"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."
It should be noted that for awhile now, Mr. Williams has also been appear on Fox News as a commentator/analyst and perhaps that gave his NPR bosses a bad case of heartburn, because they fired him.
Naturally, all hell has broken loose because of this and it's happy days for Mr. Williams, because he landed a new, shiny contract to the tune of $2 million from Fox News and made his bosses at NPR look like fools, because they went and said that 'his feelings were between him and his psychiatrist.' Of course, now that she said that, she apologized... but the fact remains that Mr. Williams expressed an opinion (a pretty damn weird one, to be sure- I mean, what are you going to do- not fly anywhere due to the risk of having Muslims on your plane?) and the CEO of NPR implied that he was kind of nutso for it.
Wonderful. Excellent timing on the part of NPR as it comes in the middle of the fall fund drive- but it also marks a fundamental change for them. I've listened to NPR for years and for years I've known that they've had a gentle, liberal bias and I've more or less made piece with that. As an organization, they tended to stay away from the mud-slinging and pissing matches that consumed the rest of the media today, but this little incident changed all that- now, NPR is just another media outlet, joining in the pissing matches and mud-sligning that all the rest do and it's a damn shame, quite frankly. I expected better from them and although I've never given to public radio, primarily because I don't have that much money laying around, it was always something I thought I'd be willing to do someday, if only for the sole reason that it would help get their annoying pledge drives over with faster.
But no more. I won't be shellacking out my money to fund just another media outlet- a high quality one to be sure, but now just another one of the media boys in their sandbox. Very, very disappointing, NPR. Very disappointing. (And of course now, Mr. Williams can write columns like this. Well done, NPR. Well done.)
The core of this controversy, however, exposes a blatant double standard when it comes to religion that exists in media today. If you, as a public figure, criticize/hate on/piss all over Christianity, well the Conservative Media will be out for your blood. If you criticize/hate on/piss all over Islam, well it's the Liberal Media that will be passing the tar and feathers. How about this: let's acknowledge that every religion has it's nutjobs and acknowledge that every religion should adapt to modern society (and not the other way around) and leave it at that. Some sanity would be nice, but I'm thinking that in America today, it's probably too much to ask for...
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