JONATHAN CHAIT JULY 21, 2011
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Juan Williams accuses National Public Radio of being in thrall to political correctness while simultaneously playing the race card against it:
“It is a very elitist and in this case white institution that I think is struggling with the changing demographics of American society,” he said. ...
In the book, Williams argues that neither his firing nor his previous fights with NPR management were isolated incidents, but rather part of a wider resurgence of what he calls “political correctness” in culture today.
“You are not supposed to say certain things in political conversation and I think it is political correctness, like the walking dead, back from the grave,” he said.
Nice trick there.
I also empathize with Williams' frustration with the whiteness of NPR. Naturally this explains his decision to go to Fox News.
5 comments
Ah, but see, Fox News isn't "Elitist", so that's okay. They're corporatist, wealthist, conservatist and dogmatist, but not elitist. I wonder when science and reason and considering many sides of a question became characterised as "elite", and when that became a bad thing.
- AllanL5
July 21, 2011 at 11:24am
Juan Williams is a self-parody. There are so many of them these days. OMG. The caps are gone but now we have a barrage of extremely clunky -ist adjectives dangled in front of us, some of them seemingly neologisms, and egregious ones at that.
- liberalref
July 21, 2011 at 11:48am
Actually, Williams's problem was one that frequently tends to afflict Fox News' token liberals (see Colmes, Alan; everyone on Hannity's Great American Panel) -- having an inability to push back against right-wing talking points and attempting to ingratiate oneself with the right-wing host. Williams did this countless times at Fox, so much so that the typical Fox viewer is simply confirmed in his view that liberals are spineless weasels. I would think that, for NPR's management, Williams's attempt to ingratiate himself with his hosts by conceding the points about the Iraq War, the Bush tax cuts or the "failured stimulus" were simply straws that piled up on the camel's back. Once Williams ever-so-graciously conceded the racist point that he is also scared of people in Muslim dress at the airport, the camel's back was finally broken.
- wildboy
July 21, 2011 at 12:12pm
NPR is enthrall to political correctness and Faux Nooz is part of a criminal enterprise that the hacks into the phones of murdered children and fallen soldiers. I'll take door number one.
- tmmats
July 21, 2011 at 1:10pm
Mark Halperin disappeared from MSNBC for insultingly calling the President a "dick." I think the politically correct term would have been "member" as in "member of the communist party."
- Nusholtz
July 21, 2011 at 1:32pm