On Sunday's MediaBuzz show on the Fox News Channel, host Howard Kurtz brought on ex-NPR reporter Juan Williams to recall his own in-house experience with the radical left inside NPR. Kurtz also noted most of the "mainstream" media have skipped any mention of the hubbub over NPR senior editor Uri Berliner's expose.
KURTZ: You know, The New York Times waited the two days and then a did a sort of 'NPR in Turmoil' piece but didn't get into any of the specifics. Nothing in The Washington Post, nothing at Politico, nothing on air at CNN or MSNBC. Doesn't that prove Berliner's point? If this had been a senior Fox person speaking out, I think it would have been covered nine seconds later!
WILLIAMS: Oh, I don't think there's any question, I can tell you that.
The liberal dissidents inside Fox News turn to anti-Fox authors like Brian Stelter or Michael Wolff instead of going public, and remain anonymous until they can dish to the next Fox-hater who comes along.
Williams argued that the media, from NPR to Fox, identify with an audience, so NPR can boast they're not for the "Big Lie" (like Fox faced in court), but the crusading for your audience against that can lead to a "blindness." So NPR can't admit that Hunter Biden's laptop wasn't entirely fictional or a "pure distraction."
Earlier, Kurtz recounted how Williams was forced out of NPR in 2010 for admitting he was scared of Muslims on airplanes on Fox's O'Reilly Factor, which led Williams to write a book titled Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate. Williams underlined this was before Trump.
WILLIAMS: I think what we've seen time and again at NPR is an insulated cadre of people, liberals, I think, for the most part who think they are right-thinking, they're well educated people, that they think they're good people, and it can lead, I think, to a sort of arrogance.
So someone like me, I think you've known me a long time. I'm no flaming conservative, but I am too conservative a black guy for their taste. They would say, well, why is he willing to hear this out, to talk to a Justice Thomas, to deal with black conserv -- they don't -- For them it was, like, that doesn't fit with advocacy groups who say we need to do more in terms of black American experience. You know, obviously, I've written, I think, best-selling books about the black experience in America. But it didn't fit with their understanding.
Kurtz noted that NPR now has a database to log in all of their guests by race, gender, and sexual orientation, which suggests a DEI database of experts.
WILLIAMS: I think this has gone to an extreme but, again, you know, there's just an interesting angle here which is it's conservatives at NPR battling against liberals.
KURTZ: Berliner voted against Trump twice. He's not a right-winger.
WILLIAMS: Right.. What you have is sort of, liberals against more people trying to prove they're more liberal. That's the very conversation in that very niche media environment. And I think this is highly regrettable because from the kind of journalistic experience I've had, you want people challenging ideas, people pushing you so that you're doing your best at not only getting the facts, or but presenting a balanced picture to the audience.
Even back when Williams came out with his book on being muzzled, NPR executives forwarded a, well, "Big Lie" that NPR was ideologically diverse. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik did a story quoting NPR executive Margaret Low Smith bizarrely claiming "NPR is a stunningly open-minded place. We're deeply encouraging and in fact appreciative of different points of view. Everybody knows that we apply journalistic rigor to absolutely every story we tell."
Insert laugh track!
