A lengthy explanation

That last post was not meant to be all that serious, whatever the events that inspired it, but I should be clear about this.

Admitting that you have an irrational fear of people who don’t look like the terrorists who attacked us is not enough to be fired, though it should reflect poorly on your next review if you have the job Juan Williams had at NPR. A lot of people have irrational fears. A lot of people have legitimate fears. That wasn’t the point. Naming your fear on the air is not the problem.

The problem comes in when you fail to identify it as your own fear while using it to support the series of moronic fear-mongering statements made over the last few days by the people from the TV network you are on at the moment. NPR employed Juan Williams as a news analyst. That requires a certain amount of impartiality, but more importantly it requires a certain level of communication skill and an ability to dispassionately analyze the news.

Williams either misstated the fear as a good reason for O’Reilly et al to have said what they said, or it was not just his and he thought it was a valid justification. He is either not competent at making a claim or he supports fear mongering. If he did the former on NPR it is a problem with job performance, doing the latter in public demonstrates poor reasoning skills or some level of dissembling.

The fact that he said it on Fox and not on NPR is somewhat ameliorating, since NPR cannot fault him for saying it on NPR. As an NPR news analyst, that sort of comment would be wrong since it calls into question the impartiality of his analysis. The hardest part of that sort of job is keeping your personal opinions out of your commentary, but if that’s the job you sign up for you do it. But you also have to make sure you don’t do something at one employer to make the other one look bad.

NPR seems to have a strange and stringent set of rules for employees. No one who works at NPR is allowed to attend the decidedly apolitical comedy rallies to be held by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in DC on October 30th. I guess they’re afraid some politics may break out. That level of restriction would seem to disqualify Juan Williams as an NPR employee just for being on FOX. Apparently not, but, also apparently, he crossed some line they didn’t like.

It’s not censorship, it’s just a decision based on his bosses’ interpretation of what his statements say about his qualifications. Maybe they should have given him a chance to explain, but the explanation he gave today certainly wasn’t the sort he should have given to prove he isn’t actually a political hack at heart who says whatever he is paid to say. That being the case, he shouldn’t be on the air.

Let me sum up. Expressing yourself on the air is not necessarily a good reason to be fired, but being inane when you are supposed to be intelligent is.