NPR, Fox News and Juan Williams: the headscarf and the burka ... by gimleteye

The problem with the Juan Williams affair is not the comment to Bill O'Reilly; that Muslims in full dress on airplanes make him nervous-- but the very confusion that Fox News represents in erasing the line separating news journalism from opinion. Over the course of many years, as the nation became ever more deeply immersed in the cloud of Fox News, NPR bent over backwards to ensure its journalism was free from the taint of opinion irrespective of ideological origin and despite a constant barrage of attacks from the right. NPR has maintained a steadfast even rigid devotion to impartiality in its news broadcasts. (please click, 'read more')

Juan Williams wandered off the NPR reservation when he signed up to be a commentator for Fox News, a news outlet that constantly mixes opinion with journalism. The reaction by NPR brass-- to fire him, for his comment to O'Reilly-- has triggered international handwringing. In my view, Williams could have remained an opinionator on NPR but could not report news or appear on a program that purports to offer news.

Fox News is the most popular "news" outlet on television. It is also the most irresponsible media organization in the United States, allowing its owner Rupert Murdoch and executive Roger Ailes to redefine civil discourse as a matter for poorly educated nitwits with bones to grind and grievances that deliberately stir fact and fiction and base emotions of fear and flight. When I listen to Fox News commentators and imagine the audience soaking in the quasi-facts, it makes me think of herds of cattle organized in feedlots and narrowing chutes.

Juan Williams is a smart guy. I don't fault smart journalists for using and even embracing the Fox News platform (and paycheck) to expose the mass market to a different level of intelligence than the idiots who comprise so much of the Fox "News" lineup. But this confusion of journalism with opinion on Fox has substantially damaged the United States. NPR brass may have done the wrong thing, but I understand how they got there.

As to the substance of Williams' comment, I too have reservations when I see the dress and symbols of Muslim culture on an airplane. But this reaction is substantially different from what I feel when I see Muslim women in burkas. It is an important distinction. They are both symbols of cultural identity, but the burka imposes cultural difference between the observed and the observer on the matter central to Western civilization: individual identity. So while I may feel uneasy on an airplane with Muslim dress, I get over it. The burka, on the other hand, is antithetical to both my belief system and the government that protects all our freedoms. The burka and the headscarf are very different things to me.

This point was driven home in Miami recently at a hot yoga class where students wear bathing suits. At the University of Miami, a fair number of foreign students are from Muslim nations. I recognized the young man next to me as one, from the Mideast. A lot of thoughts crossed my mind, but one that never crossed my mind was to feel uneasy. (I have also taken yoga classes in other cities with Muslim women who wore head scarfs. I thought, too bad for them.) I wondered, for instance, what this young man's life would be like in the future, whether he would be able in his own country later in life to take a yoga class like this one, with people of other colors and cultures or whether it would just be a strange memory of the United States.

I thought how our own nation is built from immigrants and how religious tolerance is hard-wired in our Constitution. I thought how economic desperation tears at the fabric of civil society and how poorly equipped we are to understand each other as people, because corporations have more power than we do. Like the News Corporation. I did not think of Juan Williams at all.