What ever happened to Juan?

A few years back Fox poached CNN and NPR for a few liberal faces to give some credence to its news motto, "Fair and Balanced." If you remember, Juan Williams (in)famously defended Bill O'Reilly, which he said earned him the enmity of NPR, and led to his subsequent dismissal. Juan had been "moonlighting" for quite sometime, and the last straw was his defense of O'Reilly over racial profiling regarding Muslims.

Since 2010, Juan has been working for Fox, which pays him much more than he ever got at NPR. He is co-host of The Five, which actually has seven Fox personalities sharing the honors, but who's counting. Among them is Bob Beckel, another token "liberal" on the network, who has generated his fair share of controversy with some of the comments he has made, proving he can be as good a bigot as anyone else at Fox.

You have to wonder what these once respected journalists gain by serving as pundits for Fox other than money? Their credibility has deteriorated during this time. In Beckel's case, it is virtually non-existent. Juan still has some clout thanks to the books he wrote in the past, and often cites on the program. However, after this outburst you really have to wonder why anyone would give him anymore credence.

It seems Juan is still smarting from being let go by NPR. It may not have paid much, but working with NPR gave one significant clout in the news media. Why else would Bill even invite him on his "Factor?" Juan's comments regarding NPR are particularly amusing since any number of noted conservatives contribute to the program, including David Brooks, who also writes for the New York Times, which is also considered part of the "liberal elite." If Juan has learned anything over the last four years with Fox it is to blame his own shortcoming on the liberal media.

Juan offers his broader view on his relations with NPR in Muzzled, which NPR was gracious enough to review. Unfortunately, he no longer seems to matter much either at Fox or the news world at large, which is a shame since he offered one of the best books on the Civil Rights Movements, Eyes on the Prize, that was made into a PBS documentary series in 2006.

Comments

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Dispatches from Vilnius

Search This Blog