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You have to hand it to Juan Williams. After getting booted from his ridiculously cushy NPR job for going on Fox News and saying Muslim people made him nervous, he got handed a multi-million dollar contract at Fox to be their central Fox News Liberal, a position that requires you to go on the air and say, "I'm a liberal, but these Democrats are just despicable." And now he's out with a book, Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate. Can you spare a tear for him?As I wrote when Williams got fired from NPR, his Fox statement wasn't a firing offense, but they should have gotten rid of him years earlier, since a) he was harming their brand and violating their written policies every time he went on Fox, and b) he provided zero value to NPR as a news organization (his entire job was to come on the air once a week and repeat some tired conventional wisdom for five minutes). He showed how at home he felt at Fox by promptly alleging that NPR fired him because he's black. Yeah, that was it. I haven't read Williams' book, but here's part of a review from Kirkus:
Here, the author recounts that removal, generalizing from his experience to lament a world in which free speech is supposedly suppressed in the interest of political correctness. True enough, we live in a time when the gravest offense often seems to be to give offense in the first place, even though there are plenty of people—and plenty of them on Fox—who make good livings doing just that. Williams is not especially convincing in that generalization; to read this account, it seems he may just have had a toxic relationship with his boss, herself recently gone after a political misstep of a different kind. To be fair, he concurs that some Fox types, particularly the soon-to-be-gone Glenn Beck, are guilty of stifling and shouting and incivility, though this admission comes in a rather roundabout way: "So while my friends at Fox frequently and courageously expose the use of this tactic of political correctness by the Left, it's important to remember that the Right plays this game too." Most of the book is unobjectionable—sure, it'd be nice if we could all play nice and Al Franken wouldn't roll his eyes at Mitch McConnell. Even so, much of the narrative is a long exercise in complaint about his bad treatment at the hands of NPR management, in which Williams overlooks, it seems, the Ailesian right-to-work credo, which holds that all employees serve at the pleasure of their bosses and there's no such thing as tenure or appeal.I'm sorry -- the folks at Fox "courageously" expose political correctness on the left? Does it really take a lot of courage for someone like Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity to complain about political correctness? That's like saying that Wal-Mart "courageously" sells stuff cheaper than its competitors, or that Ben & Jerry's "courageously" makes ice cream that tastes really good. It's the whole business model, and it's working out pretty well for them. You see, at Fox, conservatives are always victims. Victims of liberals, victims of the "elite" (not the people who actually have money and power, mind you, but the snooty cultural elite), victims of the media, victims of college professors, victims of pointy-headed bureaucrats. And Williams wants us to know that he's a victim too. He's been muzzled! And he can tell you all about it, from his gig on a national cable network, and his multi-book deal.
