Juan Williams

by Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate

  The New York Times editorial board wrote a few days after the attack that it was “facile” and wrong to blame conservatives and Republicans for the violence. But the paper concluded, “It is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge. Many on the Right have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants or welfare recipients or bureaucrats. They seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.”

  Further out on the Left, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann argued that it did not matter if Loughner was found to be mentally ill and unaware that he was shooting a political leader. The crime was a product of the times. “Assume the details are coincidence. The violence is not. The rhetoric has devolved and descended past the ugly and past the threatening and past the fantastic and into the imminently murderous.”

  Conservative talk-show hosts, sensing they were being blamed for the shootings, responded defiantly. Their indignation rose when it became clear that there was no explicit link between Loughner and right-wing groups or subversive tracts of the kind that had inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Rush Limbaugh castigated liberals for trying to benefit from the tragedy by using it as a reason to “regulate out of business their political opponents.” Sarah Palin, who had become a leader in the strongly anti-immigrant Tea Party, issued a statement that argued against any tenuous ties being manufactured by the left wing to tie right-wing vitriol to the attack. “Acts of monstrosity stand on their own,” she said. “They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio … not with law-abiding citizens who respectfully exercise their first amendment rights at campaign rallies.”

  The frightening shooting did cause a pause in the normal tit-for-tat bickering between Republicans and Democrats in Washington. Congressmen on both sides of the aisle pledged to be more civil in their tone and language. Some members of Congress broke from the usual seating pattern for the State of the Union address, crossing party lines in a show of national unity. And President Obama, in a speech in Arizona after the tragedy, cautioned against using the tragic situation to further polarize the national debate: “But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized—at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do—it is important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”

  The media coverage of the Tucson shooting was much more focused on possible ties to rhetoric than it was on lax gun control or inadequate treatment for people with mental illness. Somehow those relevant issues proved to be too loaded for debate, even though they are obviously at the center of the equation.

  Most Americans did welcome the opportunity to reassess the nature of American political discourse, especially the extreme, circus-barker versions that attract so much attention. It was a wake-up call. As much as we might loathe an individual politician, all political parties agree that it is wrong to kill.

  Yet even that kind of speech cannot be banned in America. After they bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, the militia groups remained free to circulate their anti-Semitic, racist screeds about conspiracies. Until he starts sending actual bombs in the mail, the Unabomber is free to post his bizarre manifesto on the Internet. Free speech gives him that right. Pundits like Palin, Ed Schultz, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Keith Olbermann, Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow, and those writing on DailyKos and HuffPo and in publications much further to the Left or Right have the right to say and write almost anything. Their high-voltage provocations and fearmongering are a daily staple of Web sites, American talk radio, and prime-time cable news shows.

  Why are such shows so shrill? Why are they so popular? Why is their language so unforgiving? Why do bellicose hosts regularly invoke military jargon about targeted opponents, political battlefields, and tactical opposition research? How can a Tea Party candidate like Nevada’s Sharron Angle think that it is acceptable to suggest fixing Washington through “Second Amendment remedies”?

  The Tucson shootings are a reminder of what we cannot tolerate in our society. It is not relevant what motivated Loughner. The point is that Loughner’s bloody assault was a reminder that for all of the bluster and bravado of American politics, it is still based on good and decent people engaging one another in conversation and debate, not violence and demonization. What we need is more honest, genuine debate. We need to talk to one another, not at one another.

  I don’t blame Rush or Olbermann for the events in Tucson. But when it comes to Rush, why is it that the king of the airwaves thinks it is a wimpy idea to encourage more civil discourse? He is a leader in the media industry, and his angry, defensive posture leads his audience to react similarly, rather than reaching for some common ground. Why can’t we act more responsibly? Can those who help shape public opinion not see that vitriolic talk leads us into a sea of bitterness, with no safe harbor for rational debate?

  The answer is plain and simple. The media industry cannot afford to stop and look at itself. Its members are scared. Limbaugh admitted to worrying after Tucson that there are people waiting for an excuse to “regulate out of business their political opponents.” But adverse reactions are not about removing political opponents. Commentary based on envy, anger, resentful mocking, and intolerance play to our late-night cravings but give us only empty calories. The talk-show crowd fears that Americans are sick and tired of lowest-common-denominator talk that yields no upside except for the big paychecks of those who produce it.

  The power of the Tucson tragedy was not that it imposed self-censorship on our ideas. It did not. Our freedom of speech remains vibrant, strong, and intact. The real power of that dark winter day in the desert was the suggestion that we must modify our behavior to increase our openness to one another, to carry on a civil conversation, and to listen respectfully to one another’s ideas.

  To quote President Obama in his speech in the aftermath of Tucson, a speech that was overwhelmingly heard as positive by the American people, on the Left and the Right,

  Let’s remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation.… We want to live up to the example of public servants like [Judge] John Roll and [Congresswoman] Gabby Giffords, who knew first and foremost that we are all Americans and that we can question each other’s ideas without questioning each other’s love of country.…

  I believe we can be better.… We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us. I believe that for all our imperfections we are full of decency and goodness and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.

  Amen.

  EPILOGUE

  IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME.

  In the middle of a political fight, I’ll ask people where they get their news. What is the basis of their argument? The reply is the equivalent of brain mapping. The liberals say the New York Times, Jon Stewart, the Huffington Post, and NPR. The conservatives say Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, Rush and Sean on the radio, the Drudge Report, and Powerline.com.

  Left wing or right wing, they are revealing their politics by announcing the locales they gravitate toward for news. And most of the time they admit those ideologically aligned outlets are their only sources of news.

  The biggest critics of Fox admit they never watch the news channel. Most of NPR’s loudest critics concede they don’t listen to it. I’ve lived on both sides of the divide. For ten years NPR and Fox simultaneously paid me to speak to their distinct audiences. When I made personal appearances for speeches in front
of the different camps, I got used to people asking me, “Why do you work for the other guys?” For conservatives it was, “Why don’t you leave NPR and work full-time for Fox?” And for liberals it was, “Why do you have to work for Fox?”

  When people come up to say hello to me at basketball games or airports, most introduce themselves by first telling me they are liberal or conservative. Only then do they say it is a pleasure to meet me, although a good number quickly add that they don’t agree with all I have to say. All this happens before they tell me their names. When people announcing differing ideological credentials come over within seconds of each other, I find myself wondering what would happen if these people ever broke out of their tight cocoons in their respective liberal and conservative media worlds and met each other.

  Would it explode their identities—some essential part of their sense of self that requires them to wear the label like an all-defining badge, “liberal” or “conservative”? Is it like fans of the Yankees and Red Sox being so locked into rooting for their team—and hating the other team—that they forget about their mutual love of baseball? Would it threaten them to hear about the stories, the passions, driving fellow Americans who think differently about the world but share the same destiny as Americans?

  As this book shows, we, the American people, are not shy about speaking out and voicing our dissent. But it also shows that such disagreements are not the end of the conversation. Our debates are the start of the conversation.

  Freedom of speech is arguably the defining aspect of the American way of life. It has been exalted by every American generation. The brightest moments in our history have come when we have gone beyond the obligation of fulfilling the constitutional grant to allow one another the right to speak and stood up to insist on it for ourselves or others who face being silenced by government or popular opinion.

  America fulfills its grant of rights best when we trust that every one of us is speaking with integrity, love of country, and the best of intentions until there is contrary evidence. Even after the arguments that led to the Civil War, President Lincoln reaffirmed the Founding Fathers’ dedication to the idea of free speech with the pledge that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

  The politically correct among us, on the Left and the Right, so self-righteous in claiming to want to protect the feelings of some minority or constituency, really want to put us all in a box to be controlled by them and their agenda. In the case of my controversial comments about Muslims dressed in religious clothes, my critics claimed to be muzzling me to protect the feelings of people wearing Muslim garb at airports. At that point all of us have to ask who benefits from insisting on this straitjacket for our thoughts and opinions. My words stand as a true expression of my feelings and a good starting point for talking about the difficult feelings many Americans have about Muslims in an era when terrorism is inextricably linked to Islam. Only corruption benefits by closing the door and shuttering the sunlight of honest dialogue among free people.

  I find it endlessly interesting to openly converse with people, to get inside the minds of those who are richer, poorer, younger, older, Jewish rabbis and Christian nuns, people who live in a different part of town, have been to war, have never been enlisted, or listen to a different set of media personalities. But apparently getting to know a varied cast of characters, even in the land of one people out of many, strikes some people as dangerous. I guess that is why NPR’s president suggested that I share my feelings only with a psychiatrist.

  But to my mind it is worthwhile to take the risk of saying what I am thinking and feeling, and to hear the same from other people. It is the politically correct crowd that assumes that anyone who thinks and looks different is a dork or a danger. Maybe their real fear is being open to admitting that they were wrong about “those people.”

  Americans on both sides of the political fence complain about how one-sided, personality-driven, and partisan the news shows have become. I tell them we get the media we deserve. The fact is the politically polarized, personality-heavy programs attract a lot of eyeballs. They consistently get high ratings, and that is why there are more and more of them. But it is also clear that on both Left and Right the viewers and listeners are in on the joke. They know it is a frivolous, guilty pleasure to sit back and get a kick out of the petty behavior, the spin doctors, the posturing, and the celebrity gossip on most of the talk news programs. But when the news is serious, like a 9/11 attack or a presidential election, Americans want more—they want hard news—real news.

  They agree with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former senator, who said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” But, unfortunately, much of the time we have to deal with a climate that seems to favor people like Senator Jon Kyl, who, as reported by Slate’s Dave Weigel, “made the defining Republican stumble of the [2011 spring government shutdown] debate, saying on the Senate floor that ‘90 percent’ of Planned Parenthood’s work was abortion. Within hours, his office clarified that this was not intended as a fact.…” You can’t make this stuff up.

  Perhaps the reason Americans feel so bereft is that with careless claims thrown left and right, there’s no longer the comfort (even if it was an illusion) of a single trusted news source.

  The days of people across the political spectrum trusting journalists such as Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and David Brinkley are long gone. None of those outstanding journalists, for all their credibility, could compete in the current media environment. They’d be disparaged as lacking personality and being too tied to the details of a story as opposed to debating the meaning of the story. Their successors are chosen for their personalities, their number of followers on Twitter, and their glamorous looks. Television executives now assume that the audience is coming to see a personality and not simply to get the news. The news is secondary.

  The reason for that is that the nature of the news business has changed with advances in technology. At work, at home, in the car, people are listening to the radio, and they’re catching a few minutes here and there from cable’s twenty-four-hour coverage throughout the day. On their computers they are reading the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report, The Hill and Foxnews.com. They have links to conservative or liberal blog postings sent to their Facebook pages, which are, in turn, sent to their cell phones. If they bother to turn on the major-network evening news broadcasts, what they are getting is no longer the “news” because they’ve heard it already. They are really tuning in to see which stories are played at the top of the broadcast, what the network slant is on a given story. And they don’t feel the need to watch regularly.

  The problem of declining relevance to people also bedevils the big morning newspapers. Only a decade ago print editions paid the bills for having top reporters covering city hall and the school board. Now the Web sites for many major metropolitan newspapers get a bigger audience than the print editions. But while the Web sites have grown, the news organizations have not figured out how to get readers and advertisers to pay for the online news product. As a result, once-indispensable metropolitan dailies like the Washington Post have been forced to scale back their operations. Some have closed their doors entirely. If your newspaper arrives at your door by 6:00 a.m. every morning, its stories have been on the paper’s Web site for at least a few hours. The stories are no longer news. Jay Leno, the late-night comedian, said in a monologue a few years ago that the New York Times had won seven Pulitzer Prizes that day, but he read about it on Google News.

  What people do want is to make sense of the news. Most people don’t have the time or energy to make sense of the complex and often frustrating political problems of our times. They are busy holding down a job, driving the kids to soccer, and paying the bills. They don’t have enough time to get a good night’s sleep, much less dedicate time to understanding the news when it requires context, history, and assessment of the motivations of the key players involved.<
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  As a result, most people look for simple answers, uncomplicated interpretations, infotainment and satire, good guys and bad guys. More and more people look for one-stop shopping—news coverage they can trust to digest the news for them and help them reach a conclusion. And it has to be fun to watch, read, or listen to. However, polls show people don’t feel they are getting the trustworthy part. What they get is predictable political spin, along with big doses of fear, fright, and fury. Which is why many Americans have lost trust in the news media. A surprising number of people, mostly young people and especially young women, report in surveys that they have become disengaged from the news—even as the media is swimming in news programs.

  In moments of crisis, people yearn for media that have the guts to provide honest and open accounts of events, fair debates that show a willingness to consistently cross the lines of political dialogue in search of the truth, not close the door on it. And too often they don’t find it. Amid the sideshow of commentary and canned news, they realize that an ever-increasing number of media outlets pretend to honor open dialogue, a symphony of ideas and opinions, but only offer a one-note performance: their niche brand. That leaves us with a lot of free speech, but free speech at the fringes. And the fringes do not promote sincere debate between Left and Right. At best, they give us shouting matches.

  The honest middle, where much of the nation lives, can’t find a place to hear a genuine discussion. And this bothers people all over the political spectrum, including the Far Right and Far Left. Smart people, including those on the political extremes, consistently tell me they want to know what the other side is thinking, even if only to be certain they are right and everyone else is wrong.