Why NPR Needed to Fire Juan Williams
Oct. 23rd, 2010 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizzieladieIt's very simple, and it's not because Williams said racist things, although saying those things was not of the good.
There is a crisis in news organizations in this country. We have some news organizations that actually report the news and have a commitment to doing so in an ethical way, and an increasing number of organizations that are willing to pay outrageous sums of money to tv personalities in order to bloviate their opinions on the news, sometimes in lieu of actual coverage of the news. Fox is the worst offender on this count, but MSNBC and CNN are doing their darnedest to catch up. Given that NPR requires it journalists to act with the same ethics and integrity that NPR requires of them in any public appearance that they make, it seems to me that appearing on an opinion show on any of those networks should probably be a firing offense, since the entire of set-up of those shows requires that you throw nuance and objectiveness that NPR requires of its reporters out the window. What this same media has largely missed in its coverage of this story is that the tension here is not between conservative and liberal view points, but between genuine journalism and opinion driven, high paying pseudo-journalism. The fact that Williams himself is unable to make this distinction suggests that if he ever intellectual rigor necessary to be a real journalist, it's gone now, and getting paid large sums to give his opinions on Fox is a completely appropriate direction for him to take his career in. If there are liberal NPR reporters commenting on Keith Olberman or any similar shows on MSNBC and CNN, they need to be dismissed as well, in order that we have at least one news organization in this country committed to objectivity and genuine news coverage.
There is a crisis in news organizations in this country. We have some news organizations that actually report the news and have a commitment to doing so in an ethical way, and an increasing number of organizations that are willing to pay outrageous sums of money to tv personalities in order to bloviate their opinions on the news, sometimes in lieu of actual coverage of the news. Fox is the worst offender on this count, but MSNBC and CNN are doing their darnedest to catch up. Given that NPR requires it journalists to act with the same ethics and integrity that NPR requires of them in any public appearance that they make, it seems to me that appearing on an opinion show on any of those networks should probably be a firing offense, since the entire of set-up of those shows requires that you throw nuance and objectiveness that NPR requires of its reporters out the window. What this same media has largely missed in its coverage of this story is that the tension here is not between conservative and liberal view points, but between genuine journalism and opinion driven, high paying pseudo-journalism. The fact that Williams himself is unable to make this distinction suggests that if he ever intellectual rigor necessary to be a real journalist, it's gone now, and getting paid large sums to give his opinions on Fox is a completely appropriate direction for him to take his career in. If there are liberal NPR reporters commenting on Keith Olberman or any similar shows on MSNBC and CNN, they need to be dismissed as well, in order that we have at least one news organization in this country committed to objectivity and genuine news coverage.
