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Catching Up With Juan Williams

Nick Step, Flickr Creative Commons

http://cptv.vo.llnwd.net/o2/ypmwebcontent/Chion/Colin%20McEnroe%20Show%2011-30-2011.mp3

Where to begin? Juan Williams is on the show today and will join me for a conversation at the Mark Twain House Friday night.

Williams became, in 2010, the human embodiment of a conversation about public broadcasting and the media in general. The surface narrative was that Juan Williams had screwed things up at his day job with something he said at his night job. His day job was as an analyst for NPR.
His night job was as an analyst for Fox News. Beneath the surface was a much larger set of questions. Was NPR genuinely fighting for its reputation as an impartial news source or were the politics of Fox News what bugged the brass?

What exactly did Williams do wrong? If you believe that Fox is more of a propaganda machine than a news organization, then maybe Williams shouldn't have been working there.
But critics of NPR would say it wasn't the propaganda machine. It was the flavor of propaganda coming out of the machine.

Leave your comments below e-mail colin@wnpr.org or Tweet us @wnprcolin.

Colin McEnroe is a radio host, newspaper columnist, magazine writer, author, playwright, lecturer, moderator, college instructor and occasional singer. Colin can be reached at colin@ctpublic.org.

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