There are really two questions at issue in the controversy over Juan Williams – the analyst National Public Radio fired last week after he made remarks as a guest of Bill O’Reilly on Fox News about being nervous when he sees people “in Muslim garb” at the airport.
The first one is, what was Williams really saying? When the liberal blog Think Progress pumped up his comments
to O’Reilly last week, the impression created was that Williams was
simply making and defending sweeping generalizations about Muslims. But
William Saletan of Slate says those impressions were false – indeed, a sort of liberal version of the infamous twisting of Shirley Sherrod‘s comments that led to her too-hasty firing from the U.S. Department of Agriculture a few months ago. NPR’s own On the Media interviewed Saleton about his column the other day.
To be sure, there are many who dispute Saletan’s interpretation such as Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic.
There’s a second issue, however, and one that’s almost, but not
quite, independent of whether the reporting of Williams’ comments did
or didn’t accurately reflect them in their totality: How narrow should
the rules be about the expressing of opinions by working journalists?
The standard dictum in the news business has been that
“objectivity” rules – and anything that is perceived to compromise that
objectivity is at least frowned upon if not forbidden outright.
That’s reflected in policies such as one at the Journal Sentinel discouraging reporters from, for instance, putting up yard signs favoring one candidate or another.
At the Washington Post a while back, management sent a memo
to reporters warning them against expressing partisan views or other
strong opinions on social networking sites such as Twitter and
Facebook.
And only a short time before the Williams firing, NPR had sent a memo to its staffers forbidding them from attending the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rallies in D.C. this coming weekend that were not so subtly intended to mock Glenn Beck‘s rally in August and others of that ilk.
Several years back, New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse, who covered the Supreme Court, was criticized for having attended (as a participant, not a reporter) an abortion-rights march.
The reasoning behind such rules are that this kind of expression
of opinion risks compromising the perception of a news organization as
biased for or against one side of the political spectrum, thus
alienating readers and perhaps sources who view the world differently.
As one former reporter reflected last week, would Williams’ at
least seeming to equate Muslims and terrorists in fact thwart his
ability to be trusted by Muslims he might need to interview sometime in
the future as part of his reporting?
Still, the same sort of rules clearly don’t bind other reporters. Bill Lueders, news editor for the weekly Isthmus
in Madison (full disclosure: My work appears in that publication from
time to time), told me: “Throughout my years at Isthmus, I have never
felt constrained about expressing my opinion on any issue. I think it
is clear that I do so in my official capacity but that I do not speak
for the paper as a whole. My sense is that I am expected to be civil
and reasonable, but that it’s OK to say interesting and provocative
things.”
But then, Isthmus is an alternative weekly that is thoroughly comfortable with journalism that has a strong
point of view and a strong personal voice. (To its enormous credit,
while like most in its niche it tacks left of center, Isthmus is far harder to pigeonhole ideologically than Milwaukee’s own Shepherd Express. At the Madison paper, for example, it’s become standard fare to cover certain high-profile political races with side-by-side commentaries representing opposing viewpoints.)
And talk radio hosts at WTMJ-AM and WISN-AM evidently suffer from no limitations. Last week, Charlie Sykes was heard openly plumping for a fundraiser for Leah Vukmir in her state Senate bid.
Of course, Sykes et al and their bosses will readily disavow the
“journalist” label, at least when it becomes inconvenient, and hold
themselves out as “entertainers” or “commentators.” But are such
distinctions really that clear to the public who views TMJ as the Journal Sentinel’s radio station?
And then there’s the constant refrain that the media are
collectively biased anyway – to the left, if you’re conservative, and
to the corporate/conservative interests if you’re liberal. In the
aftermath of the Williams firing, Chris Wallace at Fox trotted out a series of instances that suggested other NPR employees had expressed strong opinions in other contexts.
There’s no question that journalists have opinions, and that to
some degree, those opinions are going to frame not only what stories
they cover, but also how they cover them.
But I have a hunch that sometimes, maybe even often,
journalists, aware of their opinions – and perhaps a bit defensive
about them – either pull punches on stories that go after people or
institutions of which they’re actually critical – or pump up negative stories about people or institutions they actually agree with.
After Williams was fired, Joan Walsh, editor-in-chief of Salon, criticized NPR – again not entirely a surprise because like Isthmus, Salon is a publication in which strong points of view are welcomed and encouraged.
“We need more speech, more debate about these issues, not
less. Juan Williams didn’t stand up for me when he had the chance on
O’Reilly, but I feel like I should stand up for him, at least to ask
whether the left should really be so gratified by his dismissal.”
If it were possible, I’d like to see more experimentation in
welcoming points of view into supposedly “straight” journalism. But I’d
also encourage editors and reporters to challenge each other directly
over their premises, playing devil’s advocate as stories get developed,
so that everyone might move beyond narrow ideological blinders.
To some, Williams’ greater fault may have been a track record of
facile commentary on all sorts of subjects – perhaps the most infamous
of which was his calling Michelle Obama “Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress” last year.
Bill Lueders of Isthmus put it this way: “On Juan
Williams, I’d add this, speaking just for myself: As someone who loves
NPR, I am deeply saddened that it fired Juan Williams for his remarks
about fearing Muslims. Williams has given NPR so many other, better
reasons to fire him over the years, like agreeing with Bill O’Reilly on
almost everything.”
(You can get a quick roundup of Williams commentary from Richard Prince‘s online column here.)
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