Muzzled (3 page)

The shunning got worse when I wrote an editorial column for the
New York Times
that included criticism of the nation’s teachers’ unions for blocking school reform efforts. Weiss called me to her office to ask how NPR listeners could now trust my reporting on education. I reminded her that I was not the education beat reporter but a news analyst. Weiss was not persuaded. She wanted to review anything I wrote for newspapers, magazines, and even book proposals. When I said absolutely not, she insisted that I leave the staff and sign a new contract that limited my role at NPR to that of a news analyst. She said she wanted to insulate NPR against anything I said or wrote
outside NPR. With the new contractual arrangement, she argued, management could claim I was not a staff member.

NPR is an important news outlet with a large, influential audience, and I enjoyed working there. And the NPR audience seemed to appreciate me. I was constantly being asked to visit local NPR stations and meet with listeners as well as staff. The volume of my e-mail, phone calls, letters, and requests for pledge week announcements suggested my pieces got tremendous reaction. The ombudsman said she got more response to my work than to any other voice on the network. I enjoyed my relationship with the audience, so I swallowed hard and accepted Weiss’s deal. I thought my willingness to be a team player and the compromise I’d agreed to would be the end of it. But she immediately began to cut my salary and diminish my on-air appearances. Her management team began to treat me like a leper. I was prohibited from joining a panel of journalists questioning GOP presidential primary candidates in a debate. Senior editors, producers, and hosts told me that Weiss and her circle of other longtime NPR personalities—I worked there ten years and was still considered an outsider—hated Fox and hated me for appearing there. One NPR news executive told me directly that having on staff a black man with conservative social views who was personal friends with conservatives infuriated NPR’s old guard. They were unhappy with
Enough
, in which I had praised Bill Cosby for his critique of black leaders. It was clear they wanted me out the door, the same executive said, because I did not fit their view of how a black person thinks—my independence of thought, my willingness to listen to a range of views, and my strong journalistic credentials be damned.

This effort to censor, control, and belittle me got so bad I was often ignored even when I gave NPR news tips. Anytime I gave them a scoop, NPR management wanted to know why Bush officials had conversations with me on background—meaning they could not be quoted by name—or with the promise that I would refer to them only generically as senior administration officials. When I replied that this was the way senior officials in Republican and Democratic administrations leaked sensitive information to journalists, Weiss and her team questioned my journalistic standards. The same dismissive attitude came into play as the Obama campaign came into the news. I had better sources among Obama’s aides than anyone else at NPR. When other news organizations broke news of cabinet appointments for the Obama White House, it was often left to me to confirm the news, because no one else at NPR could do it. Yet even then I was treated as a suspect source and asked to reveal the names of sources I used to confirm the nominations. And when I took exclusive stories to NPR, I was told management was not comfortable with my getting exclusive interviews or breaking stories. They preferred that those stories come from other reporters, even if it meant that NPR did not get the stories first.

Yet when Fox let me talk about news from my inside sources, that made NPR leadership boil. After President Obama was elected, there was a lot of conversation in his camp about the upcoming role of his wife, Michelle Obama. Appearing on
The O’Reilly Factor
, I said I had been told by insiders that she would not be a policy adviser to the president but would focus on being an exemplary mom to her daughters. Obama’s staff also said she planned to reach out to military
families and to call attention to nutrition and obesity issues among children. I explained that this low-key approach had been planned for the First Lady, a highly opinionated Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer, because the new administration did not want a reprise of the moment during the campaign when Mrs. Obama had become a polarizing, racially charged figure. That episode had been triggered when she said her husband’s success in the primaries made her proud of the United States “for the first time in my adult life.”

Mary Katharine Ham, who was on the O’Reilly show with me that night, referring to Mrs. Obama’s campaign controversy, said the future First Lady had to avoid dropping “sound bites like she did during the campaign.” I added that Mrs. Obama was a potential liability for the president if she stirred racial tensions by getting her “Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going.” It was a catchy phrase that first came to me during conversations with Obama officials, who laughed at it. But it was reported all over left-wing blogs as an insult to Mrs. Obama. Weiss jumped on the overreaction and told me it was an inappropriate comment for an NPR journalist to make. I was called to the office of Ken Stern, then the acting president of NPR. He listened as I explained what had taken place and decided against censuring me.

But the chilly treatment persisted. When an Obama White House source mentioned that Vice President Biden was the leading critic of continuing the war in Afghanistan, despite growing calls for a “surge” from the military, I tried repeatedly to get NPR interested in the story. Several weeks later, when the same story became page-one news in the
New York Times
and
Washington Post
, NPR reported the story but claimed it
had no time to air my analysis of this critical debate inside the administration. Similarly, when Elena Kagan was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Obama, my phone started ringing. Kagan had been a clerk at the Supreme Court for liberal icon Justice Thurgood Marshall, and both liberals and conservatives saw political dynamite in that relationship. The Right wanted to paint Kagan as another left-wing activist, while the Obama administration wanted to use her ties to Marshall to reassure its liberal base that Kagan was not a weak moderate about to be steamrolled by conservatives on the court. As a result of my biography of Justice Marshall, requests for interviews poured in to me personally, as well as through the communications department at NPR. Reporters as well as senate staffers, both Democrats and Republicans, wanted to talk to me. But when I pitched NPR’s news division on a news analysis of the story based on my knowledge of the relationship, I was turned down. A week later, an NPR editor called to ask me to do the piece. I was elated. But only hours later she called back to say she had been told there was no room for “a Juan Williams piece.”

At that point I became convinced Weiss and NPR were looking for a reason to fire me. The problem with just getting rid of me was that other NPR staff, including people who worked as straight news reporters, also appeared on opinion and debate TV shows. One news reporter even worked alongside me at Fox—national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Next, NPR management tried to get Liasson to quit Fox and leave me dangling as an aberrant journalist. NPR’s management asked Liasson to spend a month watching Fox to decide whether it was a legitimate news organization worthy
of her time and presence. This request from NPR came at the same time as an Obama White House effort to get other news organizations and the public to view Fox as a propaganda machine rather than a news operation. One news report described the administration’s campaign as an effort to “delegitimize the [conservative] network” and pull the plug on its constant critiques of the president. Liberal columnist Jacob Weisberg wrote in
Newsweek
that any “respectable journalist—I’m talking to you, Mara Liasson—should stop appearing on [Fox] programs.” A Politico story quoted one NPR executive as saying that “Fox uses Mara and Juan as cover” to counter claims that the network is right-wing and to gain journalistic legitimacy that gives it credibility.

That faulty logic is just a step away from saying that Americans are too stupid to independently judge the slant of news and talk shows and enjoy them for what they are—part of a range of views available in a robust American media. But the most dangerous idea behind the NPR effort to bully Liasson into quitting Fox was that journalists should not talk across the political divide, much less acknowledge that anyone on the other side of that divide might have something interesting or important to say.

Liasson eventually told NPR she saw nothing wrong with Fox and intended to continue working there.

This orthodoxy being applied like a straitjacket to journalists is a chilling attack on the free flow of ideas and debate. No one at Fox has ever told me what to say. The same, sadly, cannot be said of NPR.

As Weiss’s long-standing antagonism toward my appearances on Fox continued to grow, the table was set, waiting
for one misguided viewpoint to create a pretext for firing me. When CAIR and Media Matters distorted my comments on the Muslim terror threat, Weiss went to NPR’s new president and CEO, Vivian Schiller, to make the case for getting rid of me.

After her dismissive late-afternoon call informing me that I was fired, Weiss and NPR released a statement announcing my termination that Wednesday night. I was working that same night on the panel for Sean Hannity’s Fox program. I didn’t mention anything about my firing on the show. When I got off the air, an NPR reporter called to ask me for a comment on it. I said I had to talk to my wife first. Sensing I was upset about something, Sean Hannity led me into a studio makeup room and—far away from our political arguments, just two friends talking—asked me what was wrong. I told him NPR had fired me; I feared for my career. NPR had the clout to tell one-sided stories disparaging me as a way to justify its action. I planned to call my agent to figure out how to tell people that I had been fired, but NPR was already putting the story out with its spin. I didn’t know if I could compete with its megaphone and the admiration and loyalty of NPR’s listeners. NPR’s ties to other news organizations meant its attacks on me were going to get a lot of attention. And I didn’t know if Fox, reacting to NPR’s action, might view me as damaged goods, as a bigot who had no credibility. It was close to 11:00 p.m. when Hannity put a hand on my shoulder and told me not to worry. He picked up the wall phone and woke up Bill Shine, Fox’s executive vice president for programming, who told him to tell me not to say anything about the firing until I met with Fox executives in the morning.

At 7:00 the next morning I appeared on
Fox and Friends;
I again said nothing about the firing. The hosts protected me by staying away from the controversy. But my face and story appeared all over the Internet, newspapers, and other cable networks. The story had gone viral. I was the center of a national media storm by the end of breakfast. Just after 8:00 a.m. I got a call from Bill Shine. He told me that Fox CEO Roger Ailes wanted to see me in his office at 10:00 a.m. Since I had talked with Hannity the night before, anxiety and pent-up anger and depression had all pulled at my emotions. I had not slept. At times I had cried over what had happened and over the potential destruction of my career—all because I had spoken my mind.

When I walked into Roger Ailes’s office, accompanied by Shine and Michael Clemente, the senior vice president for news, Ailes greeted me with a smile and said, “Well, we can’t have you working here.” As my jaw dropped, he broke into a laugh. He waved his hand and said he was offering me a new three-year contract with an increased role at the network. Ailes asked me how much I made at NPR and said he’d make up every dime so I wouldn’t have to go home and tell my wife and family we’d lost money because of NPR’s actions. He also said he wanted to see how America’s left-wing media and politicians reacted to a serious journalist being silenced this way. Ailes then released a statement that read, “Juan has been a staunch defender of liberal viewpoints since his tenure began at Fox News in 1997.… He’s an honest man whose freedom of speech is protected by Fox News on a daily basis.” I appeared on
The O’Reilly Factor
that night and guest-hosted it the following night. Bill really went to bat for me, for which
I am grateful. He called for an immediate suspension of all public money to NPR and correctly pointed out that liberal billionaire George Soros had donated $1.8 million to NPR the week before. Soros had also given money to Media Matters in the past.

Conservatives like Brit Hume and Bill Kristol, whom I had debated ferociously over the years on
Fox News Sunday
, stuck up for me and blasted NPR. Even more heartening was the support I received from fellow Fox commentators whom I had criticized when they were in positions of political power. Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, and Rick Santorum all defended my right to free speech and called out NPR for its hypocrisy.

Sarah Palin surprised me most of all. Ever since she was picked by John McCain to be his vice presidential running mate in the 2008 campaign, I have questioned her qualifications and her command of the issues facing the country. I was especially tough on her for quitting her job as governor of Alaska less than two years into her term. Yet Palin wrote on her Facebook page: “I don’t expect Juan Williams to support me (he’s said some tough things about me in the past)—but I will always support his right and the right of all Americans to speak honestly about the threats this country faces. And for Juan, speaking honestly about these issues isn’t just his right, it’s his job. Up until yesterday, he was doing that job at NPR. Firing him is their loss.”

A wave of phone calls and e-mails to NPR complained about my firing. The ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, said the day after my firing was “a day like none I’ve experienced since coming to NPR” three years earlier. I was told the phones
“rang like an alarm bell with no off button.” NPR got “more than 8,000 e-mails, a record with nothing a close second.” She said most of the callers wanted NPR to hire me back immediately. So many people tried to use the “Contact Us” form on NPR’s Web site that it crashed. One posting on the Web site, described as typical by the
Los Angeles Times
, read: “In one arrogant move the NPR exposed itself for the leftist thought police they really are.”