V.
DAVID VERSUS GOLIATH
Fox News Channel Sets its Sites on
Destroying NPR in Coming Days
First, how stupid do you have to be to not be able to guess that the next time someone tries to bomb an airplane or execute some other horrible terrorist act, they're NOT going to "look Muslim?"
NPR is kind of old-fashioned about its reporting, its reporters, and its other journalist employees. You see, technically-scratch that-actually, you're not supposed to know if a reporter at a traditional news organization hates or loves babies, or hates or loves Muslims, or hates liberals, or conservatives or can't stand broccoli.
Really? Yes, really. A blog is different. It's not traditional. It's a bastard child of a perverse universe in which the wrongdoing right gets to act righteous and indignant while a left-lurching liberal like me gets to do the same online because there's so much frigging noise on the cable networks and the radio stations of America that all the gloves have come off and no one really does news any more!!! Except NPR.
Okay, there are a few others--but only a few. But, just about everyone who actually listens to NPR says the network is fair.
Now, because it doesn't allow its journalists to go around spewing forth lists of a few of their least-favoritist things, and has fired one for doing just that, the only major power on the side of obective news-gathering and reporting will be battling to survive in tact as that bastion of objectivity, which people who just want to know the facts and figure out their own opinion about an issue or an event after hearing the facts, so desperately need.
Fox will be trying to rally support to pull all of NPR's federal funding. They'll be surprised by, and won't share, the fact that NPR only gets two percent of its funding directly from the federal government. This ain't your grandfather's public radio.
So come on all of you smart people, call NPR, email NPR, Tweet NPR, Friend Request NPR, Become a Facebook Fan or Myspace Fan of NPR right now! And just give the editorial team, the management team and the ombudsperson's office the good word that you stand by their decision to can Juan Williams for basically making himself useless to a news organizaiton that requires objectivity in order to maintain credibility in its reportage. So far the right-wing whiners have been louder than you and me.
How could Williams ever do analysis objectively on anything terrorism- or Muslim-related and be considered objective? How, I ask, could he be considered a fair source about those issues after saying people who look Muslim are spooky when he sees them on airplanes? He may think that. You may think that; I may think that. But we don't work for NPR. Part of his job is to keep Juan Williams out of the story, unless it's a story about Juan Williams (in which case, he should recuse himself from the story).
Now the story is about him, and about Fox news, because not only have they started screaming and whining that NPR is mean, and liberal and spooky and mean and snobby and liberal and mean, it's also just given Juan Williams $2 million and a three-year contract. So there! Mean old liberal-pants NPR. Nanner-nanner na.
By the way, you don't hear Fox News complaining that NPR, last week, banned its reporters from attending as participants upcoming liberal events, such as Stephen Colbert's and John Stewart's "Restoring Sanity" event in Washington D.C.
No, you won't hear Fox point that out at all, because it would disprove the lie that Williams was fired because he's become a regular-old Fox News right-wing whack-job. That would prove that NPR expects all editorial staff, liberal or conservative, to keep their personal beliefs to themselves.
Here's how to Tweet regarding NPR (click me)
Here's where to send snail mail: NPR, 635 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20001
You know how to friend and fan request on Facebook, I'm sure. If not, just email!
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