Juan Williams - Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate

ALSO BY JUAN WILLIAMS

Enough

Thurgood Marshall

Eyes on the Prize

This Far by Faith

My Soul Looks Back in Wonder

Ill Find a Way or Make One

Copyright 2011 by Juan Williams

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Williams, Juan.
Muzzled: the assault on honest debate / Juan Williams.
p. cm.
1. Freedom of speechUnited States. 2. Political correctnessUnited States. 3. Williams, JuanPolitical and social views. I. Title.
JC591.W55 2011
323.4430973dc22
2011016800

eISBN: 978-0-307-95203-5

Jacket design by Ben Gibson

v3.1

This book is dedicated to Crown Books, Fox News, FoxNews.com, The Hill newspaper, thehill.com, and the American Program BureauGuiding Lights in the stormstanding tall in the faith that speaking the truth is the heart of great journalism.

For why should my freedom be judged by anothers conscience?

1 CORINTHIANS 10:29

I AM A BIGOT. I hate Muslims. I am a fomenter of hate and intolerance. I am a black guy who makes fun of Muslims for the entertainment of white racists. I am brazen enough to do it on TV before the largest cable news audience in America. And I am such a fraud that while I was spreading hate to a conservative audience at night I delivered a totally different message to a large liberal morning-radio audience. I fooled the radio folks into thinking of me as a veteran Washington correspondent and the author of several acclaimed books celebrating Americas battles against racism.

My animus toward Muslims may be connected to my desire for publicity and the fact that I am mentally unstable. And I am also a fundamentally bad person. I repeatedly ignored warnings to stop violating my companys standards for news analysis. And I did this after repeated warnings from my patient employer. Therefore, my former employers made the right decision when they fired me. In fact, they should be praised for doing it, and rewarded with taxpayer money. Their only sin was that they didnt fire me sooner.

This is just a sampling of some of the reaction to National Public Radios decision to fire me last year after a ten-year career as a national talk show host, senior correspondent, and senior news analyst. They were not taken from the anonymous comments section of a YouTube page or the reams of hate mail that flooded my in-box in the days before the firing. No, this is the response from the NPR management whom I had served with great success for nearly a decade. It is also the reaction from national advocacy groups like the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), whose work I had generally admired and occasionally defended over the years. Joining them was a small, knee-jerk mob of liberal commentators, including a New York Times editorial writer, who defended NPR as an important news source deserving federal funding even if it meant defaming mehe made foolish and hurtful remarks about Muslims. Cable TV star Rachel Maddow, a fervent champion of free speech, agreed that I had a right to say what was on my mind, but in her opinion the comments amounted to bigotry. I had a right to speak but no right to keep [my] job. NPR also found support among leftist intellectuals who regularly brag about defending the rights of the little guy but had no problem siding with a big institution over an individual journalist when the journalist was me. One writer said I had long ingratiated myself with conservatives and I had gotten what was coming to me. His conclusion about me: Sleep with dogs, get fleas.

What did I do that warranted the firing and the ad hominem attacks that preceded and followed?

I simply told the truth.

Looking back on the torrential media coverage surrounding my dismissal, I am struck by how little of it tells the full story of what actually happened. Basic facts were distorted, important context was not provided, and personal attacks were treated as truth. The lack of honest reporting about the firing and the events that led up to it was not just unfairmost of it was flat-out lies.

In this first chapter, I will tell you the full story of what happened to me. My purpose in doing this is not to get people to feel sorry for me. The goal of this book is to set the record straight and to use my experience in what amounts to a political and media whacking as the starting point for a much-needed discussion about the current, sad state of political discourse in this country. It is time to end the ongoing assault against honest debate in America.

This story begins with a typical Monday night for me. I went to the Fox News Channels bureau in Washington, DC, to do a satellite interview for Bill OReillys prime-time show, The OReilly Factor. I have appeared on Bills show hundreds of times since I joined Fox in 1997. The drama here is watching me, a veteran Washington journalist with centrist liberal credentials, enter the lions den to debate the fiery, domineering, right-of-center OReilly. When I do the show I am almost always paired with a conservative or Republican guest. My usual jousting partner is Mary Katharine Ham, a conservative writer. This strikes some critics as stacking the deck by having two conservatives take me on. In reality the combination offers viewers a range of opinions, because OReilly is unpredictable. He listens and admits when he is wrong. Ham is an honest debate partner who is willing to call them as she sees them and to veer off any conservative party line. If the deck is stacked, its because there can be no doubt that this is Bills party and he runs the show. The audience tunes in to see him, and they keep tuning in because they love his cranky but vulnerable personality. He is a star and he can be intimidating, but I see no need to back down in a debate and I genuinely respect him. I think he respects me too. Along with Mary Katharine, Bill and I share a sense that we can disagree without the personal attacks and put-downs. I hear from viewers that the segment is a hit because they learn something from watching people with different political convictions and viewpointsbut also with affection for each othertry to make sense of emotional, political issues. We dont play the cheap TV debate trickoften used to stoke TV political debate shows and soap operasof creating false tensions by shouting over each other and calling each other liars. We treat each other as sincere people with integrity and the courage of our convictions. But make no mistake, we are painfully direct with each other. To survive on the show, youd better know how to think quickly and counter-punch with a fast, pithy point or youll be left behind with less time to talk, reduced to what Bill calls a pinhead.