LOS ANGELES — The top news official at National Public Radio announced Thursday that she would leave her post, as the news outlet concluded an investigation into last year’s firing of news analyst Juan Williams.
Ellen Weiss agreed to step down as senior vice president for news aft
er 28 years with the radio network. Weiss had fired Williams for his comments on Fox News about fearing some Muslims who board airliners with him.
The Williams’ termination set off a furor and an admission by NPR Chief Executive Vivian Schiller that Williams had been let go too quickly,
without a face-to-face meeting. The NPR board began a review and announced the results Thursday.
Schiller has been admonished for her part in the controversy and will not receive a bonus for 2010, according to a statement from the NPR board that was e-mailed to employees Thursday afternoon. She will remain in her post, though, and received a vote of confidence from the NPR board of directors, according to the statement.
“The Board has expressed confidence in Vivian Schiller’s leadership going forward. She accepted responsibility as CEO and cooperated fully with the review process,” the statement read. “The Board, however, expressed concern over her role in the termination process and has voted that she will not receive a 2010 bonus.”
The statement also said that “concerns regarding the speed and handling of the termination process” led the board to recommend other actions “with regard to management involved in Williams’ contract termination.” It did not explicitly say whether those actions concerned Weiss but that seemed evident when she tendered her resignation.
Weiss could not immediately be reached for comment.
The departure of Weiss and the board’s announcement that it would revamp its ethics rules are bound to resurrect the controversy that exploded around cable television and the blogosphere late in October.
Conservatives can be expected to renew their calls to cut government funding for public radio — an action that could gain traction with a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Liberals likely will be infuriated at blowback for the ouster of Williams, who they believed went easy on their conservative opponents.
The controversy began with an appearance Williams made in late October on the Fox News program “The O’Reilly Factor.” Conservative host Bill O’Reilly had recently appeared on the ABC program “The View,” and said that “the Muslims really killed us on 9/11,” causing two of the co-hosts to walk off in protest of a statement they considered bigoted.
O’Reilly asked Williams, one of his regular guests, to comment on his thoughts on Muslims. Williams said “political correctness” shouldn’t stop Americans from expressing their real fears about terrorism. “When I get on a plane, I got to tell you,” Williams added, “if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
Two days later, Weiss called Williams and fired him for violating a provision in the NPR ethics guidelines against its news staff expressing personal opinions. NPR journalists, the code says, “should not participate in shows … that encourage punditry and speculation rather than fact-based analysis.”
Though Williams had been warned about opinion-making before, the radio network seemed to apply the rule unequally, letting some of its other personalities offer opinions on Fox and other outlets. The one-time Washington Post journalist reacted furiously, saying he had been censored.
He soon had a full-time job at Fox, where he reportedly will receive $2 million over three years. Fox News chief Roger Ailes used the incident to trumpet the conservative network as a haven for diversity of opinion.
Schiller agreed to Williams’ termination and defended it, given the commentator’s opinion making. But she soon increased critics’ outrage by suggesting Williams should direct his complaints to his “psychiatrist or his publicist.”
Schiller then apologized, conceded the firing had been too hasty. A couple of weeks later NPR board Chairman Dave Edwards announced the outside review by Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a multi-national law firm with offices in Washington, where NPR is based.
The review assessed not only Schiller, but Weiss. It reviewed e-mails from the principals, including those Williams exchanged with O’Reilly, preparing for their joint discussion about Muslims on the Fox program. NPR does not plan to release Weil’s report. The board’s statement expressed “concerns regarding the speed and handling of the termination process” and said that as a result it had “recommended that certain actions be taken with regard to management involved in Williams’ contract termination.”
The statement did not explicitly name Weiss but one person familiar with the review said Weiss was under pressure to leave as a result of the investigation.
In the memo from the board to employees Thursday, NPR said it tried, but failed, to get Williams to participate in the review.
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