Juan Williams comment, “if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous” and NPR’s decision to end his contract as a news analyst has got a lot of people talking.

ThinkProgress has a good post about this entitled, Juan Williams Admits His Fear Of Muslims On Airplanes Is Irrational.

They refer to a question that George Stephanopoulos asked Williams on Good Morning America, “should you have gone the extra step and said, “Listen, they’re irrational, they are feelings I fight?” Williams responded, “Yeah, I could have done that.” Although he did get upset when NPR’s CEO Vivian Schiller suggested that his comments should have been “between him and his psychiatrist or his publicist”. Schiller later apologized, and she should have.

These days, psychiatrists typically spend minimal time talking to their patients. Their focus is on prescribing medications. Williams should talk with a good psychotherapist about his irrational fears. But I digress.

The real issue is whether or not his comments damaged his credibility as a news analyst. This is where Williams came so close to getting it right, and yet failing so miserably. For years the news industry has perpetuated a myth that news analysts can be fair and objective, that they can be unbiased. Personally, I don’t believe anyone can truly be objective.

It reminds me of when I attended the bloggers breakfast at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. One of the guest speakers was Walter Mears. Walter Mears has covered conventions for decades for the Associated Press. After he spoke, David Weinberger asked Mears whom he was supporting for president. Mears said that he wouldn’t say, because he had to remain objective. Weinberger pressed asking how people could compensate for Mears biases. Mears then claimed not to have biases and everyone laughed.

This is where Juan Williams came so close, and then failed. He admitted his irrational biases. He could then have said something like, “but you know, Bill, these fears are irrational. I struggle with them and I try not to let them affect my news analysis, but I know that they do, and people listening to me need to take that into consideration. You see, really, those of us in the news industry need to admit our fears and biases. We need to help other people recognize these fears and biases in themselves and rise above them.”

It is worth noting that according to NPR’s ombudsman wrote:

Later in that segment, Williams did challenge O'Reilly's apparent contention that every Muslim on the planet is an extremist bent on attacking America.

NPR was right in terminating Juan Williams news analyst contract, not for the words he said on O’Reilly’s show, but for his continued demonstration of his inability to be a credible news analyst.

Now, we have the battle over whether or not news analysts should be credible. Sarah Palin does not appear to believe that news analysts should be credible. She suggests that NPR should be defunded because “We get to witness Juan Williams being fired from NPR for merely speaking frankly about the very real threat this country faces from radical Islam.”

Unfortunately for Palin, that isn’t what he was talking about. He was talking about irrational fears, the sort of irrational fears that Palin pushes to promote herself. We need news analysts like Juan Williams could have been but failed to be. NPR plays an important role in this and should not be defunded. In fact, as Free Press notes in an email about their Don’t Let Extremists Defund NPR campaign:

The United States already has one of the lowest levels of federal funding of public media in the developed world — at just $1.43 per capita. Yet surveys show that the public considers NPR and PBS not just our most trusted news sources, but the most valued public institutions we have.

So, let’s see if we can get past the noise about Juan Williams. Let’s try to get to the meat of the subject. Can news analysts show their human failings and help us rise above our own? Standing up against islamophobia is a good starting point.