Sadly, it’s behind a subscription firewall, but in the new issue of National Review, Rob Long (who, as he writes, has inadvertently tested NPR’s delicate and rococo sensibilities himself), has a great explanation of why Juan Williams was permanently exiled to the Siberia of Fox News by NPR:
From the smug, deluded bunker of NPR, Fox News is a big, greasy, angry, hate-filled state fair, where right-wing nuttery is passed along like deep-fried Twinkies to an obese and ignorant public. Juan Williams was a crossover artist — everybody loved him on the Brit Hume show on Fox — and that’s usually a good thing. But from the tasteful offices of NPR, it was as if he were conferring, by the power invested in the chyron “Juan Williams, NPR,” a little class to that awful, tacky network. Juan Williams gave Fox News legitimacy. Juan Williams, by his very presence with Bill O’Reilly, made it impossible to paint Fox News as the monotonal mouthpiece of the American Right. So, Juan Williams had to be fired from a network that claims to value diversity of opinion but doesn’t, for bringing diversity of opinion to a network that isn’t supposed to have it but does.
Here’s what’s really going on: Juan Williams broke the class barrier. He refused to stick with his own kind. He started crossing over to the bad part of town, and the group on the good side of town had finally had enough. It’s almost too obvious to point out, but, I mean, ironic, no? What used to be the exclusive province of country-club Republicans — snobbishness, clan rules, punishment for stepping out of line, a paralyzing fear of the great and greasy middle class — is now what drives the fatcat liberals at NPR.
Meanwhile, as if the freakouts from John Kerry, Paul Krugman, George McGovern and other dinosaur “progressives” weren’t enough schadenfreude for conservatives this weekend, the left is melting down on Twitter over this little bon-bon courtesy of ABC:
ABC announced their election night coverage early on and Big Journalism Editor Dana Loesch will join the network in studio for 6 p.m. – 2 a.m. election night; Bigs founder and head of the Breitbart empire Andrew Breitbart will be bringing analysis live from Arizona.
Providing analysis and historical context will be ABC News contributors George Will, Cokie Roberts, Donna Brazile and Matthew Dowd. They will be joined by Ron Brownstein, Editorial Director for the National Journal Group and conservative commentator Dana Loesch.
Man, can you believe ABC would hire someone as partisan as Andrew Breitbart to provide opinion on election night? I’m sure George Stephanopoulos will be resigning in protest from the network at once.
Seriously though, Andrew will likely be retweeting some of the more cheerful missives from the professional left in his performance art Twitter stream (such as these two by otherwise frequently insightful “liberal” NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, whose bitter and clinging tone at the moment matches his scowling Twitter account photo perfectly). But if you need a Cliffs Notes version of the action, Jim Treacher has you covered.
And speaking of first time tragedy, second time farce, Ace wonders if we’re seeing a case of deja PEST all over again.
Update: There’s got to be a morning after….
Update: GE and NBC must be proud as a peacock when they parse the Runyon-esque prose stylings of their self-styled successor to Edward R. Murrow.
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