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Post by Fingerplucked on Oct 21, 2010 17:14:31 GMT -5
;D ;D
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Post by billhammond on Oct 21, 2010 17:17:21 GMT -5
That is one whaq burqa!
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Post by Chesapeake on Oct 21, 2010 17:17:46 GMT -5
I'm not predicting as bright a future for NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, who as far as I can figure out is the one who decided to fire Juan. She's just publicly apologized to him for speaking "hastily" in saying he should have kept his feelings about Muslims between himself and "his psychiatrist or his publicist."
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Post by billhammond on Oct 21, 2010 17:25:07 GMT -5
I'm not predicting as bright a future for NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, who as far as I can figure out is the one who decided to fire Juan. She's just publicly apologized to him for speaking "hastily" in saying he should have kept his feelings about Muslims between himself and "his psychiatrist or his publicist." Maybe she'll snag Roger Ailes' job.
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Post by patrick on Oct 21, 2010 17:31:21 GMT -5
That could be interesting. I've always like Williams. It will be interesting to see if people with whom he's agreed for the past twenty years now begin to savage him. It will depend on what he says. I wonder if he can continue to be the same voice at Fox that he was at NPR. I disagree that what he said was not biased. He started out by telling O'Reilly that he was RIGHT in saying what he said on The View, blaming 9/11 on "Muslims." Then he goes on to say that he gets nervous when he sees people dressed like Muslims on airplanes. Williams began by telling O'Reilly that he was "right" in his view on Muslims. I don't think there's anything wrong with candidly admitting that he gets nervous when he sees Muslims on airplanes -- even though those feelings reflect some highly distorted thoughts -- as we all have irrational reactions to various situations. But Williams was not condemning his own reaction; to the contrary, he went on to justify it by saying that people who wear "Muslim garb" are "identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims," and that "the war with Muslims" (quoting Faisal Shahzad, [the Times Square bomber]) is one of those "facts we can't get away from." All of those comments were prefaced with the standard defense of bigotry: "political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis where you don't address reality." What "reality" are we supposedly all afraid to address? The full context makes clear that he is not only agreeing with O'Reilly's perspective on Muslims and Terrorism, but defending the linkage between the two.
It's true that Williams went on to say that not all Muslims are extremists and that Terrorism shouldn't be attributed to Muslims generally (just as Timothy McVeigh and Fred Phelps' actions shouldn't be attributed to Christianity). If one wants to argue that Think Progress should have included that portion of the video, that's reasonable. But it's very common for someone making bigoted remarks about, say, African-Americans to stress afterward that "there are some good ones," that "they're not all bad," etc. Those after-the-fact caveats don't mitigate the original statements.
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Post by Chesapeake on Oct 21, 2010 18:15:22 GMT -5
Truth to tell, I think O'Reilly just got caught blurting out something that could be interpreted as bigoted by anybody who doesn't like O'Reilly and isn't willing to cut him any slack. He might even regret putting the way he did. He has apologized to anyone who was offended (the standard non-apology), and at the same time has chosen to vigorously defend himself.
Nobody knows another person's heart, but if you've watched much O'Reilly at all, you know he goes to great lengths not to appear bigoted either in his language or in the guests he chooses to come on and discuss controversial subjects touching on ethnicity. Juan Williams is one of those people. Guess now he's going to get paid more for it. Sounds like win-win to me.
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Post by Chesapeake on Oct 21, 2010 18:17:33 GMT -5
I'm not predicting as bright a future for NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, who as far as I can figure out is the one who decided to fire Juan. She's just publicly apologized to him for speaking "hastily" in saying he should have kept his feelings about Muslims between himself and "his psychiatrist or his publicist." Maybe she'll snag Roger Ailes' job. They could probably give each other elocution lessons.
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Post by Fingerplucked on Oct 21, 2010 18:32:23 GMT -5
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Post by Deleted on Oct 21, 2010 19:36:47 GMT -5
I wonder if the families and loved ones of the 9/11 victims wish their family members would have had some "mindless fear" or "irrational fear".... maybe enough fear to avoid getting on the plane?
Yep.... fear of a group within a group, who threaten to kill, carry out their threats, and scream bigotry when people express fear or concern for their own safety. Obviously we need more political correctness to eliminate all this unnecessary fear.
A somewhat funny sidebar. I work with a non-com broadcasting network. Coincidently our Sharathon (fundraiser... we're listener supported) began Wednesday and runs thru tomorrow (Friday). Evidently there were a few callers who reached our phone volunteers thinking that we were NPR after hearing our number on the air. Obviously not regular listeners. They were very upset and said they would never contribute to us again and we should be ashamed for the firing of Juan Williams. Funny? Well yeah... Juan Williams has never worked for us. We are not NPR and have nothing to do with NPR. NPR takes government funding, we do not. Evidently they heard our number being given out and paid little or no attention to whom they were listening.
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Post by Chesapeake on Oct 21, 2010 20:03:04 GMT -5
Hmmmmm .... mid-South .... can't be American Public Media.
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Post by Russell Letson on Oct 21, 2010 22:35:08 GMT -5
I wonder if the families and loved ones of the 9/11 victims wish their family members would have had some "mindless fear" or "irrational fear".... maybe enough fear to avoid getting on the plane? Because they saw somebody who looked like one of these?
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Post by omaha on Oct 22, 2010 7:08:16 GMT -5
Interesting observation from Rich Lowry: I often find NPR informative and enjoy my occasional appearance, but with this decision, it has chipped away at the country’s shrinking common ground for discourse. Let the record show that it wasn’t Fox News that severed its relationship with Williams because he said unacceptably liberal things, and it wasn’t Fox News viewers who agitated to have him dumped over his appearances on NPR. It’s the self-consciously tolerant people who behaved illiberally, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last.
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Post by timfarney on Oct 22, 2010 7:38:32 GMT -5
I can understand the conflict between "reporter" on one media network and "analyst" on another, and if I were the network employing the reporter, I'd have a problem with it. NPR's position is that that is the problem, that the problem had been building for a long time and that this was the straw that broke the camel's back (not their words). That's all ok until you get to the last part. Boy was reacting to the final straw a bad decision. They should have pulled Williams aside long ago, talked to him about the conflict, and asked him to choose. Maybe they did. In the face of a lack of cooperation on his part, they should have made a specific point of letting him go when he hadn't said anything controversial in awhile, and in a manner that was connected to no particular incident. It wouldn't have stopped the protests, as both sides in the ongoing left/right debate love to play "gotcha," but it wouldn't have fed them quite as much justification either. On the other hand, opening any set or remarks with "Bill OReilly is right" is enough to disqualify anyone as a legitimate news source. Sorry... Tim
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Post by dickt on Oct 22, 2010 8:08:21 GMT -5
Williams has the right to say whatever he wants; he also has the obligation to deal with the consequences. Similarly, NPR has a right not to employ anyone who expresses similar feelings. I don't hear a lot of advocates for bestiality, pedophilia, or necrophilia on their news staff (or if they're there, they keep it to themselves) J, I'd agree with that if it was a private employer but NPR is government. Nope. Huckabee and Palin think so, but it just isn't true. www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/10/21/912449/-Its-time-to-ban-federal-funding-for-Fox-News
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Post by millring on Oct 22, 2010 8:25:39 GMT -5
I can't even imagine using FOX for a source on this forum, yet time and again Huffington Post and Daily Kos get cited here. FOX is too biased to believe, but HP and DK are okay.
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Post by Doug on Oct 22, 2010 8:25:47 GMT -5
I read the article and the linked article and it seems that depending on how you view public funding it comes to 3-10%.
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Post by millring on Oct 22, 2010 8:27:22 GMT -5
Interesting observation from Rich Lowry: I often find NPR informative and enjoy my occasional appearance, but with this decision, it has chipped away at the country’s shrinking common ground for discourse. Let the record show that it wasn’t Fox News that severed its relationship with Williams because he said unacceptably liberal things, and it wasn’t Fox News viewers who agitated to have him dumped over his appearances on NPR. It’s the self-consciously tolerant people who behaved illiberally, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last. Problem with Lowry's analysis is that his parallels don't line up. FOX doesn't fire Williams for saying liberal things, but NPR didn't fire Williams for saying a conservative thing. They fired him for saying a politically incorrect thing. Big difference. Sometimes. Usually.
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Post by omaha on Oct 22, 2010 8:57:47 GMT -5
Isn't "political correctness" a wing of liberalism?
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Post by dickt on Oct 22, 2010 8:58:57 GMT -5
I read the article and the linked article and it seems that depending on how you view public funding it comes to 3-10%. Nope. No direct funding. Period. We might as well say that Doug is a govt agency since he gets govt funding. Hey, our agency buys stuff at Staples. So Staples gets govt funding too. Can't believe anyone could possibly object to the article regardless of source. I could have just told you myself that NPR isn't govt funded, but used a reference I saw on FB today.
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Post by millring on Oct 22, 2010 9:21:52 GMT -5
Isn't "political correctness" a wing of liberalism? Not exactly. At least, I don't think so. It's more like a convenient tool most often used by liberals to characterize conservatives as morally inferior. And, yes, it's sometimes maddeningly one-sided (just try -- I dare you -- to make the mistake of innocently typing "democrat" when only "democratic" will do and you will be evicerated by people who will use the term "Teabagger" without the slightest blush). But it's mostly just that politically correct terminology is used as a political tool by liberal constituency groups, not that political correctness is a tennet of liberalism. Fine line, I suppose, but to make the point (back to the subject of Juan Williams), William's comment about being afraid of muslim-garbed folk boarding a plane with him is not a conservative comment. To accept that it is (as Lowery seems to have done) is to walk right into accepting the liberal's characterization of conservatives as the bigots.
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