Muzzled Read Online Free PDF

MSNBC, claimed I was a bigot and “obtuse” and said NPR’s decision to end my contract was “anything but a First Amendment issue.” He added, with disdain for the people who voiced support for me: “We have to stamp it on people’s foreheads so they can read it backwards in the mirror.” Rachel Maddow at MSNBC said my words reminded her of appeals to white racism by Republicans in the South during the 1960s. And Michael Tomasky, a writer for London’s
The Guardian
, wrote of me, “[He chose] to ingratiate himself with O’Reilly and his viewers with that Foxy rhetoric. In a sense, Williams got what was coming to him.” He was the journalist who said, “Sleep with dogs, get fleas.”
    To be candid, the attacks from these liberal intellectuals stung me. I grew up as a liberal in New York City. As a black child during the height of the civil rights movement, Republicans seemed to me to be a bunch of Archie Bunkers, the TV character who called his son-in-law a “meathead” for welcoming black people into his neighborhood and protesting the Vietnam War. This all led me to believe the right wing had a monopoly on cruelty, intolerance, and ideological rigidity. Now, at fifty-five, it was painfully clear to me that the left wing, represented by NPR and liberal lobbying groups, had become likewise intolerant of people who did not agree withthem. In demonizing Fox News and the right wing as a powerful conspiracy of wealthy, militaristic bigots—antiblack, antifeminist, and antigay—they hid their own prejudice against different points of view. They do not believe in tolerance. They do not care about open-minded debate. They care first and foremost about liberal orthodoxy. If you dare to challenge it or deviate from it even slightly, you will be punished.
    My point is that what happened to me was not about me alone. It was an assault on journalism and honest debate. We need to protect a free-flowing, respectful national conversation in our country. Today, such honest debate about the issues becomes collateral damage in an undeclared war by those who make accusations of racism and bigotry whenever their political positions are challenged.
    I use the emotionally charged word “war” very deliberately. My comments about Muslims on Fox were twisted and deliberately taken out of context by Weiss. She was able to use that distortion, along with a general view of Fox News as bad guys, to engage in a vigilante-style attack on me. NPR’s standards for its journalistic ethics, which I supposedly broke, seemed to apply only to me. When Nina Totenberg, NPR’s reporter on legal issues, famously said that a conservative U.S. senator and his children ought to “get AIDS from a transfusion,” she was not fired. Nor was NPR news analyst Cokie Roberts when she said that Fox’s Glenn Beck was un-American and called him a terrorist.
    In their hubris and fury at me, Vivian Schiller and Weiss accepted the wacky idea that I legitimize Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity because I
talk
with them. Did they not notice that I was almost always challenging Bill and trading ideaswith Sean? Bill and Sean are major forces in American culture, media, and politics, whether or not I appear on their shows. And I believe it is important that they remain open to having their audiences hear different points of view. I continue to go on their shows and debate their ideas because I believe Americans of all political stripes are better off when they hear an experienced political observer offer an honest appraisal of the issues and the other side’s point of view.
    Of course, condoning political polarization goes well beyond just NPR. One-party dominance and one-sided thinking have become the rule rather than the exception in much of the media. We are creating a culture in the newsroom where facts, context, and insight take a backseat to fear of complaints of insensitivity, accusations of racism, and all sorts of phony charges of bigotry. On the Left, the