Standards and Practices: Why Does NPR Still Employ Nina Totenberg?

From the Wall Street Journal by James Taranto (if you don’t get his Best of the Web emails. You should. Lots of pithy commentary.)

In its furious effort to explain its firing of Juan Williams, National Public Radio has opened itself to scrutiny and raised further questions about its “standards and practices.” The network’s own website reports that NPR CEO Vivian Schiller “on Thursday said that Williams should have kept his feelings about Muslims between himself, ‘his psychiatrist or his publicist’–a comment she later said she regretted. ‘I spoke hastily and I apologize to Juan and others for my thoughtless remark,’ Schiller said in a statement released by NPR.”

No word on whether others accept her apology. As far as we know, however, she still is employed, notwithstanding this ugly comment.

Fox News, Williams’s remaining employer, has posted on its website the internal memo from Schiller to NPR Staff. Schiller says that as a “news analyst,” Williams was expected to fill “a very different role than that of a commentator or columnist”:

News analysts may not take personal public positions on controversial issues; doing so undermines their credibility as analysts, and that’s what’s happened in this situation.Yet NPR.org reported yesterday that Williams’s “status was earlier shifted from staff correspondent to analyst after he took clear-cut positions about public policy on television and in newspaper opinion pieces.” There is, to say the least, considerable ambiguity as to what NPR expects of a “news analyst.”

Read the rest here: Standards and Practices (you can see links to Best of the Web stories at the bottom)

Tags: Media Bias