“A high-profile NPR reporter well known for expressing her opinions says Wednesday’s firing of Juan Williams has caused internal friction at the radio network, and managers who made the decision were hardly guided by objective reasoning.

“Nina Totenberg, NPR’s legal affairs correspondent, says Williams’s dismissal ‘wasn’t a terribly popular decision on the news floor.’ While not explicitly saying so, Totenberg’s comments on the television political affairs show “Inside Washington” suggest her general disapproval with how the situation was handled…

“Totenberg said she’s been put in an ‘awkward position’ with the uproar and offered her explanation of why Williams was singled out for dismissal. ‘In the modern journalistic world, where people are asked to give opinions all the time whether you’re a regular on a show like this or not, if you cover a story you may be asked to appear on a television show and talk about it. I think it’s a very very difficult line to draw. And NPR tries to draw it, in my view, using rules that don’t exist anymore.'”

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“Though the dust hasn’t even begun to settle, it’s already clear what many people, of varying political stripes, think of the way NPR has handled the Williams affair: They think it’s a disaster. As Howard Kurtz put it in a Daily Beast piece: ‘His firing has backfired, handing FOX a victory and making Williams a symbol of liberal intolerance — on the very day NPR announced a grant from George Soros that it never should have accepted.’

“Indeed, the Soros revelation, combined with Republican and (especially) conservative antipathy for taxpayer support of PBS and NPR, guarantee that the Williams flap is not going away any time soon. As lamented here, there has been a coordinated and richly financed effort underway for months that has, as part of its aim, a substantial increase in government funding for public media generally, and that would oblige PBS member stations to redirect their news programs to more local coverage — the very thing that Soros’s contribution is designed to facilitate at NPR.”

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“The Williams story will be stale by the time the new Congress is in a position to do anything about it, making it less likely that there will be a big push to add anti-NPR conditions to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s next check. Now, if Republican leaders want to keep the issue alive between now and then, I’m sure it won’t be hard to keep finding stuff on public radio that offends rank-and-file conservatives. But even then, there’s a difference between wanting to keep the issue alive and actually intending to end the network’s subsidies. These standoffs never end with public broadcasting getting defunded. The point of the exercise isn’t to cut NPR loose; it’s to use the threat of cutting NPR loose to whip the network into line.”

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“Big mistake. There ought to be uninterrupted public dollars in support of public radio. Withdrawal of public dollars would raise the specter of official censorship and selective bans on ‘objectionable ideas,’ and that would only strangle independent voices on public radio, and on public television as well.

“And once a precedent is set for governmental intrusiveness — and for swaying public and corporate support away from the radio network over its bad personnel decisions — you can be sure there will be plenty of other pressure brought when the same or other officials object to the radio execs’ program choices — including programming that is deemed ‘unfair’ or biased toward the party in power of the government or ‘offensive’ to legislators’ core constituencies…

“De-funding will only encourage other special interest and pressure groups to emerge and seek de-funding of the programs and ideas they, too, find ‘offensive’ or unbalanced.”

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