Muzzled (2 page)

Mary Katharine joined the debate to say that it is important for everyone to make the distinction between moderate and extreme Islam. She said conservative support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is predicated on the idea that the United States can help build up moderate Islamic elements in those countries and push out the extremists. I agreed with her and later added that we don’t want anyone attacked on American streets because “they heard rhetoric from Bill O’Reilly and they act crazy.” Bill complained that he was tired of “being careful” in talking about radical Muslim terrorists but agreed that the man who slashed the cabby was a “nut”
and said the same about the Florida pastor who wanted to burn the Koran.

My point in recounting the on-air debate blow by blow is to show that it was in keeping with the great American tradition of argument. It was a fair, full-throated, and honest discourse about an important issue facing the country. There was no bigotry expressed, no crude provocation, and no support for anti-Muslim sentiments of any kind. Just the opposite was true. I left the studio thinking I’d helped to dispel some of the prejudice toward Muslims and moved an important national conversation forward in some modest way.

The next day I flew to Chicago to give a speech to the leaders of a Catholic health-care system. It was a 7:00 a.m. flight, so the terminal at Reagan National Airport in DC was fairly empty when I arrived at around 6:00 a.m. It was easy for other travelers to pick me out as I waited at the newsstand and while I was in line to buy coffee. Several said they had seen the segment and told me their stories of being nervous on planes and trains when encountering people in Muslim garb. One young woman, who worked for a liberal senator, also thanked me for “manning up”—a hot political term at the end of the midterm campaign that year—about the danger of letting our fears lead us to become “haters.” When I got to Chicago, I heard similar comments from people at the hotel and even during the question-and-answer period following my speech.

While I was waiting to fly out of Chicago’s jam-packed O’Hare International Airport that evening, a middle-aged man in a business suit made his way through the crowd to get to me. He looked to be of Arab descent and asked, “Are you Juan Williams?” I told him that I was, and we shook hands.
He told me that he was a Muslim. He’d apparently watched O’Reilly the previous night. I didn’t know where this was going—what he would say next. Speaking with pride, he confided that he had recently decided to get involved with Muslim political organizations in Washington because he could no longer tolerate negative stereotypes of Muslims as violent and unpatriotic. Then he told me a moving story. He said his son had recently seen him put a letter with Arabic writing in his home office’s paper shredder. The twelve-year-old asked his dad if he was shredding the letter because he didn’t want to put it in the trash and risk having neighbors see it and realize that the family is Muslim. The father explained to his son that he was shredding the letter because it included the name of Allah and it was wrong to throw something sacred in with the garbage.

What struck him, he said, was that his little boy thought it was shameful to be a Muslim. He said his son’s embarrassment had made him realize he was making a mistake by thinking that just by being a normal suburban businessman he was creating a positive image of Muslims in America. He said that in light of ongoing controversies, he realized he had to speak out against people who miscast all Muslims as terrorists and to take a stand against Muslim extremists who feed the negative images of Islam.

The man thanked me for comments made on the O’Reilly show because he feared the kind of anti-Muslim sentiment I was speaking out against.

One of the nicest things about being a television personality is the fans who approach you in airports and restaurants. Even the most strident conservatives who watch Fox will come
up to me and say that while they may disagree with almost everything I say, they enjoy listening to me. Sometimes they will ask me to sign an autograph or pose for a picture, and I’m happy to oblige because I appreciate intellectual honesty. But there are also those rare moments—like when that man came up to me at O’Hare—when people compliment a point you made publicly and appreciate the reasoning behind it. This was one of those moments.

Little did I know that as I was talking to this man, a well-organized campaign was being waged against me by CAIR and other organizations that claimed to represent him. They set up a Facebook group and circulated a sample letter to be filled out by their members and sent to NPR. Apparently upset that I had offered O’Reilly support for any part of his comments about Muslims on
The View
, CAIR’s letter quoted only the first part of my comments. This was an unfair distortion, with no hint of the full context. The author attacked me for “irresponsible and inflammatory comments [that] would not be tolerated if they targeted any other racial, ethnic or religious minority” and went on to say that “they should not pass without action by NPR. I respectfully request that your network take appropriate action in response to Mr. Williams’ intolerant comments.”

Media Matters, the far-left Web site that purports to show daily, if not hourly, instances of conservative bias on Fox, accused me of bigotry and called for me to be fired. Of course, it had been urging NPR to fire me for years because I appear on Fox. Some of my colleagues at Fox have likened Media Matters to a determined stalker and sarcastically thank it on air for contributing to Fox’s high ratings.

I didn’t take any of this too seriously. To speak and write about politics, people, and culture on a national platform—at Fox and NPR or in books and the
Washington Post
—is to quickly realize that the blogs, the phones, and the mailbag are going to be filled with criticism. My judgments are constantly questioned, my word choices are scrutinized, and alarms are raised even when things go unsaid. As far as I could tell, the criticism of what I had said on the O’Reilly show had little substance. These attacks amounted to weak, baseless distortions of a fast-paced debate on a difficult subject. Any fair-minded person taking a look at the entire conversation could easily see that my comments had been twisted to serve the political agendas of CAIR and Media Matters. And my conversations with viewers about the show revealed no such confusion, no backlash against my stand in opposition to anti-Muslim bigotry. So I dismissed the whole thing as a minor snit. I’d seen much worse when a powerful politician didn’t like some comment I’d made or when I’d actually misstated a fact of substance in offering an opinion. A lot of that comes with the job, and in some ways it reassures me that people are listening and believe I have influence.

The next day I took the shuttle to New York. A few minutes after I landed in New York, my cell phone rang. A friend at a Washington advocacy group said she wanted to see how I was doing because of the e-mail going around her office calling for me to be fired from NPR for my comments about Muslims on Fox. I thanked her for the support but told her that people with vested interests in any hot-button debate always take shots at me—Republicans and Democrats, blacks and whites, Israelis and Palestinians, pro-life and pro-choice.

I went about my work at Fox that day, talking politics as the midterm elections heated up. Shortly after 5:00 p.m., I checked my cell phone and saw that I had a missed call from Ellen Weiss, the vice president of the news division at NPR. When I got her on the phone, she told me she had been inundated with complaints about my comments to O’Reilly on Monday night. Ellen said I had crossed the line and essentially accused me of bigotry. She gave me no chance to tell her my side of the story. She focused on the admission of my fear of people dressed in Muslim garb at the airport as prima facie evidence of my bigotry. She said there are people who wear Muslim garb to work at NPR and they were offended by my comments. She never suggested that I had discriminated against anyone. Instead, Ellen continued to ask me what I had really meant. I told her I had meant exactly what I said. She retorted that she did not sense remorse from me. I said I had nothing to apologize for. I had made an honest statement about my feelings. I urged her to go back and look at the full transcript. Had she done that, she would have seen that I was arguing against exactly the kind of prejudicial snap judgments she was now accusing me of making. But Ellen would hear none of it. She claimed she had reviewed the segment. She informed me that I had violated NPR’s values for editorial commentary and my contract as a news analyst was being terminated.

I was stunned. I said that this was an outrage, that it made no sense. I appealed to her to reconsider before firing me. I asked if she had some personal animus toward me. I pointed out that I had not made my comments on NPR. When she asked if I would have said the same thing on NPR, I said yes, because I believe in telling people the truth about my feelings
and opinions, regardless of the venue. I asked why she would fire me without speaking to me face to face and reviewing the entire episode. At that point she bluntly told me there was nothing I could say or do to change her mind. She added that the decision had been confirmed above her and that there was no point in meeting in person. The decision had already been made, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Years earlier, NPR had tried to stop me from appearing on Fox. Some NPR listeners had written to ask why a top NPR personality was showing up on a conservative cable channel. I reminded the management back then that I was working for Fox before NPR signed me to host its afternoon talk show. And I pointed out that other NPR staff appeared on CNN, as well as news discussion shows where they expressed opinions, without any pressure to shut them down. I was told that Fox had grown into the number one cable news network and was a loud, controversial, conservative network at that. My response was that debate on Fox was first rate—that was why the audience was growing—and no one at Fox tried to tell me what to say. I also pointed out that I was advertising the NPR brand with every appearance before Fox’s large audience. Then it was suggested that I not express my opinions on Fox. I said I expressed my opinions every day as an NPR host and I did not say anything on Fox or in my books or newspaper columns that was different from what I said on NPR. Different NPR ombudsmen wrote about the issue over the years and concluded that while having my face on Fox bothered a few at NPR who hated Fox’s conservative approach to the news, it did not amount to a sin against NPR’s standards of journalism.

When Ellen Weiss became NPR’s top news executive, she
renewed the discussion about my work for Fox, telling me that she didn’t like Fox’s format. She said its fast-paced debates provoked pointed expression of opinions. On Fox, she observed, liberals are outnumbered by conservatives. I replied that NPR often edited interviews and even debate segments to make them move faster and sharpen contrasting viewpoints. As for the political imbalance she saw on Fox, I asked if she realized that liberals outnumbered conservatives at NPR. She responded that any controversial stand I took on Fox compromised my role as a journalist at NPR. I disagreed. But she outranked me. She insisted that I not identify myself as an NPR employee when I appeared on O’Reilly or any other Fox prime-time show.

To me this was absurd. I thought she was condescending to NPR listeners by suggesting they could not distinguish between my roles at NPR—as a talk show host, correspondent, and analyst—and my role as an occasional debating partner for conservative TV personalities on Fox.

It was the latest in a troubling history of high-ranking NPR editors and producers expressing concern about my journalistic independence because of my role at Fox. Years before that incident, NPR officials asked me to help them get an interview with President George W. Bush. Bush’s top aides felt NPR had been unfair to Bush during the 2000 campaign, and they kept NPR at a distance once Bush was in the White House. But some NPR officials noted that I had long-standing relationships with some of the key players in the Bush White House due to my years as a political writer at the
Washington Post
. They asked me to take the lead for NPR in trying to get an interview with the president. Later, when other anchors and
political reporters asked why I was leading the effort, I heard that some NPR managers suggested that the Bush White House was more likely to grant the interview because of my appearances on Fox. There was an element of petty jealousy that irritated me, but it was also true that the Bush White House had a good relationship with Fox. Over several years I held meetings and set up dinners to try to ease the tensions, and I got several Bush officials to appear on NPR for interviews with me and with others. When it served their purposes, NPR officials were all too happy to use my connection to Fox.

When the president finally agreed to an NPR interview, the offer was for me to interview him. After I did the interview, NPR played it in its entirety that evening on
All Things Considered
. The next day they devoted an entire segment to it on
Morning Edition
. The political editors and Weiss, who had helped me script the questions for the president, called and sent e-mails telling me they were thrilled with the interview. But the next day, Weiss phoned me to express anger that in the course of the interview I had prefaced a difficult question about the wars by saying to the president that Americans pray for him but don’t understand some of his actions or policies. Weiss said some NPR staff felt it was wrong to say that Americans pray for him. I reminded her that in many churches it is customary to pray for the well-being of the president, governors, mayors, ministers, and other leaders. She claimed my words amounted to evidence that I was a bad journalist who was soft on Bush.

More than six months later, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Little Rock crisis, President Bush offered to do an NPR interview with me about race relations in America. NPR management,
led by Weiss, refused the interview on the grounds that the White House had offered it to me and not to NPR’s other correspondents and hosts. The implication was that I was in the administration’s pocket. Had the NPR executives never heard my criticism of President Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq or his curtailment of civil liberties in the war on terror? Was Weiss unaware that in looking for someone to discuss race relations with the president, the White House might have considered my expertise on the civil rights movement? I am the author of a best-selling history of the civil rights movement,
Eyes on the Prize—America’s Civil Rights Years
, as well as an acclaimed biography of America’s first black Supreme Court justice,
Thurgood Marshall—American Revolutionary
. My latest book,
Enough
, was about the state of black leadership in America and had found a place on the
New York Times
best-seller list. Weiss found it was easier to see me as a shill for the Bush administration. So I did the interview for Fox instead. While it made national headlines, it was never mentioned on NPR.