They’ve fired Juan Williams.
As a commenter notes at Riehl World, apparently there are some things that shouldn’t be considered.
[Update a while later]
This seems related — SF author Elizabeth Moon is shunned by PC SF fans. I think the best response to this is to purchase a book or three
[Update a couple minutes later]
A lot more Juan Williams links and thoughts.
[Bumped]
De fund NPR Feb 2011- cut them off and let them choke in the marketplace like Air America.
And NPR was right when they saw the TEA Party as a mortal threat… we are. And Congress will be hounded relentlessly until we’re no longer paying for this little Psy-Op ministry
So much for “All Things Considered”…
Juan was going on about rent control being a good thing the other day. I felt like having a father/son talk with him to explain the evil of it. He is one of the least objectionable lefties out there. He’s just been mugged… but I don’t expect him to become a conservative now. He is an honest fellow. Now he may come to realize how the left hates honesty and truth when it doesn’t fit their narrative.
The government should stop using taxpayer money for social goals… period. I don’t care who thinks it’s a good idea, it’s pure theft. It should have been included in the first amendment (along with the other five that Coons had no idea were there.)
I think he was actually fired for this little nugget just prior to his airplane stuff:
I think, look, political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis where you don’t address reality.
I can see the airheads at NPR blowing gaskets over that.
Can someone explain to me why NPR/PBS still exists as a taxpayer subsidized entity other than as a liberal outlet unable to compete in the arena of ideas?
And so it begins…the left eating it’s own. The first but far from the last.
I think there’s more to it than his comments — that was just a convenient excuse, for which they must have been looking for a while. If I had to guess, I would say some major donor made it a condition. Oh look! Apparently George Soros just donated $1.8 mil to NPR. Hmmm.
Juan Williams is too moderate for MSNBC but he would be a good hire for CNN. If Fox was to give him his own show, I bet he would have a decent following.
NPR has been looking for an excuse to fire Juan for a long time.
SF author Elizabeth Moon is shunned by PC SF fans
Of course it was at a “feminist” SF con, which means it was already hard left and discriminatory to begin with. Once upon a time, SF was the one place you could count on being for free thought and no discrimination whatsoever.
Baen, the ones republishing Heinlein’s works, are pretty reliably non-leftists. (And some are off-the-charts opposed to transnational progressives.)
NPR CEO Vivian Schiller:
he should have kept his feeling about Muslims between himself and his psychiatrist
Classy. Very classy. Hope your listeners show their appreciation during your next fund drive.
Hey, I think Vivian Schiller should’ve kept her feelings about black men who don’ toe de line and do what massa says between herself and her psychiatrist, so we’re kind of even that way.
Just spent the last couple hours reading the link train on Moon’s blog entry. It is amazing how the left will eat their own.
Was also interesting to note there were no comments about what she said about conservatives and white people in the same post. Very telling.
SF was the one place you could count on being for free thought and no discrimination whatsoever.
SF and SF Fandom are not the same thing.
Wiscon is a feminist and anti-racism con and known for it. Had she been a GOH at a World Con/MinniCon/Westercon/etc… this wouldn’t have been an issue.
SF Fandom is a pretty big church, she just happened to be a GoH in a small and fairly “conservative” sub-church which she royally pee’d off.
Welcome to the “low dishonest decade.”
I read that NPR claims that only 2% of their operation comes from taxpayer money. Then they shouldn’t miss it if it’s cut off. Maybe they could cut back and air Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Socialist” show only once on weekends instead of twice, and just play more classical music from their current CD library. (In Atlanta, where I live, the local public radio has pretty much eliminated classical music on weekends to make more room for NPR current-affairs programming and talk shows.)
“SF Fandom is a pretty big church, she just happened to be a GoH in a small and fairly “conservative” sub-church which she royally pee’d off.”
Mabey if she bought the fundi-wymn-libbers some nice Burquas to wear, they could all call it squarzies.
Williams has been given an expanded roll at Fox and a 3 year contract worth ~$2 million. Win for Juan!
I know how Ms. Moon must feel. I, too, work in a branch of the media/entertainment field, and my opposition to “gay marriage” has cost me significantly in terms of canceled personal appearances and income from related sources. Those who dare criticize the wonderful. peace-loving Muslims will be set upon by the shrieking harpies of the Left in the same way.
Je ne regrette rien. Long after those ignorant, hypocritical cunts at WisCon are gone and forgotten, Ms, Moon will still be making money writing science fiction.
We shouldn’t be talking about “Cutting off funding.” We should be talking about auctioning it off entirely.
“SF was the one place you could count on being for free thought and no discrimination whatsoever.”
Which con was it where Heinlein was booed? MidAmeriCon?
I was involved with SF fandom some years back, in the 70s and 80s; helped run a few in the northeast, and knew some of the main players. Even at that point, there were few conservatives involved with it, and there was some resentment over my working as volunteer for a conservative US senator, even among the local group.
I dropped out of fandom around the time that I went into engineering design, because far too many of the people that I knew wanted to be given this wonderful society loosely based on movies and tv shows. I enjoyed many of the shows and movies myself, but saw that getting to the stars was going to be very hard work, and in my experience far too many of the participants were uninterested in the nitty gritty of building a space faring civilization.
Another drawback, actually two of them, were the heavy drinking and drug cultures that permeated far too much of the fandom that I saw.
The other, and this pertains tangentally to the topic, is the hive mentality of much of the fandom leadership, or at least the ones that I saw. It was difficult for them to accept someone, who, with his wife, wanted to be involved with the space sub-community, while holding overall conservative values.
I worked on a few spacecraft(Chandra, ISS and a few military), and while on contract tried to get involved with some of the local groups, but their minds were almost completely closed. Far too many of them were “tenured” students, who were careful to avoid anything that smacked of hard science or engineering. They were nothing but talk, mostly platitudes from the far left. Dennis “The Menace” Kucinich(sp?) was seen as a far right conservative.
I hereby nominate the NPR CEO for the “Tom Vilsack firing of Shirley Sherrod Award.”
Story I hear is that the fireable statement of Juan Williams is the result of selective editing (source: “Vodka Pundit” Stephen Green commenting on PJTV).
He started out with his “straw man” argument about how he was personally nervous about “persons in Muslim garb on planes”, but continued to say that “those people aren’t terrorists” and concluded by quoting President George Bush that “the War on Terror is not a war on Islam.”
Story I hear is that the fireable statement of Juan Williams is the result of selective editing (source: “Vodka Pundit” Stephen Green commenting on PJTV).
Huh. Wonder if that was the plan from the beginning? NPR leadership looking for a pretext to fire someone they didn’t like.
Seems NPR has its own “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell” its
commentatorsanalystshouse Negroes.Seems NPR has its own “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell” policy for its
commentatorsanalystshouse Negroes.They did this during NPR fund raising week, it would be hard to icrease their level of incompetence
I read that NPR claims that only 2% of their operation comes from taxpayer money.
That’s just the Corporation for Public Broadcasting portion. They also get money from the Department of Education and the Department of Commerce and the National Endowment of the Arts, etc. etc. See their annual report.
That’s the game they play. This has got to stop. Only congress can do it.
Teaklanners, without public funding how can the Left possibly get its message out? We should also go back to the good old days of the Fairness Doctrine while we’re at it to shut down the Right Wing Noise Machine(tm).
They did this during NPR fund raising week, it would be hard to icrease their level of incompetence
I agree. I learned right here on this blog that a sufficiently high level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. Does that imply that NPR’s move was a deliberate suicide attempt?
I learned right here on this blog that a sufficiently high level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
From typing? No, I think your understanding of that goes back further.
Does that imply that NPR’s move was a deliberate suicide attempt?
No, I think you’ve got 10 fingers. Care to dip your toe in the Vivian-Schiller-isn’t-an-idiot pool?
So where’s Jim? I would have expected a full and satisfying explanation of this from him.
Now what am I going to do?
I don’t understand your comment Curt. I think NPR made a bad move – they should have continued to employ Williams (he didn’t do anything worthy of being fired for), and it would have been right up NPR’s alley to allow Williams comment to be an excuse to host two discussions, a big one, maybe all week long, on what Williams said, and a smller one about journalism. Williams could be on the air with moderate muslims, clerics from various religions, etc and chat about much the same things that O’Reilly and Williams were already talking about, but in an NPR kind of way. The second smaller discussion could have been about whether there is and/or shoudl be aline between being an objective journalist and a pundit. Again, the discussion would be similar to the discussions regarding media bias that occur on Fox, but NPR would bring their semio-academic tone to the discussion. When I mentioned this to my wife, she said “well, no one would be able to tell whether they were following your suggestion or not, since that’s what NPR does all the time anyway.” My wife is almost completely right, with the exception being the firing of Williams instead of having a talk-fest.
Oh, but this idea that sufficient incompetence is indistinguishable form malice? I wanted my first comment to illustrate why that idea is nonsense, but I think it is really worse than nonsense. When you imagine malice where there at least might not be any, you risk becoming hateful.
Being equal just means don’t judge one way or the other without additional evidence. It does not mean, as you suggest, that you just pick whichever fits your ideology. Lefties will ignore that additional evidence so they can make the wrong choice. Hate is not always bad. Hating what is bad is a biblical admonition. It refers to sin, not people. Another mistake of lefties.