Wow, that was a great article, learned a bunch of NPR behind the scenes stuff.
I can’t listen to much lefty junk, Juan is about the only liberal that I like— flip the TV when Beckle is on.
NPR fudged it with Juan, he wasn’t some screaming, spitting, rabid, liberal...they lost a classy one. (though I don’t agree with hardly a word Mr Williams says— he’s always respectful and even)
I agree. I watch virtually no television, but occasionally I have seen clips of Juan Williams, and while I didn’t agree with him, he was obviously intelligent and knowledgeable, a good speaker, and took his (conservative) opponent seriously.
I thought this article was really interesting in what it revealed about the pressure put on intelligent and thereby non-conforming people on NPR.
I was in college in the late 60’s and I was one of the ones who got spat on for going to class when SDS, made up entirely of the privileged children of the wealthy, was having boycotts on my campus. I was working in a restaurant and putting myself through school.
I had gone to one of the elite NYC high schools and I had friends who had gone on to Columbia and Barnard, which was at that time an all-women’s college. One of them invited me to an SDS meeting, but I didn’t go; nonetheless, I later found my name on the list of attendees.
In any case, what they told me about SDS was that all chapters had something called “crit-self-crit” (I’m spelling this the way I heard it) which was evidently something common to radical Communist organizations. What they do is sit down and accuse themselves of faults, and if they don’t accuse themselves, somebody else does it for them and then they have to acknowledge it and accept their punishment.
Stalin killed many of his inner circle this way. Juan Williams was accused by the inner circle and has now metaphorically been killed.