Vanity Fair
In the new issue of Vanity Fair, David Margolick goes deep into the back story of Juan Williams and NPR, saying Williams was dogged by internal criticism of his work but management didn’t know what to do about it. Margolick compares Williams’ dual roles at NPR and Fox News with his work for Fox News now:
Williams … had for a decade pulled off a balancing act worthy of the Cirque de Soleil: straddling between brash, right-wing Fox News, which he’d joined in 1997, and polite, vaguely progressive NPR, where he’d come three years later. For someone who thrived on being provocative and unpredictable, who hated being pigeonholed, it worked quite nicely: he could be semi-liberal around the conservatives and semi-conservative around the liberals, and a rare, cherished black body around both. …
Williams has clearly found a home for himself at Fox, where the vocal chords are given far more of a workout than shoe leather. But the old complexities and contradictions about the man remain in plain view. In the Wall Street Journal/Fox News–sponsored debate among the Republican presidential candidates in South Carolina on January 16, the dilemma was on perfect display. … It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and Williams was a panelist alongside Bret Baier and two representatives from The Wall Street Journal. The topics ranged from foreign affairs to tax policy to “super PACs,” but with a couple of exceptions, virtually every question Williams asked that night dealt with minorities and their problems in an especially troubled economy. …
Was this Williams courageously, even valiantly, introducing issues that Republicans and Fox News rarely discuss—and on hostile Confederate terrain, to boot? Or had he taken on, or been given, the role facetiously occupied by The Daily Show’s Larry Wilmore—“Senior Black Correspondent”—giving Fox a patina of racial fairness and balance on the black holiday, ghettoizing questions that should be the concern of all reporters, black and white? Or was it both?
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