Juan Williams: Here's the True Problem With NPR

Arrogant, elitist leaders ruining a 'once-great brand'
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 15, 2011 10:44 AM CDT
Juan Williams: Here's the True Problem With NPR
News analyst Juan Williams appears on the "Fox & friends" television program in New York, Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010.   (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

The departure of NPR CEO Vivian Schiller shines a light on the network’s key problem: its "ingrown and arrogant" leaders, who have "lost sight of journalism as the essential product of NPR," writes Juan Williams in the New York Post. Those at the top think they're smarter than everyone else, and "any approach at variance with their own was considered traitorous and a basis for exiling them to the Gulag—or, in my case, firing me."

That puts the the station's admittedly great journalists in a bind, “trying to please the leadership," who is in turn completely obsessed with money. Its leaders will do anything for any liberal with a fat pocketbook, writes Williams, then "turn around and in self-righteous indignation claim that they have cleaner hands than anybody in the news business who accepts advertising or expresses a point of view." And that confirms it for Williams: The government needs to stop funding NPR, and the NPR audience needs to step up to the plate and fund it. "I'm still an NPR fan," concludes Williams, "but I'm no fan of the self-serving, self-righteous thinking that is at the top level of NPR in Washington and that has corrupted a once-great brand." (More Juan Williams stories.)

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