I
had mixed feelings last Friday night when Juan
Williams stepped up to the podium at the Milwaukee Press Club’s annual
gridiron dinner.
Williams
– a one-time Washington Post staffer,
author of the much-lauded Civil Rights history Eyes on the Prize, and former NPR Talk of the Nation host and later reporter and analyst for the
public radio network – is perhaps most famous these days for the circumstances
under which he left
that latter organization.
When
he remarked to Bill O’Reilly on Fox
News a few years ago that people wearing “Muslim garb” in the airport made him
nervous, NPR fired him, saying his comments “were inconsistent with our
editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news
analyst with NPR.”
I
think there’s still a case to be made that Williams got railroaded. As William Saletan at Slate pointed
out in the aftermath, the controversy over Williams’ comment actually
obscured his main point: that such a
bias-fed, emotional reaction is wrong and needs to be resisted. (While Ta-Nehisi Coates and Andrew Sullivan both made strong
arguments in rebuttal, I don’t think they undermined Saletan’s basic premise.)
At
the same time, though, I often found Williams’ “political analysis,” whether on
NPR or on Fox, shallow, mired in tired conventional wisdom from inside the
Beltway or reaching too conveniently for the quick quip at the expense of more
subtle and supple thinking – “Stokely
Carmichael in a designer dress,”
anyone?
He’s
not alone in those failings, to be sure, and I don’t know that they would
constitute firing offenses. But to be honest, I never missed him once he left
NPR, and I thought it a bit much to cast him as a martyr to liberal political
correctness, even as he was rewarded with a $2
million paycheck at Fox. I’ve also never been in a hurry to get around to
reading his
own take on the whole affair.
So as Williams prepared to deliver his Gridiron Dinner address –
the price of admission the Press Club charges the national journalism figures
upon whom it bestows its yearly “Sacred Cat” award – the most I hoped for was
that he would not emulate last year’s winner. That would be Bill Kurtis, who bafflingly chose to
begin his speech with a crude dirty joke masquerading as a biographical
anecdote.
I
was pleasantly surprised.
The
core of Williams’ message cut right to the heart of what I think is one of
journalism’s most important responsibilities today – and was, perhaps, all the
more surprising considering the messenger.
I’m
not talking about his exhortation that as journalists, “We have to be about
making a difference in this world.” That’s
standard boilerplate when we media types gather to pat each other and ourselves
on the back or buck up our sagging spirits.
Nor
am I talking about the well-worn and reflexive nod to the way technology and
social change are remaking the news business from top to bottom – for better
and for worse, both.
In
his windup, Williams only made a glancing reference to the ruckus that led to
his own career change, when he urged the student and professional journalists
in his audience, “don’t give up a belief that journalists have a right to
express an opinion – even when that opinion is unpopular to hear.”
But his most spot-on observation was his call for journalists
to persist in “telling the story of who we are as an American people,” even as
– especially as – society continues
to become more complex and its population more diverse. Deepening divisions of
ideology, ethnicity, social outlooks, religion, wealth and class are all
driving us apart, he said – and under those conditions, “the work of American
journalists is all the more important.”
Instead
of simply mimicking that splintering of society, journalists must transcend it,
he declared.
“The
danger is that Johnny who lives on the wrong side of the tracks has no idea
what life is like for Mary on the right side of the tracks,” Williams said –
and might have added, accurately, that the reverse is true as well.
“People
who are worried about losing their health care,” he continued, are at risk of
lacking any understanding of the lives and experiences “of people who have no
health care at all.”
Journalists
need to be “helping people to be informed about people who are not like them,
people who vote differently than they do,” Williams said. He warned against the
“tendency to demonize people who are different:
It’s a way to pander in telling the tale of American life to one side or
the other.”
And
he brought the message home to Wisconsin, asking whether, in the future,
journalists in the state will be judged has having clarified the current
political turbulence or, instead, having been “caught up in the fog of war.”
No doubt one can put in a call to the Irony Police,
considering that Williams’ current employer is widely seen as among the worst
of those pandering demonizers. That doesn’t negate the fundamental validity of
his message, though.
And
while it wasn’t framed as such, his speech offered at least a partial rejoinder
to the increasingly heard advice – advice that I think is actually mostly sound
– that news organizations should
drop the so-called “view from nowhere.” It’s a reminder that it may be just
as mistaken to get too caught up in a blinkered “view from somewhere” that
would appear to be at the opposite end of that professional continuum.
Now
I think I just might want to take a look at Williams’ book after all.
*
Liars figure? Two big
stories
in Wednesday’s Journal Sentinel turn
on how statistics are collected, reported, and analyzed. In each case, I have
some questions about what we’re really seeing. If and when I get some answers,
I hope to share those with readers soon.
*
Comment
below, or write Pressroom at pressroom@milwaukeemagazine.com.
Follow
Pressroom on Facebook or on Twitter.
