Juan Williams admits he gets nervous when a fellow passenger on a plane is wearing a Muslim outfit.
In fact Williams, longtime news analyst on National P ublic Radio, was fired after making this confession to on The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News. The exact quote: “Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot…. 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.”
Since then, there has been a cry from the political right to have NPR stripped of federal funding, while the left has accused Williams, who has accepted a 2 million dollar contract with Fox, of going over to the dark side.
Of the numerous issues raised by this case, two stand out. Was Williams’ nervousness a bigoted reaction? Borderline, at most. For anyone who has been reading and watching the news in recent years to insist that muslim garb would not cause the terrorism possibility at least to flicker for a moment across the consciousness would constitute denial or outright lie.
But even if Williams’ reaction were bigoted, would his admission of such a reaction be an act of bigotry?
The one thing I retain from my sophomore year high school English class was an anecdote the teacher told us, an all white class in an all white town, to illustrate the concept of prejudice. Once when a bus she was on stopped suddenly, she said, and a little African-American girl (“negro” is probably what she said back in those days) had jostled against her, she pulled back involuntarily, much to her own consternation and lingering guilt.
Was the involuntary reaction itself racist? Probably.
But should she have been relieved of her position in the high school for telling this story on herself?
NPR did not actually accuse Williams of bigotry. They fired him, they said, because of their policy that “News analysts may not take personal public positions on controversial issues; doing so undermines their credibility as analysts,” the implication being that analysts should be neutral or objective.
The basic problem here is with a policy based naively on the myth of journalistic objectivity. It sounds like a good idea, but unfortunately there’s no such thing. It’s not in the nature of things, of language.
Unfortunately, you can’t read an op-ed column like this one and then turn to the news section of the paper, or anywhere else, and find out the truth. I think I’m right in what I’m saying here about this controversial issue. That’s why I’m saying it. But I’m not claiming objectivity. There are other views of the subject of this column, but no more objective ones.
In the political spectrum you have left, right and center, but no objectivity. Fact is, we are awash in opinion with no islands of objectivity to cling to for relief.
There’s another angle to the issue of the innocence of Juan Williams. Was he in making his admission either unwittingly or wittingly feeding O’Reilly and the right in general a story he should have known knew they could make use of to move the world in a direction Williams, an African-American liberal in much of his career influence, would presumably oppose ? ( Making it, just one example, that much easier for voters to feel justified opposing candidates associated with or the policies of a president with a Muslim-sounding name.) It’s hard to believe that Williams could be unaware of that strong possibility. On the tape you can hear O’Reilly making grateful, supportive noises in the background.
Williams could have made an eloquent repudiation of such a possibility by flatly turning down Fox’s 2 million.
Of course, easy for me to say, not knowing from personal experience the persuasive power of a 2 million dollar job offer.
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