Did NPR Commit Suicide With Williams Decision?

From Investors.com:

NPR's Suicide?

Media: Did National Public Radio jump the shark? Just hours after sacking Juan Williams for making sensible but allegedly insensitive remarks on Fox, the federally funded outfit has brought itself under painful scrutiny.

Williams no doubt has been riding an emotional roller coaster, both smarting from NPR's patently unjust action and reveling in a new $2 million-plus contract with the Fox News Channel. For the rest of us who are concerned with restoring integrity to the news business, there's good news in this.

For one, NPR was condemned across the spectrum — at least to the far fringes of the left, where the George Soros-funded Media Matters now wants similar action to be taken against Mara Liasson, the other NPR journalist who regularly moonlights on Fox.

There's also good news in the recovery by many traditional liberals of their commitment to fairness and free speech for which they were known before political correctness set in many years ago.

Even the Washington Post — where early in his career Williams worked as a reporter — was so outraged that it defended its former writer in a lead editorial.

NPR's reflexive intolerance also occasioned a revisiting of the left-leaning organization's many past sins.

Exhibit A: the record of "correspondent" Nina Totenberg, who, on one of those soporific shows from "inside Washington" on yet another network, also doubles as a panelist.

Whereas Williams thoughtfully explained the frisson he shares with millions of Americans when boarding airplanes alongside passengers in Muslim garb, Totenberg grotesquely wished AIDS by transfusion on the late senator Jesse Helms and his grandchildren.

So when does she get the ax?

The boiling indignation now moves to Capitol Hill, where congressional Republicans and likely a few Democrats will put NPR on the squirm seat. There it will have to explain why it shouldn't be defunded — which would be a good thing.

Just months ago the Federal Trade Commission, feeling the Oba-maite impulse to nationalize, prepared a report on how the government could "save journalism" by subsidizing various news outlets and pumping up public broadcast outlets.

Alarmingly, the plan was well received by some media "leaders" who once prized their independence. NPR stood to gain by the blueprint, which resembled authoritarian media practices from Ceaucescu's Romania to Chavez's Venezuela.

By sacking Juan Williams, NPR may inadvertently have brought that plan to a screeching and welcome halt.