NPR Ends Juan Williams' Contract After Comments on Muslims

[Option D]

Obama did it

[Fury]

.

[Option D]

.

[Benny B]

Actually NPR is both privately and publicly funded. It receives a substantial amount of federal money each year. The receive grants each year from the federal government, as well as funding on the local level from each state. Without the federal and state money, NPR would not exist nearly at the capacity it does now. One vote from congress could seriously threaten NPR's livelihood, which personally I'd be in favor of even before this event transpired.

2% of NPR's funding is from the federal gov't. The reset comes from public and private donors. Local affiliates receive additional funding.

NPR is the BEST of talk radio and isn't going anywhere. Fact based news and analysis for intelligent people who don't to be told what to think.

[Soul Crusher]

Benny  = "Pants on the Ground"

[Arnold jr]

2% of NPR's funding is from the federal gov't. The reset comes from public and private donors. Local affiliates receive additional funding.

NPR is the BEST of talk radio and isn't going anywhere. Fact based news and analysis for intelligent people who don't to be told what to think.

About 50% comes from private funding. The remaining 50% comes from Federal grants and State subsidies. Federal grants make up around 15%, the rest is State subsidized.

This isn't "Crazy Right Wing" stats, this is a pretty easy thing to look up...NPR doesn't hide where its funding comes from.

[Benny B]

About 50% comes from private funding. The remaining 50% comes from Federal grants and State subsidies. Federal grants make up around 15%, the rest is State subsidized.

This isn't "Crazy Right Wing" stats, this is a pretty easy thing to look up...NPR doesn't hide where its funding comes from.

incorrect, sorry

[Soul Crusher]

Michael Barone: NPR’s intolerant firing of Juan Williams
Washington Examiner ^ | 10/21/10 | Michael Barone


By now you have heard the astonishing and dismaying news that NPR has fired Juan Williams for making the following comment on the O’Reilly program on Fox News Channel.

“I mean, 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.”

As Clive Crook has noted, back in 1993 Jesse Jackson said

“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

Of course neither statement is bigoted. And it is apparent from Juan Williams’s further statements on O’Reilly that his feeling of worry or nervousness is, as in Jackson’s case, painful to him. Many if not all readers feel the same way. We’re all aware that most identifiable Muslims on planes, like most young black men on city streets, are peaceful and unmenacing. But we also know who hurled those planes into buildings on September 11.

I’ve known Juan Williams for 28 years. In 1982, when I joined the Washington Post’s editorial page staff, I took over what had been Juan’s office and his telephone number, as he was moving from the editorial side of the paper back to the news side. In the preceding weeks, Juan had been working on stories about prostitution in Washington, and during the first several weeks I received some pretty weird telephone calls—something we’ve laughed about ever since. Over the years I’ve...


(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Arnold jr]

incorrect, sorry

"The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the parent company of PBS and NPR, received $420 million in taxpayer funds in 2010"
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/10/21/npr-seeks-defuse-uproar-williams-firing-critics-congress-defund-network/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews%2FKTvS+%28FOXNews.com%29

NPR states only 2% of their money comes from federal grants, OK fine, maybe I was off on the percentage of federal money, but you still have to include money given to NPR from the states in the form of grants...pretty much the same thing, meaning, money is taken from you and given to NPR. In another statement today NPR said it receives 10% of it's funding in Federal grants...so that's a little fishy.



Now this is funny, in the past 24hrs the Wiki page on NPR funding has been completely rewritten. As of this time yesterday the first sentence stated NPR receives approximately 40% of it's funding from private donations, 16% from federal grants and the rest from the individual states. Flash forward to today, and that first sentence is gone and is replaced with a sentence that says NPR receives no federal funding.

[Soul Crusher]

We should not be paiying any of this.  Same with the NEA.   

[Dos Equis]

They shouldn't get any taxpayer dollars.

[Soul Crusher]

Video: Dem Congressman: Juan Williams Is “Un-American”
Eyeblast TV / The Blast ( Media Research Center) ^ | 10/25/2010

Posted on Monday, October 25, 2010 12:07:13 PM by blog.Eyeblast.tv

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) appeared on the Ed Schultz show and said Juan Williams is ‘Un-American’ and people like him contribute to ‘profiling and harassing Americans’ for his comments last week on Muslim airline passengers. Schultz agreed and said the Congressman’s comments were ‘right on the mark’.

Williams responded to his firing by saying NPR was looking for a reason to get rid of him, and jumped all over the comments to do so.


(Excerpt) Read more at blog.eyeblast.tv ...

[Dos Equis]

Video: Dem Congressman: Juan Williams Is “Un-American”
Eyeblast TV / The Blast ( Media Research Center) ^ | 10/25/2010

Posted on Monday, October 25, 2010 12:07:13 PM by blog.Eyeblast.tv

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) appeared on the Ed Schultz show and said Juan Williams is ‘Un-American’ and people like him contribute to ‘profiling and harassing Americans’ for his comments last week on Muslim airline passengers. Schultz agreed and said the Congressman’s comments were ‘right on the mark’.

Williams responded to his firing by saying NPR was looking for a reason to get rid of him, and jumped all over the comments to do so.


(Excerpt) Read more at blog.eyeblast.tv ...

No wonder nobody watches his show. 

[Dos Equis]

Good.

Top NPR official stepping down
Ellen Weiss agrees to step down as senior vice president for news after 28 years with the radio network, which just finished an investigation into last year's firing of news analyst Juan Williams.
By James Rainey, Los Angeles Times
January 7, 2011
 
The top news official at National Public Radio announced Thursday that she would leave her post, as the news outlet concluded an investigation into last year's firing of news analyst Juan Williams.

Ellen Weiss agreed to step down as senior vice president for news after 28 years with the radio network. Weiss had fired Williams for his comments on Fox News about fearing some Muslims who board airliners with him.

The Williams' termination set off a furor and an admission by NPR Chief Executive Vivian Schiller that Williams had been let go too quickly, without a face-to-face meeting. The NPR board began a review and announced the results Thursday.

Save Up to 90%: Sign up for our free daily e-mail to get in on exclusive deals around L.A. Powered by Groupon. Subscribe Now.

Schiller has been admonished for her part in the controversy and will not receive a bonus for 2010, according to a statement from the NPR board that was e-mailed to employees Thursday afternoon. She will remain in her post, though, and received a vote of confidence from the NPR board of directors, according to the statement.

FOR THE RECORD: The article on Ellen Weiss' departure as senior vice president for news at NPR incorrectly quoted Fox News host Bill O'Reilly. In discussing a controversy over a proposal to build a Muslim cultural center in downtown Manhattan O'Reilly said, "Muslims killed us on 9/11." The Times inadvertently rendered the quote, from the ABC program "The View," as " Muslims really killed us on 9/11."

"The Board has expressed confidence in Vivian Schiller's leadership going forward. She accepted responsibility as CEO and cooperated fully with the review process," the statement read. "The Board, however, expressed concern over her role in the termination process and has voted that she will not receive a 2010 bonus."

The statement also said that "concerns regarding the speed and handling of the termination process" led the board to recommend other actions "with regard to management involved in Williams' contract termination." It did not explicitly say whether those actions concerned Weiss but that seemed evident when she tendered her resignation.

Weiss called her decision to step down Thursday as the top news executive at National Public Radio "extremely hard" but declined to either criticize NPR or back away from her firing of Williams. Weiss, 51, would have hit her 29th anniversary at NPR next month, stressed that she did not make the decision to fire Williams alone, referring to Schiller's approval of the firing.

"What I would say is that the decision to terminate the Juan Williams contract by NPR, of which I was a participant, was based on the highest journalistic standards," Weiss said Thursday.

The departure of Weiss and the board's announcement that it would revamp its ethics rules are bound to resurrect the controversy that exploded around cable television and the blogosphere late in October.

Conservatives can be expected to renew their calls to cut government funding for public radio — an action that could gain traction with a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Liberals likely will be infuriated at blowback for the ouster of Williams, who they believed went easy on their conservative opponents.

The controversy began with an appearance Williams made in late October on the Fox News program "The O'Reilly Factor." Conservative host Bill O'Reilly had recently appeared on the ABC program "The View," and said that "the Muslims really killed us on 9/11," causing two of the co-hosts to walk off in protest of a statement they considered bigoted.

O'Reilly asked Williams, one of his regular guests, to comment on his thoughts on Muslims. Williams said "political correctness" shouldn't stop Americans from expressing their real fears about terrorism. "When I get on a plane, I got to tell you," Williams added, "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."

Two days later, Weiss called Williams and fired him for violating a provision in the NPR ethics guidelines against its news staff expressing personal opinions. NPR journalists, the code says, "should not participate in shows…that encourage punditry and speculation rather than fact-based analysis."

Though Williams had been warned about opinion-making before, the radio network seemed to apply the rule unequally, letting some of its other personalities offer opinions on Fox and other outlets. The one-time Washington Post journalist reacted furiously, saying he had been censored.

He soon had a full-time job at Fox, where he reportedly will receive $2 million over three years. Fox News chief Roger Ailes used the incident to trumpet the conservative network as a haven for diversity of opinion.

Schiller agreed to Williams' termination and defended it, given the commentator's opinion making. But she soon increased critics' outrage by suggesting Williams should direct his complaints to his "psychiatrist or his publicist."

Schiller then apologized, conceded the firing had been too hasty. A couple of weeks later NPR board Chairman Dave Edwards announced the outside review by Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a multi-national law firm with offices in Washington, where NPR is based.

The review assessed not only Schiller, but Weiss. It reviewed e-mails from the principals, including those Williams exchanged with O'Reilly, preparing for their joint discussion about Muslims on the Fox program. NPR does not plan to release Weil's report. The board's statement expressed "concerns regarding the speed and handling of the termination process" and said that as a result it had "recommended that certain actions be taken with regard to management involved in Williams' contract termination."

The statement did not explicitly name Weiss but one person familiar with the review said Weiss was under pressure to leave as a result of the investigation.

In the memo from the board to employees Thursday, NPR said it tried, but failed, to get Williams to participate in the review.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-npr-20110107,0,7743574.story

[Dos Equis]

 

JUAN WILLIAMS: It's Time to Defund NPR
By Juan Williams
Published March 14, 2011
FoxNews.com


It just keeps happening. NPR's leadership keeps tripping over its microphone wires and then asking everybody else to plug them back in.

I know everybody thinks I must be in a vindictive mood, celebrating the sudden departure of NPR CEO Vivian Schiller after her hand-picked personal fundraiser was caught on tape disparaging Tea Party activists, Jews and taking more shots at me. I'm human and do have some thoughts but it's okay to keep them to myself.

I will not slander her in the way that she impugned my intellect and my integrity with condescending comments after my firing. She said my comments on Fox News violated journalistic ethics and should have been kept between "him and his psychiatrist or his publicist." Schiller's missteps have been very public and all too visible to the world, allowing everyone to draw their own conclusions about her.

I'm not being vindictive when I say that NPR leadership had become ingrown and arrogant to the point that they lost sight of journalism as the essential product of NPR. People like Schiller and Ellen Weiss, the head of news for NPR, who made it her life's work to fire me, came to think of themselves as smarter than anyone else. They felt no need to answer to any critic. No other point of view had any importance to them. They came to personify anti-intellectual resentment and arrogance in journalism. Any approach at variance with their own was considered traitorous and a basis for exiling them to the Gulag or in my case, firing me.

The recent videotape showing NPR chief fundraiser Ron Schiller (no relation to Vivian Schiller) is just an open microphone on what I've been hearing from NPR top executives and editors for years. They are willing to do anything in service to any liberal with money and then they will turn around and in self-righteous indignation claim that they have cleaner hands than anybody in the news business who accepts advertising or expresses a point of view.

Ron Schiller's performance on videotape -- which included lecturing two young men pretending to be Muslims on how to select wine -- is a "South Park" worthy caricature of the American liberal as an effete, Volvo-driving, wine-sipping, NPR-listening dunderhead.

The work of NPR's many outstanding journalists is barely an afterthought to leadership with this mindset and obsessed with funding. NPR has many, very good journalists. But they are caught in a game where they are trying to please a leadership that doesn't want to hear stories that contradict the official point of view. I'm not just talking about conservatives but also the far-left, the poor, anybody who didn't fit into leadership's design of NPR as the official voice of comfortable, liberal-leaning upper-income America.

This just confirms my belief that it is time for our government to get out of the business of funding NPR. NPR's management had been wanting to not only maintain current funding but expand the network to create a much larger BCC-style institution in the United States. The idea to me of government-funded media doesn't fit the United States. No matter the good intentions about protecting journalists from the excesses of the marketplace such as sensationalism and the dominance of entertainment news, journalists should not be doing news to please any party or any elected official -- out of fear of losing funding. And the tremendous variety of sources for news -- in print, broadcast, on the radio and on the Internet, does not suggest that there's any reason for the U.S. government to make a priority of supporting NPR while cutting funding for school breakfast programs or college scholarships.

The New York Times, the Washington Post, Fox News may have budget struggles but they do fine journalism while accepting advertising. Over the last several years, NPR's leadership had become so obsessed with the money issue, as evidenced by Ron Schiller's behavior, that it had started to corrupt the news gathering process because non-profit fundraising has devolved into an underworld cesspool.
The result is that NPR's leadership under the likes of Weiss and the two Schillers has been diminishing their own brand. They created an anti-intellectual environment that took delight and pride in censoring journalists like me for honestly admitting that people dressed in Muslim garb make me nervous at airports. They had lost slight of promoting debates and providing information that is essential for people who want to be well-informed as citizens of a thriving democracy.

I am still insulted when I hear Ron Schiller, no doubt reflecting his boss Vivian Schiller, still making the case that my firing as a good thing, it was just handled badly. This was not a process problem. I said nothing, I violated no journalistic standard that should have resulted in me being fired. It's only in the very small world and small thinking of NPR's leadership that appearing on Fox News Channel and speaking about a feeling in the context of a larger debate somehow makes for a bad journalist who needs to be muzzled.

My hope is that the great journalists who are at NPR will carry on and that the NPR audience will support them, especially at the level of local member stations where in many places NPR is a community treasure. Those stations often provide coverage that is hard to find as local newspaper and TV coverage declines due to economic pressures.

So, I'm still an NPR fan, but I'm no fan of the self-serving, self-righteous thinking that is at the top level of NPR in Washington and that has corrupted a once great brand.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/03/14/juan-williams-latest-npr-scandal-disgrace-time-defund-npr/?test=faces

[Soul Crusher]