NPR to review Williams firing

Posted at 10:46 AM on November 15, 2010 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Media

NPR has hired an outside investigator to review its botched (at least from a P.R. standpoint) firing of commentator Juan Williams last month.

But NPR's ombudsman isn't happy with the notion that some of the resulting report won't be made public.

I'm told it's unlikely the final report will be made public in its entirety, though parts of it may be. I always advocate for transparency, but NPR considers this a personnel issue even though the resulting damage to NPR goes beyond the consequences of firing an independent contractor.

NPR can hire the most sophisticated investigators in the world, but how can such a review have credibility if people who care about NPR can't read the full results of it? NPR needs to find a way to make the full report --or the key parts of it --public.

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Comments (4)

It's a good thing that NPR has commissioned an independent third party review of Juan Williams firing, but what a golden opportunity NPR would be missing in not making their review of their handling of the Juan Williams case a transparent learning opportunity in how journalists participate in and their employers manage the reporting of complex racial issues in the news.

Our society is becoming more multiracial all the time, and for the media to be credible to their consumers they need to be open about how they address racial issues when they arise. NPR would only be further damaging it's brand and worsening the PR disaster it created by releasing a sanitized version of the inquiry findings to it's listeners, the media industry and the general public.

Posted by Patrick Kerrigan | November 15, 2010 12:21 PM

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You are a good and faithful public radio employee Bob, but why should public radio behave any differently than any other major American employer, all of whom act like petty despots when accountability time rolls around.

NPR has already botched this one. Every other American employer ruthlessly terminates employees when they fail to toe the company line. Williams strayed for years and years and a cowardly NPR didn't fire him until recently, and then when the predictably politicized firestorm ensued, they cowered and promised a third-party review.

Suckers. Employment at Fox News isn't just at will, it's subject to review when your age starts showing or if you so much as hint at having views not congruent with Roger Ailes' daily memos. When GE CEO Jack Welch came into election hq and started telling NBC how to report their election findings, all video of that enounter vanished, and no NBC employee was ever found who would talk about it on or off the record.

In this matter, NPR is behaving like CBS when they fired Dan Rather because one small aspect of a very large story couldn't be documented to the satisfaction of a Georgia-based Republican consultant.

You cannot win this battle. The right, having found you guilty, will now judge this review equally harshly.

Posted by Mark Gisleson | November 15, 2010 1:58 PM

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Instead of investigating the firing of Juan Williams, NPR should spend it's time recruiting a conservative who could give NPR, what Williams gave FOX, an intelligent voice from the other side.

Posted by GregS | November 15, 2010 7:04 PM

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NPR should never have allowed anyone working for them to be on another's network. CBS might as well have allowed Cronkite to work for NBC. NPR should immediately tell Nina and Mara and Cokie that they cannot work for another competitive operation. The worst of it is that everyone knows that the Fox Entertainment Division show, Fox News, is in fact not journalism but just what Fox calls it inside their operation, that is, entertainment. They employ contract performers to generate audience by generating emotions of anger and hate that confirm the bias of their audience. Bring out the clown car and see how long you can get the audience to clap.

Posted by Dwight Bobson | November 16, 2010 4:43 PM

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