Here’s my column today on the Williams firing. I was talking yesterday to an NPR defender who was trying to make the case that NPR needs its “news analysts” to be non-ideological. This is risible. The problem with Williams wasn’t that he was ideological, but that he wasn’t ideological enough–he occasionally said non-liberal things on a network hated by liberals. As Brian noted yesterday, there’s simply no way to explain the Totenberg double-standard. She’s a genuine, down-the-line ideologue who routinely expresses her views in pungent fashion and she’s a correspondent, not a news analyst.
Meanwhile, an e-mailer thinks I just don’t get it:
I don’t get your problem with this, he was clearly on “double secret probation”!