Mike Huckabee (left) and Sarah Palin have taken to the airwaves to defend Juan Williams. | AP Photos Fox hires Williams, right blasts NPR

Fox News moved swiftly to turn the controversy over Juan Williams’ firing by NPR to its advantage, offering Williams an expanded role on the network and a new three-year contract Thursday in a deal that amounts to nearly $2 million.

"Juan has been a staunch defender of liberal viewpoints since his tenure began at Fox News in 1997,” Fox’s Roger Ailes said in a statement, first reported in the Los Angeles Times. “He’s an honest man whose freedom of speech is protected by Fox News on a daily basis.”


NPR’s decision to fire Williams over comments he made about Muslims on Fox has prompted calls on the right for Congress to remove its funding. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) plans to introduce a bill to strip any federal money – which NPR says amounts to about 2 percent of its annual budget.

“I think it’s reasonable to ask why Congress is spending taxpayers’ money to support a left-wing radio network – and in the wake of Juan Williams’ firing, it’s clearer than ever that’s what NPR is,” said House Republican leader John Boehner (R-Ohio.)

And Williams’ firing raised the uncomfortable prospect for Democrats that the issue could remind voters of the backlash over the lower Manhattan mosque in the final two weeks before the midterm elections.

The biggest names in conservative politics — including Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin, both paid Fox News contributors like Williams — rushed to his defense after he said he gets “nervous” when he sees people in Muslim dress boarding an airplane.

Williams discussed the circumstances of his firing for the first time Thursday, saying he was fired over the phone without being given a chance to come in and make his case, despite having worked at NPR for 10 years.

In regard to his comments about Muslims on Bill O’Reilly’s show this week on Fox, he was told “that crosses the line” and that there wasn’t anything he could say to change NPR executives’ minds that his statements were bigoted. (See: NPR fires Juan Williams)

He argued that he was just making an honest statement about his emotional response, adding, “You cannot ignore what happened on 9/11.”

NPR CEO Vivian Schiller told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Williams’ firing was more of a “last straw” than a response to a single comment, saying, “There have been several instances over the last couple of years where we felt Juan has stepped over the line.”

Most famously, NPR asked Williams to stop identifying himself an an NPR news analyst while speaking on Fox last year after he said “Michelle Obama, you know, she’s got this Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going” and that she’d be an “albatross” for President Barack Obama.

She also said that Williams’ views on Muslims should remain between him and “his psychiatrist or his publicist,” a comment for which she later apologized.

The controversy over Williams’ firing is only the latest in a series of political battles over Islam’s role in American public life this year that began with the fight over the proposed Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero.

In that controversy, as in this one, Palin was one of the strongest voices supporting the side having the negative reaction to Muslims as a result of the actions of the 9/11 terrorists, and she was largely backed up by Republicans. The mosque debate, in turn, was politically damaging to President Obama.

Now Williams’ firing is becoming a cause célèbre for conservatives.

On his program Thursday night, O’Reilly said that “Jim DeMint will introduce legislation to defund” NPR in the wake of Williams’s firing – which a source later confirmed to POLITICO.

“This is like the ACORN deal – no more money to NPR,” O’Reilly said. “NPR has now devolved into a totalitarian outfit functioning as an arm of the far left.”

Earlier in the day, Huckabee, like Palin a possible presidential candidate in 2012, also urged Congress to cut NPR’s funding and announced he would no longer accept interviews on NPR.

“NPR has discredited itself as a forum for free speech and a protection of the First Amendment rights of all and has solidified itself as a purveyor of politically correct pabulum and protector of views that lean left,” he said in a statement.

Palin took to her Facebook page to echo his statements: “If NPR is unable to tolerate an honest debate about an issue as important as Islamic terrorism, then it’s time for ‘National Public Radio’ to become ‘National Private Radio.’ It’s time for Congress to defund this organization.” (See: Hurricane Sarah)

But Anna Christopher, a spokeswoman for NPR, said these calls for cutting off funding to NPR were “unfortunate” and reflect a fundamental misunderstanding about NPR’s financial structure.

“We don’t report to any congressional committee,” she said. “NPR is an independent news organization that receives no direct federal money, and less than 1 percent of our budget comes from grants that we competitively seek from government-funded organizations like the CPB [Corporation for Public Broadcasting] and the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts].”

NPR gets no direct funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but does receive federal grant and contract money, as well as funding from foundations that are federal grantees. NPR officials say this federal money constitutes a low single-digit percentage of its annual budget, about 2 percent depending on the year.

NPR’s total budget in 2007 was $170 million, according to its filing with the IRS.

Local NPR affiliates do receive about $90 million in annual appropriations from the CPB, which amount to around 10 percent of their revenue.

"So it turns out there is not a simple answer” to the funding question, one House aide said. “We don't directly fund NPR - we fund CPB, they make grants directly to stations and they, in turn, pay dues to NPR."

Still, conservatives kept up the call to cut off the money. Conservative activist and direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie has launched an on-line petition, hoping to gather 1 million taxpayers’ signatures to end federal funding to NPR.

Brent Bozell, the president of the conservative media watchdog Media Research Center, submitted a letter to Reps. Henry Waxman and Joe Barton, who sit on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, to investigate Williams’ firing. “Juan Williams was fired for saying what the vast majority of Americans believe,” he wrote.

He also slammed NPR for “kowtowing to the agenda of radical anti-American groups like CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relations] and doing the bidding of George Soros, who hates Fox News with a passion.”

CAIR issued a statement Wednesday saying: ““NPR should address the fact that one of its news analysts seems to believe that all airline passengers who are perceived to be Muslim can legitimately be viewed as security threats.”Open Society Foundations, which was founded by billionaire George Soros, gave a $1.8 million grant to NPR earlier this week to start a new statehouse reporting initiative.

Conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh said, “Political correctness is ruling the day.” (See: Who are you calling stupid?)

“Juan Williams is a known quantity, and now he is essentially ‘Clarence Thomased’ in a sense for voicing an opinion that is contrary to the doctrine,” said Limbaugh, referring to the conservative African-American Supreme Court justice who came under fire during his 1991 confirmation hearings.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) stopped short of calling for defunding NPR, but also criticized the decision, saying, “I don't believe his recent comments reflect prejudice against the Islamic religion or Muslims in general — it's just an observation shared by many during the times in which we live.”

Other critics weighed in as well. Alvin S. Felzenberg, author of “The Leaders We Deserved” and the spokesman for the 9/11 Commission, suggested that “citizens should boycott NPR’s ‘beg-a-thons’ and Congress should zero out its federal appropriation — of whatever amount it is.”

A onetime coworker of Williams suggested his firing from NPR over his comments about Muslims was justified.

“Juan, apologies as your former colleague at The Washington Post, but you crossed the line on this one,” wrote Molly Moore in POLITICO’s Arena.

“Juan’s comments were absolutely a firing offense for an impartial news organization such as NPR which — even in an age of all-opinionated-blabber-all-the-time — maintains strong objective news standards,” wrote Moore, now senior vice president of Sanderson Strategies Group, a communications firm.

But former Rep. Mickey Edwards (R-Okla.), once a regular contributor on NPR’s “All Things Considered” said the radio network had caved into political correctness.

“Firing Williams for these comments, even if they were not in sync with NPR's new sensitivities, was itself over the line: Political correctness quite easily morphs into censorship, and here NPR fell into that trap.”

Whoopi Goldberg on “The View,” whose walk-off during a segment with O’Reilly prompted the discussion that led to Williams’s firing, called NPR’s decision “ridiculous.”

“In all of our opinions, it seems, the firing of Juan was a total mistake and sends the wrong message, and NPR — get yourself together, because we’ve all got to work on this together.”

And Democrats worried it would embolden NPR’s enemies.

"NPR’s overreaction has handed its government-hating detractors a chance to slap the PC label on the network, which in reality is the nation’s most robust marketplace of ideas,” said Will Marshall, president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute.

The nonpartisan media reform organization Free Press worried that the right’s calls for defunding NPR amounted to asymmetrical warfare.

"It is time to stop playing politics with our nation’s public media system,” said Josh Silver, president of Free Press. “Calling for Congress to defund NPR is nothing more than political opportunism by public figures who have built a career on such shenanigans. Regardless of what you think about Juan Williams' dismissal, calling for the defunding of NPR is like asking for the death penalty in small claims court.”

But O’Reilly, host of “The O’Reilly Factor,” said Thursday on Fox News that the decision by the “left-wing” radio station was “ridiculous.”

“As Woody Allen said, this is a travesty of a mockery of a sham,” he said.

“I’m calling immediately — and we’re going to make a big deal out of this on 'The Factor' — for the immediate suspension of every taxpayer dollar going into the National Public Radio outfit,” he added. “We’re going to get legislation. We’re going to freeze it down, so they don’t get any more money. This is outrageous.”

Jonathan Allen, Jake Sherman, Meredith Shiner, Andy Barr and Scott Wong contributed to this report.