America’s degraded public debate

America’s degraded public debate
By Jurek Martin
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: October 27 2010 01:22 | Last updated: October 27 2010 01:22
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/16424890-e15c-11df-90b7-00144feabdc0.html


Contrary to majority opinion in the US media, National Public Radio was perfectly within its rights – and was right – to fire Juan Williams for last week’s comments that Muslims made him nervous on airplanes, delivered on the Fox TV network. It is less a question of what he said than where he said it.

I would go further. NPR should have fired him years ago, on the grounds that running off at the mouth in the putrid kitchen that is talk media is inconsistent with the higher standards of objectivity practised at the station.

NPR should also tell Mara Liasson, another staffer who appears regularly on Fox (as a liberal punching bag for the conservative heavies) that she has a choice to make; stick with her employers, or change partners for the (fleeting) fame and fortune that Rupert Murdoch is accustomed to dangling. (Williams was rewarded with a $2m contract on Fox.)

This reveals me as arguably liberal but, much more, as anachronistically old school. In the US writing journalists seem to spend more time in the TV studio spouting off than they do sticking to their reporting last for their employer. This has contributed to the declining quality of newspaper shoe leather political reportage most evident this year.

A good reporter lets his readers in on the story, but not on the thought process. In late 1975, Johnny Apple disappeared from the pages of the New York Times for several weeks, resurfacing with an exquisitely detailed story that the presidential candidate registering at 2 per cent in the national polls (Jimmy Carter) was showing real strength on the ground.

These days, sadly, only the polls would matter, along with what the reporter thinks, but does not necessarily know. There are exceptions to this (Joe Klein’s recent 6,000 mile odyssey for Time Magazine, for example) but not many. It is mostly in-and-out once-over-lightly quote-a-poll stuff, for which the parlous state of newspaper finances is as much to blame as any reportorial deficiencies.

The Williams incident also served to remind how degraded political debate has become. In conservative demonology – exemplified by, but not confined to, Fox – NPR stands as a redoubt of the “far left,” a bastion of political correctness and guilty of closet racism, all accusations now laid at its door by the once progressive Mr Williams.

In reality, it is the closest America comes to the BBC, wielding its liberal tendencies with a small stick. It is also a bit smug and boring and, fair enough, politically correct.

It had long been made clear to Mr Williams that public radio was uncomfortable with his appearances on Fox. It had required him to remove his NPR affiliation whenever he mouthed off on the Murdoch network. But, as a star in the star-struck world of media-land, he felt free to say with impunity whatever he felt like saying (last year equating Michelle Obama with the old black radical Stokely Carmichael, for example).

It is predictable that NPR should be more criticised than supported for what it did. Nor should it surprise that the usual rightwing political suspects – such as Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina – should revive the Newt Gingrich ploy of the mid-’90s and demand that non-commercial media lose its federal funding, in NPR’s case about 2 per cent of its total budget.

Yet the debate has centred on three issues; whether he was out of line in saying he was nervous about Muslims on planes, which plays into the Fox mantra that all terrorists are Muslims; why his other qualifying remarks on the fateful Bill O’Reilly programme were not taken into consideration; and whether NPR was justified in summary dismissal by telephone, rather than after a face-to-face hearing.

I have sympathy for none of them. The first two are all about parsing, when everybody knows that talk television is all about being outrageous and outspoken and not about being contained and logical, which will not get you invited back. And, to quote Rhett Butler, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn how Williams was shown the exit.

Corporations have rights, including that of hiring and firing. I suspect that, in taking this hard line, I am perpetuating America’s destructive and false ideological wars. So be it. You would not get me on Fox for love, or money (probably).

onohana@aol.com