National Public Radio honchos fired news analyst Juan Williams last week, and now people want the network’s public funding yanked?
Where were these folks in 1994? They’re about 16 years late. But, as the saying goes, better late than never, perhaps.
Let’s recap the events in the Williams matter. Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly went on “The View” and expressed his feelings about a proposed mosque being built near the site of where the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers once stood.
Long story short: O’Reilly’s against the mosque, and he explained why: “Muslims killed us on 9-11.”
That led to a brief exchange with Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar, a couple of the way-too-many co-hosts of “The View”. After the exchange, Goldberg and Behar stormed off the set in protest of O’Reilly’s “bigotry.”
If I were a Muslim, here or anywhere in the world, I’d react to Goldberg and Behar having my back in one of three ways.
I’d change my religion; I’d slash my wrists; or I’d change my religion, then slash my wrists.
Flash forward a few days later. O’Reilly is discussing the incident on his Fox show, with Williams as a guest.
Williams tries to tell O’Reilly that his comments were a blanket condemnation of all Muslims. O’Reilly responds that he realizes most American Muslims are loyal, law-abiding citizens who abhor terrorism. (If he realizes that, then he must surely realize how egregiously wrong his comments on “The View” were.)
Williams stuck to his guns, but admitted that he feels “nervous” when he boards an airliner with Muslims who are dressed in Muslim attire.
Two days later, NPR officials gave Williams the ax, issuing some pious drivel about how Williams’ comments “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR,” according to the network’s Web site.
Clearly NPR’s execs are hoping Americans don’t remember that episode from 1994, when airing the views of a convicted cop killer weren’t inconsistent at all with the network’s “editorial practices and standards.”
Yes, that would be one Mumia Abu-Jamal, who, on the night of Dec. 9, 1981, fired several fatal shots into the body of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Police found Abu-Jamal with a bullet wound from Faulkner’s gun near the officer’s corpse.
Abu-Jamal was convicted and sentenced to death in 1982. He managed to gain supporters who truly believe that somebody else shot Faulkner, who then mysteriously and for no good reason shot Abu-Jamal and that the latter is innocent.
So in 1994 the producer of NPR’s show “All Things Considered” thought it would be a peachy idea to have Abu-Jamal give monthly commentaries about prison life. He was to be paid $175 per broadcast.
Those commentaries never aired, but not because they were inconsistent with NPR’s editorial standards and practices. They never aired because Maureen Faulkner, Daniel Faulkner’s widow, and the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police got wind of what NPR planned to do and turned up the heat.
Had there been no public outcry, no pressure, then Abu-Jamal’s commentaries would have aired as planned, and the network today would be known as “Cop Killer Radio,” not NPR.
That was the time to stop taxpayer dollars from going to NPR. The network has a reputation for being a left-wing body with left-wing biases, and that’s perfectly fine. But they should be who they are with donations from their listeners, not taxpayers.
Defenders of NPR say that only 2 percent of the network’s budget comes from tax dollars. Fine. That means they don’t really need the money.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
