Williams on backlash: ‘I don’t have psychiatrist or a publicist’

Recently dismissed NPR analyst Juan Williams responded to remarks from an NPR official suggesting he should have kept a controversial remark between “his psychiatrist or his publicist.”

“I don’t have a psychiatrist or a publicist,” he said, adding that he has been personally “hurt” by NPR’s decision to fire him.

“It was a rough week. To get fired, obviously, is no pleasure, and the innuendo I am unstable was despicable,” Williams said.

Williams was fired as an NPR news analyst last week for a remark he made about being nervous around passengers in Muslim dress on planes. The decision raised outcry on the left and right that NPR overstepped and was stifling open debate. Several high-profile Republicans called for NPR to stop receiving public funding.

Williams, who will take a larger role as an analyst at Fox News, said the decision “amounts to censorship” on an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

Williams was already a regular on Fox News shows. Part of NPR’s reason for firing him, he said, was based on his willingness to appear on shows with a conservative reputation. He said NPR officials saw that he was unnecessarily “legitimizing Fox News.”

“I think they were using a lot of this as a pretext to get rid of me … They don’t like that I appear on Fox News,” he said.

He added that NPR officials engaged in “character assassination about me and my professional behavior.”

“My integrity has been questioned. I’m still in the storm of it, but I just thought it was unfair,” he said. “I want to move on.”

He also hailed people on the left who echoed conservative criticisms of NPR about his firing.

“People on the left have resisted the temptation to say” he should be fired, he said.

“I didn’t advocate discriminating against Muslims,” he said.

“Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace told Williams he is “among friends” on Fox and granted him the final word in a panel discussion about the midterm elections. Williams and Wallace joked that the courtesy would evaporate by next Sunday.

Prompting his dismissal, Williams had told Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, “Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, 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.”



NPR explained Williams’s firing in a statement saying his comments were “inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.” 

NPR receives public and private funding, but most of its money comes from private sources.