Juan Williams Says It’s Time

Juan Williams is speaking out on the latest debacle at NPR.  He gives an inside perspective that we on the outside can’t see.  He knows the government should not be funding NPR.

Williams wrote:

I know everybody thinks I must be in a vindictive mood, celebrating the sudden departure of NPR CEO Vivian Schiller after her hand-picked personal fundraiser was caught on tape disparaging Tea Party activists, Jews and taking more shots at me. I'm human and do have some thoughts but it's okay to keep them to myself.

I will not slander her in the way that she impugned my intellect and my integrity with condescending comments after my firing. She said my comments on Fox News violated journalistic ethics and should have been kept between "him and his psychiatrist or his publicist." Schiller's missteps have been very public and all too visible to the world, allowing everyone to draw their own conclusions about her.

I'm not being vindictive when I say that NPR leadership had become ingrown and arrogant to the point that they lost sight of journalism as the essential product of NPR. People like Schiller and Ellen Weiss, the head of news for NPR, who made it her life's work to fire me, came to think of themselves as smarter than anyone else. They felt no need to answer to any critic. No other point of view had any importance to them. They came to personify anti-intellectual resentment and arrogance in journalism. Any approach at variance with their own was considered traitorous and a basis for exiling them to the Gulag or in my case, firing me.

…… This just confirms my belief that it is time for our government to get out of the business of funding NPR. NPR's management had been wanting to not only maintain current funding but expand the network to create a much larger BCC-style institution in the United States. The idea to me of government-funded media doesn't fit the United States. No matter the good intentions about protecting journalists from the excesses of the marketplace such as sensationalism and the dominance of entertainment news, journalists should not be doing news to please any party or any elected official -- out of fear of losing funding. And the tremendous variety of sources for news -- in print, broadcast, on the radio and on the Internet, does not suggest that there's any reason for the U.S. government to make a priority of supporting NPR while cutting funding for school breakfast programs or college scholarships.

The government has no business funding an organization like NPR that has an agenda.  They don’t want to air both sides of any debate.  The government is broke and this is one way to stop spending money we don’t have.

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