Murdoch's World (17 page)

After one such instance in late June 2007, I encountered Williams by chance, as he sat, looking stunned, on the steps of the J. Crew store in Georgetown. He had just concluded a phone call with NPR's top news official, senior vice president Ellen Weiss. In an op-ed in the
New York Times
,
Williams backed the Bush administration's stance against considering race in assigning children to schools. It carried a provocative headline, referring to the historic 1954 US Supreme Court ruling that desegregated American schools: “Don't Mourn Brown v. Board of Education.” Weiss had been surprised and angered.

Do you think I did anything wrong, David?
he asked, as his wife stood nearby.

I told Williams, truthfully, that I personally didn't have a problem that he wrote what he wrote. But I said that I didn't create the company's newsroom policies, nor did I sign its paychecks.
Let them know ahead of time
, I suggested.
It's best never to surprise top editors
.

A few months later, White House aides offered him a one-on-one interview with President Bush to explore the legacy of the integration of Little Rock High School on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary.
NPR turned down the offer: “We're grateful for the opportunity to talk to the president,” Weiss told the
Washington Post
, “but we wanted to determine who did the interview.”

Williams was incredulous and took the interview to Fox News. Most other news organizations in that situation would offer an anodyne comment about the circumstances in which the interview was obtained. Not Fox. Fox spokeswoman Irena Briganti took the opportunity to berate and belittle the public radio broadcaster: “NPR's lack
of news judgment is astonishing, and their treatment of a respected journalist like Juan Williams is appalling.”

By 2008, Williams was just a contract employee at NPR. His time on the air had been diminished, although as an analyst Williams had a little more breathing room to offer his personal thoughts. While there is
an expectation among many of NPR's liberal listeners that the network's mission is to reflect their beliefs and aspirations, most NPR journalists perceive their responsibility is reporting on unfolding news, providing crucial context and watchdog journalism, and offering a civil discussion of public events.

That notion of civility conflicted with Williams's role as a commentator on Fox, which requires clarity, forcefulness, even hyperbole. During the 2008 campaign, other Fox
commentators had raised rumors that a video would show Michelle Obama referring to “whitey” in an unspecified rant on tape. The video never materialized, but months later, in early 2009, Williams gave the thrust of that charge credence. He told Bill O'Reilly that Michelle Obama could be a drag on her husband's White House.

“Michelle Obama, you know, she's got this
Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going,” Williams said on the
O'Reilly Factor
. “Her instinct is to start with this blame America, you know, I'm the victim. If that stuff starts coming out, people will go bananas and she'll go from being the new Jackie O to being something of an albatross.”

Called on the carpet again by NPR news executives, Williams apologized. In the heat of the moment on a charged cable show such as the
O'Reilly Factor
, Williams conceded, his analysis of Michelle Obama's press coverage was easily mistaken for an attack. “What I said about Michelle Obama is
not out of the realm of mainstream political discourse,” Williams told NPR's ombudsman. “The point is that NPR has a much more deliberative, slow-paced form with more time to explain what you meant.”

NPR had repeatedly asked Fox to stop identifying Williams as an NPR analyst. Fox would cease for a while and then go right back to putting NPR in the identifying chyron, the on-screen caption.
He could not believe the angst over the other gig, which he had started before joining NPR. And the radio network's decision to kill his interview with a sitting president dismayed him.

NPR executives had their own concerns. Williams's handling of the Bush interview concerned some of NPR's hard news veterans. Additionally, the network did not want to allow the Bush White House, or any other administration, to dictate who could interview the president.

Then came the flying Muslims. It was October 2010, and Bill O'Reilly was looking for some moral support.
On an episode of ABC's chat show
The View
, he had blamed Muslims for the September 11, 2001, attacks—seemingly not just the plotters, but Muslim people more generally. The hosts swiftly turned on him and two of them walked off the set.

Back in Fox News studios, O'Reilly sought affirmation and
received an attaboy from Williams: “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.”

A few minutes later, Williams circled back, warning O'Reilly against mistaking all Muslims for “extremists,” saying Christians shouldn't be blamed for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

It was too late.

Complaints poured in. The common thread: Williams had demeaned people simply by their faith and affect. NPR news chief Ellen Weiss consulted with other editors and CEO Vivian Schiller. And then
Weiss terminated Williams's contract early amid a sharp exchange by cell phone. She said Williams's remarks “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”

I spoke briefly to Williams that night. He was baffled, genuinely uncomprehending of what he could have done to offend. He would later say repeatedly on Fox News that he made a point of telling O'Reilly that it was wrong to blame all Muslims for one's own suspicions and fears. I am convinced that was the point he believed he was making.

NPR's brass decided he had proved a very different point: Juan Williams, they felt, could no longer be trusted in front of a microphone. And over at Fox, among its programming and corporate executives, a very different conclusion had been drawn: it was go time.

10

A TOTEBAG TO A KNIFE FIGHT

AN EDITOR NOT INVOLVED IN terminating Williams's contract suggested I might need to track it down and file a “spot”—a short item about a minute long. And so the games began. Along with Brian Stelter of the
New York Times
, I broke the story online late the night of October 18 and early the next morning; the news about Williams appeared in the
Times
in print on October 19 and instantly drew a drumbeat of heavy and overwhelmingly negative coverage on Twitter, on blogs, in print, and on the air.

On October 21, things just got worse for NPR. Few people, even internally, would defend the way in which Williams was dropped—by cell phone, not in person. And CEO
Vivian Schiller, speaking to the Atlanta Press Club at a previously arranged event, was asked by reporters
why
it had happened. (His contract was set to expire the following March.) She had been consulted on terminating him, in a series of quick telephone conversations, and had backed Weiss on the
call. In Atlanta, Schiller attempted to explain that NPR was paying him for insight, not opinions, and added that he should confide his own beliefs to a psychoanalyst or his PR agent. She was attempting, she said later, to imply these were personal beliefs, and should be shared only with people who would keep his confidence.

But Williams took Schiller's remarks to mean she was suggesting he was crazy. And in the hours that followed, Fox News unleashed its arsenal. It started with interviews during news shows, surged in the late afternoon and early evening, and crested in the prime-time opinion shows.

Glenn Beck used Williams's termination by NPR as the cornerstone of an hour-long focus on free speech. “America, you're smart enough. You know what this is all about. You see what all of this is about. It's not about the truth. It's not about setting anything right. It's about intimidation, bullying, tearing down.”

The next hour, Bret Baier announced that Fox News chairman Ailes had just awarded Williams a beefed-up contract with a bigger role at the network. The newscast's second story focused on calls for an investigation into NPR and the elimination of federal funding for its operations and shows, notably from Congressman Peter King, a Long Island Republican who had routinely been critical of Muslim groups in the US for what he characterized as sympathy for terrorist operations. Baier returned to the Williams firing anew with his panel of analysts—two conservative columnists and a political reporter for the
Washington Post
.

On the
O'Reilly Factor
, Bill O'Reilly called Schiller a pinhead within moments of its opening. (O'Reilly routinely sorts people into baskets of pinheads and patriots, which renders that decision even less surprising.) NPR, he said, was “a totalitarian outfit functioning as an arm of the far left.”

Williams came on and told his side, fleshing out details of the indignity of being fired by cell phone. “I don't fit in their box. I'm not
a predictable black liberal,” Williams said. “They were looking for a reason to get rid of me because I appear on Fox News. They don't want me talking to you.” O'Reilly promised he would have Williams's back—and that Williams would guest host his program the next night.

Williams was followed by Fox News analyst Karl Rove, George W. Bush's former top political adviser, who said NPR and public radio should be stripped of federal funding. Then Laura Ingraham inveighed against NPR. Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, a former lawyer, appeared to suggest Williams might have a lawsuit against the network. Glenn Beck rehearsed his grievances one more time.

At 9:00
PM
, Sean Hannity declared “a good man has been smeared.” His guests uniformly blasted NPR. Frank Luntz convened a focus group whose members, he said, gave him a clear message: “You got to tell Juan, hang in there, because Republicans and Democrats alike want him to fight for his job.”

Ailes wrapped himself around Williams with a three-year, $2 million contract. The maneuver allowed him to brand Fox as the champion of free speech and to delight a sizable segment of its audience by criticizing NPR as something valued only by liberals.

Other journalists had been fired over controversial remarks in other settings without such a muscular backlash. CNN had dismissed two figures in the months leading up to the Williams imbroglio. Longtime CNN Mideast expert and senior editor
Octavia Nasr was forced out for a tweet that expressed sadness over the death of a prominent Hezbollah figure. Nasr had seen him as a bridge between the terrorist group and a more constructive future, but he had also been designated a terrorist by the US government. The network announced that her standing had been compromised. CNN daytime anchor
Rick Sanchez also had been dumped by the network. Sanchez had complained on a satellite radio show that the
Daily Show
's Jon Stewart, who frequently mocked him, was a bigot. Sanchez couldn't win, he argued, because Jews (like Stewart) controlled the media. Sanchez was gone within hours.

In Williams's case, people directly questioned the nature of the definitions separating different categories of journalists.
“When is somebody giving his or her opinion?” ABC's Barbara Walters asked on her talk show,
The View
. “If you are a ‘journalist,' where you're supposed to be straight and narrow and not give opinions—you know how careful I am, because I'm wearing two hats—sometimes that's one thing. But if you are someone who's giving your opinion, then you're allowed to give your opinion!”

The conservative media criticism group
NewsBusters revived comments made by NPR's legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg fifteen years earlier, in which she appeared to wish harm to befall Republican senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. In arguing against new funding for AIDS research in 1995, Helms had said, “We've got to have common sense about a disease transmitted by people deliberately engaging in unnatural acts.” He was talking about sex between gay men.

Totenberg said on the syndicated political television program
Inside Washington
: “I think he ought to be worried about the—about what's going on in the good Lord's mind, because if there's retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion or one of his grandchildren will get it.” At the time, others on the show also reacted strongly against Helms, including conservatives; Krauthammer called Helms's remarks “bigoted and cruel.” But Totenberg's comments became relevant once more.
Jesse Watters, a producer for Fox's
O'Reilly Factor
, confronted Schiller on her way to an appointment to challenge her, on tape, about the disparities between the handling of Totenberg and Williams.