L'Affaire Juan Williams as Seen from Outside

The issue around what can and cannot be said by journalists is drawing notice among other public broadcasters.

I was part of an interview program about whether journalists should be allowed to express opinions last weekend on BBC Radio's Newshour. Seth Lipsky from the Wall Street Journal was also part of the discussion. Lipsky has written that NPR and indeed all public broadcasting deserve to be defunded since, in his opinion, government funds deform the journalistic landscape.

I think that's highly questionable, but we did agree that news organizations have the right to ask their journalists to refrain from personal comments. Mr. Lipsky as an editorialist and opinion leader, has a somewhat broader view of what's allowable than I do.

The program came just a few days after the BBC World Service broadcast a phone-in show about prospective cuts to the BBC. The program, called "World - Have Your Say" took calls from around the world with listeners begging the BBC not to reduce its service.

The in-studio guest from BBC management assured anxious listeners that the BBC is so admired because it takes no position on matters of public controversy. It tries, he explained, to explore the issues rather than take sides. That may be a highly subjective viewpoint, but at least, it's an official one.

And the CBC's Washington correspondent Neil MacDonald has offered his perspective here.
He states that Juan Williams deserved to be fired when he placed NPR in an embarrassing situation by expressing an anti-Muslim bias. (Juan backtracked somewhat, but the damage was done and the fallout from his dismissal is still causing ructions in and around the public radio community in this volatile pre-election period).

By way of explanation, Neil MacDonald - it must be said -  is no management toady and hardly a stranger to controversy of a particular kind. His reporting from the Middle East and from Ottawa has been robust, to say the least. MacDonald usually bases his conclusions on the evidence, even if some viewers may find his perspectives to be highly flammable or at the very least, contrarian.

So his analysis on Juan Williams and NPR is a bit counter-intuitive. His take (and mine) is that if you take the King's shilling, some limitations invariably come with that, including a limit on one's own freedom to speak your mind.

Media Organizations: Is Firing Troublesome Employees a Trend?

A friend in DC asks the question: Do you think journalism is cleansing itself with this recent spate of firings - Williams, Sanchez, Thomas, the CNN ME bureau chief, Octavia someone?  Or are these unrelated?

My response: Interesting...I think that a couple of things are going on...One, there is
clearly a limit to how much license a media organization will allow its employees.

I don't think this is because of some sudden epiphany in management offices
that they need to get back to first principles about serving citizens with respect and proportionality (although one can always hope).

I suspect that money is a major factor.

The Times recently reported that Glenn Beck's show is losing ratings and advertisers because of his crazy talk. Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch may be wondering how far to push this.

CNN is also losing viewers possibly because it's trying to be more like Fox. It hasn't found a way to establish a niche in a unique way that recreates its original brand and following. Larry King can't retire too soon. Parker and Spitzer might just work even though part of the attraction is the "euuww" factor. Anderson Cooper's ratings are also down.

NPR's ratings on the other hand, keep going up. Some of the stations' recent fundraising drives have been the most successful ever.

So will Juan's firing have any impact on NPR's ability to raise money?

I doubt it. Station managers, the NPR board and the big machers have always told NPR management that they find NPR journalists on Fox (including correspondent Mara Liasson who is more measured than Juan but still...) to be distasteful and an embarrassment.

Station managers will put pressure on NPR President Vivian Schiller to be more careful
next time. My guess is that not many people will lament Juan's departure, just the way it was handled. So far, Schiller has not made many (if any) mistakes and the stations love her for how she's prepared to co-operate, compared to the previous regime which increasingly ignored the stations.

The big unknown will be how this will play politically. The right always love to use NPR as a piñata, but since NPR takes less than 2% from CPB, there's not a lot of leverage there.

The stations are more vulnerable (they take closer to 13% of their funding from CPB) and a Republican Congress might relish taking on public radio. They tried and failed under Gingrich in 1994, but these days, with the Palin-led pitchfork and torches brigade, all bets are off.

Juan Down. NPR Fires Long Time Liberal Lightning Rod Juan Williams

Juan Williams is a well known Washington-based writer, journalist and commentator. On NPR, he offered political analysis that mostly suited public radio's appetite for reasonable and contextual political observations.

It was when he appeared on Fox News that his tone changed.

Williams has a Zelig-like ability. He can sound like NPR when he was on public radio, yet voice Fox-like observations on Fox programs which appealed to the red-meat Fox audiences.

He once stated (on Fox) that Michelle Obama's "... got this Stokely Carmichael-in-a designer -dress thing going. If she starts talking . . . her instinct is to start with this blame America, you know, I'm the victim. If that stuff starts to coming out, people will go bananas and she'll go from being the new Jackie O. to being something of an albatross."

On NPR, his tone was more measured, largely because Williams knows what his audience will tolerate and more often because his scripts were vetted in advance by NPR producers - something that I suspect may not happen as frequently on Fox.


Over the years as NPR's Ombudsman (2000-2006), I received many complaints about Juan's comments on Fox; relatively few about his commentaries on NPR. Management was willing to tolerate Williams on Fox because of a respect for his First Amendment rights - something I think was in fact a deformation of that Amendment, rather than an affirmation, but that's another subject for another posting.

The final straw for NPR management occurred yesterday when Williams appeared on Bill O'Reilly's show on Fox.

O'Reilly, always the master provocateur asked Williams if he agreed that Muslims caused 9/11. Williams agreed and then went farther: "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."

That did it for NPR: Williams was fired after the public broadcaster and the ombuds, Alicia Shepard received hundreds of complaints.

With CNN's recent firing of Ric Sanchez and now NPR's firing of Juan Williams, it appears that media organizations are finally stating that there are limits to free speech at least when their corporate reputation is at stake. Robust civic discourse is one thing; bigotry disguised as fair comment is another. Both CNN and NPR showed they can understand the difference.

Serendipitously, this could not have happened at a better time for NPR management: just after NPR announced that it did not want its employees to attend the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally in Washington next weekend (and took considerable flack from liberal bloggers), Juan Williams is fired for his anti-Muslim statements.

This has the dual advantage of placating (if such a thing is possible) both conservatives and liberals in this high-charged atmosphere.

Sometime, it seems management just gets lucky.

Should NPR Ban Its Employees from Political Demos? Yes We Can.

Two pre-midterm election demonstrations in Washington DC are scheduled for the end of this month. Actually they are likely one demo (with the cheeky title of "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear"), but held under the aegis of two cable news liberals - Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Both NPR and the Washington Post have publicly told their employees that they may not attend, unless they are there in a professional capacity.

This has naturally resulted in an interesting fulmination about the fairness of this fiat from liberal bloggers. Arianna Huffington has denounced this in her blog as an affront to sanity...

Jeff Jarvis also takes a whack at NPR for restricting its employees and notes that NPR apparently did not have to ban its workers from attending the recent "Restoring Honor" Glenn Beck rally on the National Mall. Jarvis makes the assumption that the good liberal media employees of NPR and the Washington Post wouldn't be seen dead at a Tea Party party. He may be right.

What is lost in this discussion is the right and obligation of journalists to behave as citizens. Regardless of who pays your salary, you still have the right to vote, participate and think about how you want the democracy to be. Full disclosure: as NPR's VP of News and later as its first ombuds, I also warned NPR employees about not appearing to give NPR's imprimatur to political causes. As the political temperature rises, NPR management is right to do so again.

The complication comes when well known journalists start to engage in politics. They have every right to do so, but a media organization also has the right to protect its reputation as a reliable witness to events. It's unfair, but I would argue that well-known journalists who are known to the public should avoid public affiliations while they are still in the employ of the company. Editors, engineers and even managers who have no public profile may participate but they must not do so as representatives of NPR.

What Huffington objects to is the sense that NPR journalism will self-censor its' reporting in order to achieve some sort of "neutrality."

I doubt that will happen.

The dangerous tendencies in American politics are emerging in their usual full-throated way and sunlight is always the best disinfectant.

I'm reminded of an argument I had when I was ombudsman at NPR. It involved an interview conducted by Terry Gross. She remains one of the finest radio journalists of her generation. But I was critical of her interview with Bill O'Reilly. After his usual bully-boy tactics didn't work with the fearless Terry, he stomped out of the studio. My only criticism was that she continued to ask her tough questions, even though he wasn't there to answer them.

Shortly thereafter, I got a blistering phonecall from Al Franken who berated me for half an hour for not supporting Terry. "You don't understand," said the future Minnesota senator, "Fairness doesn't work. We have to go after these guys by any means necessary."

I hope that NPR employees go to the Stewart-Colbert demonstration, just as I hope there were some NPR-ers at the Beck demo, if only to satisfy their curiosity. Journalists still need to experience what's happening outside the newsroom cocoon. Watching it on CNN is hardly a substitute.

If "fairness" doesn't work, pace Senator Franken, we are in much bigger trouble than we realize.

Us Vs. Them: The New Digital Divide

Some thoughts on how media are evolving were focused in a conversation with Mathew Ingram yesterday as we met in a downtown Toronto coffee bar.

Mathew is one of the more interesting thinkers about where media are headed as can be seen in a recent posting about how magazine apps are still "walled gardens" here.

There seems to be a limitless horizon for new approaches to social media: as the recession appears to recede, the outgoing tide is leaving some interesting new artifacts (aka apps) on the new digital shores.

The number of social media apps seems to proliferate daily: spot.us, ushahidi, SwiftRiver and ripple are a few that fell into my computer only recently. Like many other, I suffer from apps anguish, wondering if I can possibly keep up with them all. Dozens, if not thousands get invented and appear daily.

It's worth looking at the definition of an app: In computer science jargon, an application (or "app") is simply a program designed to help people perform an activity. An app differs from an operating system (which runs a computer), a utility (which performs maintenance or general-purpose chores), and a program language which creates the original program.

Depending on the activity for which it was designed, an app can manipulate text, numbers, graphics, or a combination of these elements. Some app packages offer considerable computing power by focusing on a single task, such as word processing; others, like integrated software offer somewhat less power but include several apps.

Inventive capitalism at its finest. Now a lot of smart people have taken to designing apps which then can be sold to large software firms who can market the apps to be sold to the rest of us.

But as a recent article in Wired magazine stated, the implication of apps and the promise of the Internet seem to be moving in opposite directions.

Apps as Mathew states, continue to segment society even as the Internet promised to create communities.

Dennis Haarsager (another very smart thinker about these things) recently wrote about how IP ("Internet Protocol") for public radio is changing as apps allow the traditional audience to access content in new ways.

What is being left behind is the sense of real community that public radio once created. Instead, apps are also increasing the centrifugal tendency to atomize and disconnect the audience from its larger sense of self.

While this may work for the business model, it may have unintended consequences for cohesive communities such as public radio that now are seeing their core values being dissipated in the rush to obtain the newest toys for the coolest kids.

Guinea: Voting Postponed. Democracy Denied

To update: the interim government in Guinea in West Africa has postponed the runoff election for president, previously scheduled for September 19. No date has been announced for the next round.* **

Although I'm not surprised, I am disappointed and I am sure that many Guinéens are as well. When I was in Conakry in June, people expressed such powerful hopes that the years of repression and dictatorship were about to end. The first round of voting happened peacefully and with a remarkable 80% turnout. The two remaining candidates vying for the ballot: Cellou Dalein Diallo who in the first round, on June 27, obtained 43.69% of the vote, and Alpha Condé, won 18.25% of the votes.

Not so in the lead up to September 19th: a number of people were killed in pre-voting violence.

The interim president Jean-Marie Doré decided to cancel the vote because as he claimed, not everyone in Guinea had received a ballot.

Hopefully, pressure from the European Union, and especially from France and the United States will help to set a new timetable.

But present day role of western powers can't undo the years of repression that has resulted in weak governance and an anti-democratic impulse. As one commentator noted, Africa doesn't need strong men; it needs strong institutions.

In Guinea, I saw that democracy appeared possible. That hope is still there, I'm sure.
_________________

*This just in: the next round of voting has been scheduled for October 19th.
** Another delay until November 9th. Reports of violence between groups resulted in the recent postponement.

The Firing of Rick Sanchez at CNN

It's the second time in a few months that a prominent CNN personality has been shown the door.

On July 8, 2010, Octavia Nasr was also summarily removed after tweeting that the late leader of Hizbollah was also a champion of women's rights in the Middle East. Nasr tried to add that the Grand Ayatollah Fadllalah was also profoundly anti-America and anti-Israel. Too late. The damage was done and CNN, already under pressure for its alleged pro-Palestinian reporting, fired her.

Now it's Rick Sanchez' turn.

Unlike Nasr's sin of omission, Sanchez' was a sin of commission: his shtick on CNN was specifically designed to be provocative and loud. He was the frequent target of John Stewart who effectively needled him to the point where Sanchez lost it on a talk radio show.

Sanchez accused Stewart of being a bigot (Sanchez is Cuban-American) and when pressed to explain, Sanchez hauled up the old canard - Jewish control of the media. Strike two.

There is no excuse for either Nasr or Sanchez to have committed these inexcusable breaches (although I tend to cut Nasr a bit of slack...she may not have fully appreciated just how deadly an unguided tweet could be). Sanchez just confirmed his blowhard status and now is paying the price. I note that when times get complicated, the conspiracy theorists tend to be heard more often. This is one of those times.

I do blame CNN: it allowed Sanchez (and others like him) on the air and seems unable to find its role, squeezed by the bloviators on Fox and the more thoughtful journalism to be found elsewhere on TV and radio.

CNN has long been an enabler for a number of right wing wannabees who once they see the profits to be made elsewhere, end up roosting on Fox or talk radio. CNN has no one to blame but itself for Sanchez' outbursts.

There is also a long tradition in American broadcasting of extreme opinions going back to Father Coughlin in Detroit in the 30s and 40s. Walter Winchell became equally paranoid in his later career and was one of the more effective red-baiters in the Cold War. Sanchez, Beck, O'Reilly and Limbaugh are entirely within that tradition.

If there is a glimmer anywhere in this, it's that the ranters appear to be losing their impact, in broadcast audience terms.

According to a terrific profile of Glenn Beck in last Sunday's New York Times magazine, by Mark Leibovich, Beck's numbers are dropping. His TV show now has a quarter hour cume of a little more than 2 million. Advertisers are fleeing as well. Fox's president, Roger Ailes doubts that Beck is still the same valuable media property these days.

Compare that to the CBS Evening News (still in 3rd place) with more than 8 million. Or NPR's All Things Considered with more than 13 million listeners.

The Tea Party may still be pouring, but the beverage appears to be losing its steam at least on TV.