NATIONAL PUSILLANIMOUS RADIO: JOHN FUND
By JOHN FUND
Political correctness has ended the radio career of Juan Williams, a longtime contributor to NPR. The public radio network terminated its contract with Mr. Williams, one of its senior news analysts for the last 11 years, after he made what NPR considered unacceptable statements about Muslims. NPR said the statements “undermined his credibility as a news analyst.”
What horrible things did Mr. Williams say on Fox News this past Monday? As a Fox News contributor, he agreed with host Bill O’Reilly that the radical jihad movement, “aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet.” He went on say: “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
Mr. Williams was giving voice to the involuntary feelings of millions of air passengers. His recitation of a threat uttered by a convicted terrorist was perfectly accurate. Thanks to NPR’s misplaced sensitivity, however, radical jihadists have been handed a victory by America’s own refusal to allow itself an honest conversation about radical Islam and how to balance the nation’s security concerns with its pluralistic ethos.
What Mr. Williams, author of the seminal history of the civil rights movement “Eyes on the Prize,” said is little different than what Jesse Jackson told an Operation PUSH convention back in 1993. Mr. Jackson said: “There is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery — and then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
Mr. Jackson later said he was quoted “out of context,” but the New York Times noted at the time that “no amount of ‘context’ matters when you fear that you are about to be mugged.” The fear may not be rational, but it is real and can’t be resolved by ignoring it or censoring discussion of it. By NPR’s logic, the network should have banned Mr. Jackson from its airwaves. But he has appeared dozens of times on its programs over the past 17 years.
The late columnist Mike Royko, who first reported Mr. Jackson’s heresy in the Chicago Tribune back in 1993, was mainly interested in lampooning the political correctness that such statements elicit, saying “most public radio producers would hyperventilate if a guest uttered such heresies.” In the case of Mr. Williams, who said nothing that was bigoted or mean-spirited, public radio has done more than hyperventilate. In trying to stain Mr. Williams’s reputation NPR has only stained itself.
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