Well, the NPR Ombudsman has taken to completely disavowing anything Juan Williams says when he is on Fox News, and has notified her readers that, “NPR’s Vice President of News, Ellen Weiss, has asked Williams to ask that Fox remove his NPR identification whenever he is on O’Reilly.”
You see, when someone says that Michelle Obama has, “this Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going,” people tend to think that he’s not a functioning journalist.
The truth is that he hasn’t been one for a long time, when he led the lynch mob against Anita Hill, and neglected to mention that he had repeated allegations of sexual harassment against him, he stopped being a journalist.
Currently he’s a freelancer, as the ombud made abundantly clear:
His “Stokely Carmichael” comment got the attention of NPR’s top managers. They are in a bind because Williams is no longer a staff employee but an independent contractor. As a contract news analyst, NPR doesn’t exercise control over what Williams says outside of NPR.
When he wasn’t, he was for a brief period on Talk of the Nation, but proved too damn stupid to handle the interviews….The show is on today, and it can still be lame, but he was painful to listen to.
The problem here is not that he’s on Fox News, so is Mara Liasson, it’s that he’s on O’Reilly, and he’s stupid, and he’s very eager to please, you could use Dr. Boyce Watkins term to describe him, but that brings in race, and I think to Fox and O’Reilly, it’s more important that he’s “NPR” than that he’s black.