Conservatives Outraged At Juan Williams NPR Firing Didn’t Care When CNN Correspondent Met Same Fate

[Hissyspit]

http://bloggasm.com/conservatives-outraged-at-juan-williams-npr-firing-didnt-care-when-cnn-correspondent-met-the-same-fate

Conservatives outraged at Juan Williams’ NPR firing didn’t care when CNN correspondent met the same fate
Posted in General | Thursday, October 21st, 2010

- snip -

There have been hundreds of conservative bloggers and commentators who have attacked NPR in the wake of this firing, claiming political censorship and a liberal bias (the censorship issue stems from funding public radio receives from the government, though a large percentage of its revenue comes from private donors). Bill O’Reilly accused NPR of being a “left-wing outfit that wants one opinion.” Fox News contributor Bernie Goldberg told a Yahoo reporter, “So Juan Williams is fired for saying something the liberals at NPR find controversial? One more piece of evidence that liberals have forgotten how to be liberal.”

Reading over the commentary in many of the most popular conservative blogs, I wondered if these online pundits expressed similar outrage at CNN’s firing of Middle East editor Octavia Nasr for an offense that didn’t even occur on a major news outlet. CNN’s reason for terminating Nasr in July was for a now-deleted tweet that merely expressed sadness for the death of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a beloved Muslim leader in the Middle East whose death was mourned even by our own allies. Because Fadlallah had been reported to be a “spiritual leader”of Hezbollah by some sources, neo-conservatives accused Nasr of being a terrorist sympathizer despite the fact that her tweet didn’t include any support for Hezbollah actions or policies.

So how did conservative bloggers’ coverage of Nasr’s firing compare to Williams’? The conservative Hot Air said today that an “NPR opinion journalist had better not admit to having a normal human reaction about potential for terrorism nine years after 3,000 Americans got killed by radical Muslims on commercial air flights, or else.” This was, the blogger said, “an object lesson about the range of opinion tolerated by management.” But with the Nasr firing, this same blog asked whether “after having outed herself as a Hezbollah sympathizer,” CNN owed “its viewers and readers a complete accounting of their coverage in the Middle East and a complete explanation of Nasr’s role in it?”

The conservative media watchdog Newsbusters claimed today that “Juan Williams has done nothing wrong” and that “what he said echoes what the vast majority of Americans believe.” This is the complete opposite of the view it took on Nasr’s rather anodyne tweet. “CNN has finally taken a step in the right direction in removing a terrorist sympathizer from their ranks,” the blogger wrote several months ago. “It’s a shame it took this amount of publicity and attention from organizations like the MRC to get the job done, as Octavia Nasr should never have been granted the position of authority to begin with.”

MORE

[aquart]

1. Nasr, who is still on Twitter, is doing just fine, however.

And appears to be in excellent spirits.

[Scurrilous]

2. Where's Rick Sanchez figure in all this?

:hide:

[Tx4obama]

3. It's a FoxNews media stunt....

FoxNews led the over blown outrage all day, then gave Juan a three year TWO million dollar contract.
Tons of free advertising for their newly hired FoxNews talkinghead/contributor ;)