I am sitting in O'Hare airport listening to the repeated announcements about the DHS security level - it is orange, should you be wondering. So, it seems apposite to comment on the latest media dust-up.
Juan Williams should not have lost his job for confessing his personal prejudices. We all have them. Some are more ignorant than others. And the ignorance of your prejudices changes with context. (Hence, even if the scare tactics of DHS are not meant to inflame prejudices, it is predictable that they do so.) So, here is something for Juan to ponder as he enjoys his new $2M gig with the Fox folks: given recent research demonstrating that engineers are over-represented among Islamicist types, perhaps we ought to worry when we spy fellow passengers of middle eastern descent wearing pocket protectors? They are asserting their identity as techno-geeks over everything else. Or perhaps we ought to work at keeping our prejudices in check. Williams's thoughts on Muslims are just ignorant. But they are no more ignorant than what passes for news reporting by npr's own Dina Temple-Raston on a regular basis. She sees terrorists - Muslim ones- lurking under the bed regularly and tends to simply parrot claims by any American official peddling fear and anxiety. So why just fire Juan?
According to npr they fired Williams for engaging in activity contrary to their commitment to objective journalism, or something like that. Well, Williams has been taking money from Fox for years. How is that consistent with objective journalism? Getting paid to consort with Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and other propagandists seems to me to have been sufficient grounds for separation.
And, by the way, this has nothing to do with George Soros. ... The folks at Fox seem to think that sponsors simply buy and sell mouthpieces everywhere and not just on their network.
