Farewell, Juan Williams

National Public Radio has every right and justification to sack their longtime employee. As well, Fox "News" has every right to extend its employment of him.
NPR claims they are sacking Juan Williams, because he made comments during a recent appearance on Fox's The O'Reilly Factor that compromised his credibility as a political analyst for NPR.
The
New York Times is reporting this as a story of one reporter caught between two news organizations having vastly different journalistic values. This is a terribly misleading perspective, because NPR is the only news organization involved.
Indeed, Mr. Williams is caught between a sort of paradox, but not between news organizations as the NY Times frames it. He is caught between professions, a distinction lost on many Americans who have little appreciation for what constitutes quality journalism.
When Juan Williams works in the employ of Fox, he crosses a clear line separating journalism from entertainment. To understand why requires the benefit of an experience with recent history.
There was a time, perhaps before Juan Williams can remember, when broadcast news organizations served the American public under the dictates of our Federal Communications Commission.
Our government licensed the airwaves, a public commons, to the broadcasters and demanded in turn that the broadcasters deliver the news to us as fairly as possible. It worked fine for over 40 years, and then President Ronald Reagan removed that mandate. This freed the commercial broadcasters to operate their news organizations to a higher profit motive as they do with their other sports and entertainment programming.
What we now get is less news and more analysis: more talk, less bothersome fact-checking.
Also, it's cheaper for the networks to hire a few telegenic talking heads than it is to staff and operate an array of domestic and foreign bureaus run by professional journalists gathering hard news.
NPR has more correspondents stationed overseas than any of the for-profit "news" networks (including Fox and CNN) do. This alone speaks volumes about how seriously NPR takes their mission to inform us.
With the added emphasis on profits, we also get network "news" that is carefully-censored to avoid offending current and potential corporate sponsors.
In this regard NPR is not immune, since they, too, rely heavily on corporate underwriting.
Fox, however, goes even further than the other commercial networks, to the extent that Fox "News" is news in name only. They clearly demonstrate little interest in serving as a source of information for the broader American public and even have dropped their Orwellian fair and balanced tag line.
Fox delivers a right-wing corporatist perspective of the world espoused by its parent corporation's two largest shareholders, Rupert Murdoch and Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.
To this end Fox produces faux news and analysis wrapped in slick, spectacular set pieces. Their programs occasionally use a point-counterpoint format, which provides an entertaining form of verbal combat but often oversimplifies the true nature of the real world.
In this, Fox pays Juan Williams to provide the Liberal counterpoint, which makes him an actor for Fox.
As for NPR's stated reason for firing Williams, we should apply the Walter Cronkite test. Could you imagine dear Walter telling David Brinkley that it makes him uncomfortable to sit next to a Russian? How might such a remark possibly help us, the American people, make further sense of our modern world in the midst of the Cold War?
Cronkite wouldn't waste his breath--or our time. Unfortunately, our commercial "news" programs are full of those who do.
NPR has a right to defend its public reputation as a quality purveyor of news, and the law does not prevent a private employer from limiting the speech of an employee.
So, Juan Williams, good luck with your career, whatever you want that to be.

- As always, thank you for reading and stay in touch!