the-record conversations with sources, and my past experiences. The goal is a strong presentation of all those elements in a logical manner that allows the viewer to understand how I am putting puzzling events together and why I’m thinking that way. To do my job at the highest level, I tell audiences what I know, what I think, and, yes, what I feel about people looking for advantage in power struggles, military engagements, and racial and cultural wars (the very thing NPR’s Vivian Schiller and Ellen Weiss criticized me for). The only reason to listen to a professional news analyst is to get into the edgy flow of the political debate about the story—a sense of where the story is going, the insights, the ideas, and the spin, as well as the charges of sham, deceit, and corruption. Audiences dialing up news programs in search of in-depth understanding of the news don’t want bartenders.

When Schiller, Weiss, and like-minded news executives claim they are upholding high standards of journalism, they are actually forcing all reporters, commentators, and analysts to tell stories from one approved perspective. It is a perspective that amounts to liberal orthodoxy. They are being politically correct.

It begins with the journalists being forced to act like bartenders. They write and speak in such a way that they avoid having anyone complain—especially powerful people with a constituency. Journalists do this because of weak knees among their bosses, the news executives and managers, who live in fear that some power player will call or write to complain that they didn’t like what they read, saw, or heard on the
news. So the power players’ hypocrisy and lies are allowed to go unchallenged.

The power player might be a big bank or a brokerage house on Wall Street claiming to look out for America while making money by closing down American industry and shipping jobs overseas. The powerful might also be an activist, say, Al Sharpton; a politician, such as Sarah Palin; or the White House press secretary. But there are other examples that can be more difficult to see. For example, what do you do with the story of a big-city summer jobs program for poor kids in which the young people sit around all day doing nothing and still collect a check at the end of the week? Do you report on the scam or keep a politically correct silence about how the city keeps young people from stirring up trouble during the hot summer months? Here is another example of stories that go untold while journalists pretend to be bartenders. People stand to applaud the tremendous sacrifice of American soldiers even as polls show an overwhelming majority in opposition to any talk about renewing a universal draft or even a two-year national service commitment for young people. Few point out the inconsistency. No one wants to be the skunk at the garden party. No one wants to say the emperor has no clothes. No one wants to lose a tip. Similarly, our representatives in Congress refuse to deal with immigration reform. Yet it is commonplace for them to hire illegal immigrants as babysitters, contractors, and housecleaners (as well as to allow them to pick lettuce or work in factories in their districts or states). And politicians condemn drug dealers while the nation refuses to discuss why the United States is the top market in the world for consumption of illegal drugs.