The View From 1776

In his Best of the Web Today column in the October 22, 2010, edition of the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto highlights the stark contrast between NPR management’s treatment of Juan Williams and Nina Totenberg.

Totenberg, it will be recalled, led the media propaganda assault on judge Clarence Thomas during the Senate committee hearings regarding his appointment to the Supreme Court.

Standards and Practices
Why does NPR still employ Nina Totenberg?

By JAMES TARANTO

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.”

Schiller goes on to say that the network has long viewed Williams as a problem:

This isn’t the first time we have had serious concerns about some of Juan’s public comments. Despite many conversations and warnings over the years, Juan has continued to violate this principal [sic]. . . .
These specific comments (and others made in the past), are inconsistent with NPR’s ethics code, which applies to all journalists (including contracted analysts):

“In appearing on TV or other media . . . NPR journalists should not express views they would not air in their role as an NPR journalist. They should not participate in shows . . . that encourage punditry and speculation rather than fact-based analysis." . . .

Unfortunately, Juan’s comments on Fox violated our standards as well as our values and offended many in doing so.

Which raises a question: If these are NPR’s standards, why does the network still employ Nina Totenberg?

Totenberg, according to her NPR.org bio, is not a news analyst but a correspondent--the position from which Williams was shifted because he became too opinionated. Yet Totenberg, a regular on PBS’s “Inside Washington,” has a long and continuing history of opinionizing, sometimes in very ugly fashion.

The most notorious example, noted by Reason’s Michael Moynihan, is an old one. In July 1995, she said this about Sen. Jesse Helms: “I think he ought to be worried about the--about what’s going on in the good Lord’s mind, because if there’s retributive justice, he’ll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it.” Wishing death on the senator’s grandchildren is a particularly nice touch.

The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes reviews recent episodes of “Inside Washington” and finds a wealth of statements that, while not grossly objectionable, express strong personal opinions of the sort that Schiller claims are forbidden even for “news analysts.”

On Oct. 10, Totenberg--whose beat is the Supreme Court--said this about Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a free-speech decision that liberals loathe: “Well, you know, really, this is the next scandal. It’s the scandal in the making. They don’t have to disclose anything. And eventually, this is the kind of thing that led to Watergate.”

Just this past Sunday, Hayes writes, Totenberg “told us that Michelle Obama is ‘an incredibly graceful surrogate’ for her husband who gives people ‘warm and fuzzy’ feelings.”

On Oct. 3, Hayes writes, “she decried Republicans--a ‘concerted minority’--for holding up business in the Senate and declared that their willingness to exploit antiquated congressional rules was a ‘loony way to do business.’ ” (Maybe Vivian Schiller can recommend a shrink.)

“Her most partisan comment,” Hayes adds, “came when Charles Krauthammer pointed out that 31 Democrats in the House had written to Nancy Pelosi to call for extending the Bush tax cuts, Totenberg wished them out of the party. ‘When a party actually has a huge majority, it has a huge diversity. And that is part of the problem that Democrats have. But would I like it to be otherwise? Of course.’ ”

Of course!

National Review Online’s Brian Bolduc has other, earlier examples, including Totenberg’s describing then-Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito as “some white guy,” her saying of the Bush tax cuts “I just think it’s immoral,” and her dismissing the Tea Party movement on the ground that “any cockamamie proposition in America will have at least 25% of those polled supporting it.”

So how is it that Juan Williams got the ax while Nina Totenberg is still a member in good standing of the NPR news staff? “The answer is obvious,” says Hayes: “It’s Fox.”

We’re not so sure. CEO Schiller quotes NPR policy as stipulating that in outside appearances, “NPR journalists should not express views they would not air in their role as an NPR journalist.” Perhaps Totenberg’s liberal-left views are ones that she would air in her role as an NPR journalist. In which case, what does it say about NPR that even Juan Williams isn’t liberal enough for it? Blogger “Doctor Zero” offers an answer:

I think one of the reasons the hardcore liberals who run NPR terminated Williams is their desire to abort a preference cascade. . . . As described by Glenn Reynolds in a classic 2002 essay, a preference cascade occurs when people trapped inside a manufactured consensus suddenly realize that many other people share their doubts. Preference falsification works by making doubters feel isolated and alone. . . .

Since a free society makes it very easy for individuals to change their opinions, they must be prevented from even considering such a change. Manufactured consensus is very fragile in a competitive arena of ideas, when there is no fearsome penalty for a “Fresh Air” listener who decides to switch over to Rush Limbaugh.

The manufactured liberal consensus about Islamic terrorism rolled off the assembly line a long time ago. . . . A credentialed, taxpayer-supported NPR liberal cannot be allowed to question this consensus. It will shatter too easily if the clients of liberalism begin connecting dots between underwear bombers and pistol-packing Army psychiatrists. They cannot be left to nod quietly in agreement with the earnest musings of Juan Williams . . . then look around the room and see all the other faithful liberals nodding at the same time. . . .

Juan Williams came too close to understanding ideas he was supposed to hate. The Left is deathly afraid of what happens when its constituents begin to understand the Right. They didn’t like the idea of millions watching an NPR contributor break the biohazard seal on strictly quarantined ideas.

Look again at the above litany of Nina Totenberg quotes, and you’ll find it fits perfectly with this theme. Not only does she not understand conservative ideas, she knows they are unworthy of even trying to understand. She hates conservatives so much that she hopes their grandchildren get AIDS.

If, as Doctor Zero suggests, NPR has come to see its purpose as the defense of a closed ideological system, then Nina Totenberg is the very ideal of an “NPR journalist.” But if this is the case, in what sense can NPR be considered “public” radio?