Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires

by David Folkenflik

  A message to his hundreds of thousands of followers—and his hundreds of newspaper editors and television news executives, economically conveyed in less than 140 characters: No need to get people worked up about it. We’ll handle this one at our own pace. No need for the government to get involved.

  9

  THE FLYING MUSLIMS

  MURDOCH ALWAYS RESENTED GOVERNMENT REGULATION of for-profit news outlets and financial support for the public media sector. That opposition stemmed from both philosophical and competitive reasons, and it was often reflected in the commentaries of his journalists. In the fall of 2010, NPR’s decision to sever ties with Juan Williams because of remarks he made on the Fox News Channel became more than just a professional cataclysm for the journalist and a public relations debacle for the public radio broadcaster. The episode served as a singularly telling moment about two distinctive journalistic cultures.

  In the summer of 1995, I was a reporter on the metro desk for the Baltimore Sun covering campus life and higher education. One of the most contested issues in the state involved legal challenges to a scholarship program at the University of Maryland set aside for African Americans and other minority students. The university had filed briefs defending the scholarships by invoking the state’s racist past. At the outset of the Great Depression, it was widely believed that the university’s law school, based in Baltimore, had denied admission to hometown native Thurgood Marshall, who eventually became the chief lawyer for the NAACP, the nation’s solicitor general, and the first black jurist to sit on the Supreme Court.

  The story had been told many times, including repeatedly in the pages of the Sun, but most notably by the late syndicated columnist and civil rights champion Carl T. Rowan. In his 1993 biography of Marshall, Rowan wrote the sting never eased: Marshall’s treatment by Maryland fueled his quest for justice, including a landmark case in which he successfully represented a black Amherst College graduate seeking to overturn his rejection from the University of Maryland law school. Marshall also refused to attend the ceremony naming the school library in his honor.

  An administrator tipped me off to a law review article suggesting the facts did not match the legend. There was little evidence that Marshall had ever applied to the University of Maryland law school, because he knew his race would preclude his admission.

  I reviewed documents at the Library of Congress and conferred with Marshall’s former law clerks and his widow. I found the rejection letter with the language cited by Rowan—but it was in response to an application by a client of Marshall’s, not Marshall himself.

  Finally I called Williams, then a columnist at the Washington Post who was working on his own Marshall biography. While I was in college I had read and admired his book on the American civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize, a companion volume to the PBS documentary television series of the same name.

  Williams had also concluded Marshall had not applied. Rowan, though indignant at the suggestion, by all indications misunderstood this seminal episode about Marshall. “He and every other young black person in Baltimore in this time period, in 1930, knew that the University of Maryland law school did not accept black students,” Williams told me. “At best, it would be defying the state and simply registering your refusal to accept this racist system.”

  “In that sense, it doesn’t make much difference,” Williams said. But he proved willing to report what he had learned, despite the power of the legend. Several years earlier, Williams had embroiled himself in controversy by defending the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas; women at the Washington Post denounced him for failing to disclose that he—like Thomas—had been accused of verbal sexual harassment by female colleagues. A lengthy apology helped to dispel that flap.

  Williams signed up to be a commentator on Fox News in 1997, and in 2000 he left the Post to become host of NPR’s afternoon public affairs interview and call-in show Talk of the Nation. The combination was striking. When I became the Baltimore Sun’s media columnist, I profiled Williams: “During the week, Williams acts as the reasonable arbiter, led by common sense to tease out greater truths. Sundays, he’s the sparring partner of anchor Brit Hume, perhaps the toniest embodiment of Fox News’ often-acerbic style.”

  Williams said NPR allowed him to avoid the cable catnip of controversy for its own sake. He was popular and affable, and became more visible than ever for his work on the air. In addition, Williams proved to be one of the network’s most highly sought-after public speakers.

  But controversy would shadow his time at the radio network.

  Williams was eased out of the Talk of the Nation job after just a year. Senior producers and executives at NPR concluded—with almost no dissenting voices—that the role wasn’t a great fit for him. He became a senior correspondent, tapped to do political coverage and some high-profile interviews.

  But some of those colleagues and some of his listeners did not always appreciate how he subsequently handled himself. One minor element involved a cultural matter, internal to the network. He showed little interest in mastering how to record interviews on his own, and therefore frequently required a producer to accompany him on assignments. The practice is commonplace in network television, but less frequent at NPR.

  Second, and more important, his performance on the air occasioned periodic heartburn. In large part because of his prominence on Fox News, Williams had a line to officials at the Bush White House that was hard for some of his NPR colleagues to match. That was at once envied and believed to be a good thing. He landed interviews with Vice President Cheney, Bush’s chief political adviser Karl Rove, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and, in January 2007, President Bush himself.

  It was the network’s only interview with Bush during his eight-year presidency. By then the public had soured on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Republicans had been tossed from majorities in both chambers of Congress. As he did during most of his interviews, Williams sought to connect with the person sitting across from him. This time, Williams seemed at his most empathetic, seeking a way to give Bush a chance to explain himself. “You know, people are praying for you,” Williams said. “The American people want to be with you, Mr. President, but you just spoke about the polls and they indicate the public—and you know about what’s going up on Capitol Hill with the Congress, some in the military. Even many Iraqis, according to the polls, don’t like the idea of sending more troops into Iraq. So I wonder if you could give us something to go on, give us something—say, you know, this is a reason to get behind the president right now.” Many listeners, including some of Williams’s colleagues, believed he had veered dangerously into apologia, even as he broached an uncomfortable truth for the president.

  Additionally, Williams had antagonized bosses by continuing to write opinion pieces in major papers such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, and USA Today without getting NPR’s approval. He was not the only major NPR figure to write such pieces. Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon occasionally weighed in, backing President Bush’s war on terror in late 2001 in a piece for the Wall Street Journal, for example. But Simon tended to run his columns by his editors first. Williams did not.

  After one such instance in late June 2007, I encountered Williams by chance, as he sat, looking stunned, on the steps of the J. Crew store in Georgetown. He had just concluded a phone call with NPR’s top news official, senior vice president Ellen Weiss. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Williams backed the Bush administration’s stance against considering race in assigning children to schools. It carried a provocative headline, referring to the historic 1954 US Supreme Court ruling that desegregated American schools: “Don’t Mourn Brown v. Board of Education.” Weiss had been surprised and angered.

  Do you think I did anything wrong, David? he asked, as his wife stood nearby.

  I told Williams, truthfully, that I personally didn’t have a problem that he wrote what he wrote. But I said that I didn’t create the company’s newsroom polic
ies, nor did I sign its paychecks. Let them know ahead of time, I suggested. It’s best never to surprise top editors.

  A few months later, White House aides offered him a one-on-one interview with President Bush to explore the legacy of the integration of Little Rock High School on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. NPR turned down the offer: “We’re grateful for the opportunity to talk to the president,” Weiss told the Washington Post, “but we wanted to determine who did the interview.”

  Williams was incredulous and took the interview to Fox News. Most other news organizations in that situation would offer an anodyne comment about the circumstances in which the interview was obtained. Not Fox. Fox spokeswoman Irena Briganti took the opportunity to berate and belittle the public radio broadcaster: “NPR’s lack of news judgment is astonishing, and their treatment of a respected journalist like Juan Williams is appalling.”

  By 2008, Williams was just a contract employee at NPR. His time on the air had been diminished, although as an analyst Williams had a little more breathing room to offer his personal thoughts. While there is an expectation among many of NPR’s liberal listeners that the network’s mission is to reflect their beliefs and aspirations, most NPR journalists perceive their responsibility is reporting on unfolding news, providing crucial context and watchdog journalism, and offering a civil discussion of public events.

  That notion of civility conflicted with Williams’s role as a commentator on Fox, which requires clarity, forcefulness, even hyperbole. During the 2008 campaign, other Fox commentators had raised rumors that a video would show Michelle Obama referring to “whitey” in an unspecified rant on tape. The video never materialized, but months later, in early 2009, Williams gave the thrust of that charge credence. He told Bill O’Reilly that Michelle Obama could be a drag on her husband’s White House.

  “Michelle Obama, you know, she’s got this Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going,” Williams said on the O’Reilly Factor. “Her instinct is to start with this blame America, you know, I’m the victim. If that stuff starts coming out, people will go bananas and she’ll go from being the new Jackie O to being something of an albatross.”

  Called on the carpet again by NPR news executives, Williams apologized. In the heat of the moment on a charged cable show such as the O’Reilly Factor, Williams conceded, his analysis of Michelle Obama’s press coverage was easily mistaken for an attack. “What I said about Michelle Obama is not out of the realm of mainstream political discourse,” Williams told NPR’s ombudsman. “The point is that NPR has a much more deliberative, slow-paced form with more time to explain what you meant.”

  NPR had repeatedly asked Fox to stop identifying Williams as an NPR analyst. Fox would cease for a while and then go right back to putting NPR in the identifying chyron, the on-screen caption. He could not believe the angst over the other gig, which he had started before joining NPR. And the radio network’s decision to kill his interview with a sitting president dismayed him.

  NPR executives had their own concerns. Williams’s handling of the Bush interview concerned some of NPR’s hard news veterans. Additionally, the network did not want to allow the Bush White House, or any other administration, to dictate who could interview the president.

  Then came the flying Muslims. It was October 2010, and Bill O’Reilly was looking for some moral support. On an episode of ABC’s chat show The View, he had blamed Muslims for the September 11, 2001, attacks—seemingly not just the plotters, but Muslim people more generally. The hosts swiftly turned on him and two of them walked off the set.

  Back in Fox News studios, O’Reilly sought affirmation and received an attaboy from Williams: “Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

  A few minutes later, Williams circled back, warning O’Reilly against mistaking all Muslims for “extremists,” saying Christians shouldn’t be blamed for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

  It was too late.

  Complaints poured in. The common thread: Williams had demeaned people simply by their faith and affect. NPR news chief Ellen Weiss consulted with other editors and CEO Vivian Schiller. And then Weiss terminated Williams’s contract early amid a sharp exchange by cell phone. She said Williams’s remarks “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”

  I spoke briefly to Williams that night. He was baffled, genuinely uncomprehending of what he could have done to offend. He would later say repeatedly on Fox News that he made a point of telling O’Reilly that it was wrong to blame all Muslims for one’s own suspicions and fears. I am convinced that was the point he believed he was making.

  NPR’s brass decided he had proved a very different point: Juan Williams, they felt, could no longer be trusted in front of a microphone. And over at Fox, among its programming and corporate executives, a very different conclusion had been drawn: it was go time.

  10

  A TOTEBAG TO A KNIFE FIGHT

  AN EDITOR NOT INVOLVED IN terminating Williams’s contract suggested I might need to track it down and file a “spot”—a short item about a minute long. And so the games began. Along with Brian Stelter of the New York Times, I broke the story online late the night of October 18 and early the next morning; the news about Williams appeared in the Times in print on October 19 and instantly drew a drumbeat of heavy and overwhelmingly negative coverage on Twitter, on blogs, in print, and on the air.

  On October 21, things just got worse for NPR. Few people, even internally, would defend the way in which Williams was dropped—by cell phone, not in person. And CEO Vivian Schiller, speaking to the Atlanta Press Club at a previously arranged event, was asked by reporters why it had happened. (His contract was set to expire the following March.) She had been consulted on terminating him, in a series of quick telephone conversations, and had backed Weiss on the call. In Atlanta, Schiller attempted to explain that NPR was paying him for insight, not opinions, and added that he should confide his own beliefs to a psychoanalyst or his PR agent. She was attempting, she said later, to imply these were personal beliefs, and should be shared only with people who would keep his confidence.

  But Williams took Schiller’s remarks to mean she was suggesting he was crazy. And in the hours that followed, Fox News unleashed its arsenal. It started with interviews during news shows, surged in the late afternoon and early evening, and crested in the prime-time opinion shows.

  Glenn Beck used Williams’s termination by NPR as the cornerstone of an hour-long focus on free speech. “America, you’re smart enough. You know what this is all about. You see what all of this is about. It’s not about the truth. It’s not about setting anything right. It’s about intimidation, bullying, tearing down.”

  The next hour, Bret Baier announced that Fox News chairman Ailes had just awarded Williams a beefed-up contract with a bigger role at the network. The newscast’s second story focused on calls for an investigation into NPR and the elimination of federal funding for its operations and shows, notably from Congressman Peter King, a Long Island Republican who had routinely been critical of Muslim groups in the US for what he characterized as sympathy for terrorist operations. Baier returned to the Williams firing anew with his panel of analysts—two conservative columnists and a political reporter for the Washington Post.

  On the O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly called Schiller a pinhead within moments of its opening. (O’Reilly routinely sorts people into baskets of pinheads and patriots, which renders that decision even less surprising.) NPR, he said, was “a totalitarian outfit functioning as an arm of the far left.”

  Williams came on and told his side, fleshing out details of the indignity of being fired by cell phone. “I don’t fit in their box. I
’m not a predictable black liberal,” Williams said. “They were looking for a reason to get rid of me because I appear on Fox News. They don’t want me talking to you.” O’Reilly promised he would have Williams’s back—and that Williams would guest host his program the next night.

  Williams was followed by Fox News analyst Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s former top political adviser, who said NPR and public radio should be stripped of federal funding. Then Laura Ingraham inveighed against NPR. Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, a former lawyer, appeared to suggest Williams might have a lawsuit against the network. Glenn Beck rehearsed his grievances one more time.

  At 9:00 PM, Sean Hannity declared “a good man has been smeared.” His guests uniformly blasted NPR. Frank Luntz convened a focus group whose members, he said, gave him a clear message: “You got to tell Juan, hang in there, because Republicans and Democrats alike want him to fight for his job.”

  Ailes wrapped himself around Williams with a three-year, $2 million contract. The maneuver allowed him to brand Fox as the champion of free speech and to delight a sizable segment of its audience by criticizing NPR as something valued only by liberals.

  Other journalists had been fired over controversial remarks in other settings without such a muscular backlash. CNN had dismissed two figures in the months leading up to the Williams imbroglio. Longtime CNN Mideast expert and senior editor Octavia Nasr was forced out for a tweet that expressed sadness over the death of a prominent Hezbollah figure. Nasr had seen him as a bridge between the terrorist group and a more constructive future, but he had also been designated a terrorist by the US government. The network announced that her standing had been compromised. CNN daytime anchor Rick Sanchez also had been dumped by the network. Sanchez had complained on a satellite radio show that the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, who frequently mocked him, was a bigot. Sanchez couldn’t win, he argued, because Jews (like Stewart) controlled the media. Sanchez was gone within hours.