Juan Williams
Juan Williams shouldn’t have been working for NPR in the first place. That’s not because he’s too Fox-y, it’s because he’s too thick. He doesn’t have an interesting mind, so he doesn’t have interesting things to say.
NPR quite likes that, up to a point – it doesn’t want its people to sound “too” intelligent or curious or thoughtful. I know that because almost none of them do. A Nina Totenberg probably couldn’t get hired there today – she sounds too sharp and too unplacating. NPR seems to want only people who won’t intimidate listeners by sounding possibly cleverer than the listeners are.
I suspect that’s why they liked Juan Williams in the first place – he has that warm, furry, cozy, slow, soporific note to his voice that nearly all NPR on-air people do. But it turns out he’s just soporific without being “nice.”
My first awareness of Williams (apart from knowing he wrote Eyes on the Prize – which was a pretty impressive credential) was when he replaced Ray Suarez on NPR’s show Talk of the Nation. I had been listening to that show pretty regularly, because Suarez was brilliant – he did a lot of homework, he was interested, he was curious, he could think on his feet, he gave a damn – he was just great. Williams was a shocking contrast. He obviously did no homework at all, he wasn’t curious, his questions were random and uninteresting, and he couldn’t even understand what his guests said. He would say, “So you’re saying X,” and while I ground my teeth in fury the hapless guest would say, “No, I’m saying Y,” and re-state what she had just said.
He’s just thick. He’s no good. NPR should never have hired him as an “analyst” in the first place. They should stop with the cozy approach and dare to hire intelligent people, however scare or intimidating they may sound. People like that will have no interest in being on Fox.
I’ve been listening to NPR since law school, back in the late ’70s. With a few exceptions, like Ms. Totenberg, Peter Overby, and some of the science and financial reporters (Christopher Joyce, John Hamilton, Adam Davidson, Chana Joffe-Walt) most of the really terrific, intelligent, and super-creative personnel at NPR seem to be working off the air, or on not-widely-distributed NPR programs produced at local stations, or in the backwaters of American Public Media.
Two cases in point: Robert Krulwich of WNYC’s RadioLab, and Ira Glass, formerly of NPR and now with WBEZ and APM.
I can’t hear Talk of the Nation over the airwaves in this part of the U.S., so I’ve never heard Juan Williams as a host. I never had a visceral dislike for his phone-it-in pundit’s style, but I won’t miss him, either.
As for Mr. Williams’s on-air comment about feeling uneasy or nervous or fearful in the presence of Muslims in airport gate areas, I don’t share those sensations. If I see fellow passengers wearing Hasidic Jewish or Punjabi Sikh or Muslim garb, I take notice, but that’s about it. What would it take for one or more passengers “dressed as Muslims” to make me feel alarmed or fearful”? Probably something like standing up during the flight and shouting Allahu akbar.
Call me prejudiced, but as some anonymous wit once said, without my hands and my prejudices I could not make it across my living room in the dark.
For my money his articles in NYT and TIME were hardly worth the read. Almost every time you would reach the bottom and then think “What, that’s it?” So yeah, they should have sacked him a long time ago, but I don’t think their hiring practices will change anytime soon. There are truly to few intelligent commentators on the media these days, but NPR has not enough spine to change that.
When I first heard the headlines, I was quite happy to hear that Juan Williams was out. My experience agrees with yours. I never found that he had anything interesting to say. And yes, it was his stint at Talk of the Nation that first led me to that opinion of him.
Several of my friends have had to listen to my ” Is NPR getting stupider?” rant, so I won’t go into it here. I stopped listening to “Talk of the Nation” after Suarez left. I only listen in the morning any more because our local affiliate employs some good reporters who do good coverage of local issues, and because they do the most up to date morning traffic reports.
I would agree with Jeff D on most points, but nothing gets me out of bed quicker than Davidson’s and Joffe-Walt’s chipper cross-talk on matters economic. All that is missing is the sound of their gum snapping.
Oh feel free to get into an “is NPR getting stupider?” rant here. Because it is.
I thought this is exactly how you’re supposed to host an NPR show
http://www.hulu.com/watch/4156/saturday-night-live-nprs-delicious-dish-schweddy-balls
Maybe Juan Williams really meant ‘Muslin dress’!
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I know this is only tangentially related, but I feel *exactly* the same way about some of Robert Price’s recent PoI shows. That one on abortion was just one long cringeful of him throwing mushy, softball questions and letting Jen Roth get away with straw man after straw man.
It’s fine to talk about whether you like Williams or not. I happen to.
But that’s a secondarybissue. Don’t you think (at least I will be disappointed if do) that NPR was totally asinine in how it fired him? And made a nothing issue out of Williams and shifted the issue so that it was, is and will be a big deal about NPR. Inane and incompetent. No sense of strategic thinking.
Then again such incompetence might be in line with your sense of the quality of the newer NPR staff.
Robert Price makes for a good interviewee on biblical topics but not a good interviewer. In contrast even Chris Mooney seems like a decent interviewer albeit a very different type of host compared to DJ Grothe. The problem with Mooney’s approach is not a lack of intellectual ability but the whole ‘political’ aspect of his work – sticking to ‘politically correct’ (in the scientific sense) topics like climate change and anti-vaccination. He should change the name of the program to “Point of Authority” since there is very little genuine inquiry any more, its all argument from authority stuff. Even those of us who are actually on his side in a general political sense find this approach incredibly grating.
What bothers me is not whether Williams was thick or worked for Fox. This dustup seems to be about his making a statement, admittedly a personal opinion, and quite possibly of debatable quality, that offended some political correctness standard at NPR.
This is concern because NPR (unlike FOX) is committed by it’s charter to cover a broad range of opinion.
I don’t think NPR is getting stupider – it’s become quite right-wing and that makes it look like stupider. Juan Williams fit right into the new NPR instituted when Bush parachuted in a republican apparatchik as CEO and a bunch of refugees from VOA right-wing propaganda radio got hired. After that Bob Edwards was fired and NPR started slipping down the slope. Recent studies of how it operates indicate that NPR “news” stories quote right-wingers many more times than left wingers and you’ll rarely hear a centrist…….now with people like Mara Liasson, another commentator on Fox, and Barbara Bradley Haggarty, an avowed christian proselytizer, about the only things still worth hearing (sometimes) are Fresh Air & Diane Rehm show. Even that “marketplace” show they have is generally a crock…..
Juan Williams will be replaced by another republican voice and as long as the people running NPR now stay in place nothing will change.
My “rant” about NPR includes the above (thankfully, I am not alone) and that English there is a forgotten language; but, Language, Truth and Logic go hand in hand. On the other hand, I would like to add Tom Ashbrook of On Point as a good voice there.
@9
Whether I think Juan Williams is bad at unscripted radio because he’s bad at thinking is not a secondary issue on this particular thread, because it’s what the post is about. The post was deliberately not about the reasons for his firing, it was about things I consider much more basic. Since he lacks precisely the qualities that one needs to do good talk radio, it’s odd and interesting that NPR hired him. It interests me that NPR seems to prefer stupid or stupid-sounding people; I wonder how conscious that is, and what the reasons for it are. It seems connected to the US’s notorious vein of anti-intellectualism. That interests me.
And the issue isn’t whether I like Williams, it’s what his talents are. I’m not talking about popularity or likability – which is, I suspect, exactly what NPR was doing when it hired him, and why it went so wrong – I’m talking about intellectual qualities, which are needed for a job of this kind. Suarez has them, Williams doesn’t.
For what it’s worth, Marketplace and Marketplace Morning Report are not NPR programs. There has been some migration and cross-pollination of editorial and engineering staffs over the years between American Public Media (which produces those 2 shows) and NPR.
I just heard Juan Williams interviewed on Diane Rehm’s show this morning. Didn’t hear anything to change my opinions.
I live in Ireland and never heard of Juan Williams until the recent brouhaha. Whether you agree with what he said or not is irrelevant. (Personally, I think that anyone who doesn’t experience a frisson of nervousness on seeing people in full Muslim garb on a plane is dead to all feeling.) Whether or not he is stupid and incurious is also irrelevant. Williams has committed the cardinal sin of offending the Religion of Peace. In doing that he has articulated what many of us feel but do not dare to say. I would have thought that B&W and its readers would be the first to defend him.
@16 – first point – yes, this is a parochial issue, but I include quite a lot of stuff from Ireland as well as other places, so it kind of evens out.
Second point – I don’t think it’s at all irrelevant to the point I wanted to make in this particular thread, that Williams is conspicuously bad at the job he was hired to do. I think it’s interesting that NPR chose to hire him for that job; interesting and, given its status and role, important. I think it’s interesting and important for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with Islam.
And I don’t much feel like defending him, precisely because I think he’s bad at what he does. There is another reason however, which is that I think Fox is a bad joke as a “news” organization, so I don’t want to defend Fox or a Fox journalist for that reason too. Juan Williams is not Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
I’m not saying it was right to fire him for what he said (not least because what he said was just a setup for a change of mind, as in the case of Shirley Sherrod), I’m just saying I don’t feel like defending him. I think he should do a different job.
Getting fired for being honest. That was his biggest mistake. We can’t have honesty in the media, that’s not going to sell stuff.
@17–you misunderstand my first point. I said that I had never heard of Juan Williams merely to make clear that I have no idea if he was good or bad at his job for NPR. I don’t regard his firing as a parochial issue at all because militant Islam and the suffocating political correctness which prevents us discussing it is a problem for the entire western world.
As regards not defending him because you think he is bad at what he does — isn’t it necessary and right to defend even those you dislike when they are fired for expressing an opinion?
It’s interesting coincidence that you chose to focus on Juan Williams’ skill at the same time as the NPR flap is unfolding.
[smites brow] David, of course it’s not a coincidence. Williams is in the news. I would have said this 14 years ago or whenever it was that he took over Talk of the Nation from Suarez, but I didn’t have a website then.
bythesea, ah right. Mind you I wasn’t annoyed by the parochial charge (which you didn’t make), just clarifying.
As for your question – well, no. It might be necessary and right to say “fire him for other reasons” or similar; or to separate the two entirely (which I’m pretty much doing, implicitly). I don’t think it’s necessary and right to defend someone you think is seriously bad at an important job. His badness makes me angry. It sets a bad example; it sends a bad message. I dislike NPR’s tendency to go for the apparently cuddly and non-threatening instead of the clever and thoughtful. Since NPR is such a powerful influence on the culture, I think this matters.
So do its firing policies, of course. Yes, I think this firing was ridiculous. But it’s NPR that confused the issue by making such a dud hire in the first place.
I think the reason NP hired Williams in the first place was to try to get rid of the label of “national liberal radio” that was hung around their neck by the republicans. NPR had a habit of reporting facts back then and facts always tend to make the republicans look bad. The republicans could have cleaned up their act, told the truth a lot more and played fairer but instead they did what they always do – mounted a vicious attack. Hence NPR hired Williams and others as analysts to provide a conspicuous right-wing “balance”. All it did was provide a lot of right-wing spin and few if any facts…then came the Bush proteges to provide yet more “balance”…….The reason Williams comes across as not smart enough to be an analyst on NPR is that right-wingers aren’t smart. After all Buckley is still revered by republicans as an intellectual…..
@22
Could you please offer some examples that Wiliams is “right-wing?”
There are plenty of conservatives who can talk intelligently in a way that is wholly beyond Williams. I don’t think that’s it.
@22
Just FYI, I do not believe that Williams in any reasonable way coud be considered a conservative, much less “right wing.”
Willing to change my view if I get new information.