In a recent interview with the Daily Caller, Fox News contributor Juan Williams said so-called mainstream media outlets will "stab" and "kill" dissenting voices to silence them, The Blaze reported Sunday.
Williams spoke of his experience having worked for both left and right-leaning media operations, the Blaze said. In 2010, Williams was fired from the taxpayer-subsidized NPR for telling Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that he sometimes gets nervous when seated on an airplane with Muslims.
“I mean, 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,” he said in October 2010.
At the time, a number of conservatives including Michelle Malkin and Brent Bozell came to his defense, calling his firing outrageous.
“I always thought it was the Archie Bunkers of the world, the right-wingers of the world, who were more resistant and more closed-minded about hearing the other side,” Williams told the Daily Caller.
“But in fact, what I have learned is, in a very painful way -- and I can open this shirt and show you the scars and the knife wounds -- is that it is big media institutions who are identifiably more liberal to left-leaning who will shut you down, stab you and kill you, fire you, if they perceive that you are not telling the story in the way they want it told,” he added.
Williams said he deals with conservatives "all the time" and told Ginni Thomas that "they’re far more tolerant of me as a dissident voice than anything I ever encountered on the left.”
But, he added, that's not what he would have thought 30 years ago coming out of college.
“The guy that showed up just out of college would never have guessed that this would be true, thirty years later,” he said.
After his firing, Williams leveled charges of racism at NPR in his book, "Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate."
Williams wrote that “it was clear they wanted me out the door.” The reason, he said at the time, is that an NPR news executive told him, “because I did not fit their view of how a black person thinks.”
Video of Williams' remarks can be seen here.
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