Juan Williams lashed back at NPR Thursday and Friday over his Wednesday night firing, as the network's CEO acknowledged it bungled Williams' dismissal and black NPR employees tied Williams' departure to their diversity concerns. The story was proving to be bigger than anyone imagined.

Some American Muslims, meanwhile, wondered whether the episode would make matters worse for them.

" 'The greater American public remains unsure about Islam and very often hostile about Islam,' saidAkbar Ahmed, chair of Islamic Studies at American University, who examines the divide in his new film and book, 'Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam,' " Matea Gold of the Los Angeles Times reported Friday for the Tribune Washington bureau.

"Ahmed said he was disappointed by Williams' comments. But he added that NPR's abrupt firing 'does not bring the temperature down against Muslims…. Now the debate is, are we being oversensitive to Muslims?' "

NPR fired Williams from his news analyst job after he told Bill O'Reilly on Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor" that Muslims dressed in Muslim garb on planes made him nervous.

"Mr. Williams tempered his remarks, though, by reminding Mr. O’Reilly that all Muslims should not be branded as extremists," as Brian Stelter wrote in the New York Times. " 'We don’t want, in America, people to have their rights violated, to be attacked because they hear rhetoric from Bill O’Reilly and they act crazy,' Mr. Williams said, and Mr. O’Reilly agreed."

Williams, a senior news analyst on NPR but a commentator on Fox News Channel, was told by NPR late Wednesday via telephone that it was terminating his contract. "His remarks on The O'Reilly Factor this past Monday were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR," NPR said in a statement. The remarks also came in a week when NPR affiliates, which depend heavily on donations, were conducting a pledge drive.

In a FoxNews.com column and an appearance on O'Reilly on Thursday, and in an appearance on ABC's "Good Morning America" on Friday, Williams struck back.

"Now that I no longer work for NPR let me give you my opinion," he wrote. "This is an outrageous violation of journalistic standards and ethics by management that has no use for a diversity of opinion, ideas or a diversity of staff (I was the only black male on the air). This is evidence of one-party rule and one-sided thinking at NPR that leads to enforced ideology, speech and writing. It leads to people, especially journalists, being sent to the gulag for raising the wrong questions and displaying independence of thought."

On "Good Morning America," Williams said of NPR, "This current crew was really getting vicious. I’ve always thought the right wing were ones that were inflexible and intolerant And now I'm coming to realize that the orthodoxy at NPR, if it's representing the left, it's just unbelievable that, you know — and especially I think for me as a black man to somehow, you know, say something that's out of the box, they find it very difficult.

"And I think that's right, George. I think they were looking for a reason to get rid of me, that they were uncomfortable with the idea that I was talking to the likes of Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity."

It was an unusual public denunciation of his former employers in an industry where burning bridges carries a risk: A boss at one network today might easily become a supervisor at your news organization tomorrow.

Vivian Schiller, the NPR CEO, framed Williams' firing as the last straw in a series of incidents, not simply over the comments on O'Reilly. Asked about firing Williams in a late-night phone call, she conceded in a staff meeting on Friday, "Was it a smart idea? No."

Black journalists who watched events play out declared Williams the winner after he emerged with a $2 million, three-year contract with Fox News Channel. But many did not buy Williams' arguments, although they did agree that there were racial implications to the developments.

"OK, so he worked for an organization whose leadership he supposedly found 'self-righteous, ideological, left-wing' and that treated him worse than 'Tricky Dick' treated his enemies," freelance writer Marjorie Valbrun wrote for Slate.com. "Yet he stayed with them for 10 years. I wonder when exactly he began to notice he was the only black male on air at NPR and why he did not publicly complain about this lack of diversity before?

"Now that Williams is feeling victimized, maybe he can imagine how Muslims must feel about his comments."

Williams was NPR's sole on-air black male voice for most of his career at NPR. The National Association of Black Journalists questioned NPR's commitment to diversity a year ago after Greg Peppers, one of two black men in NPR's newsroom management, was fired less than 24 hours after the network hosted NABJ at its Washington headquarters.

Schiller responded that "we are examining our overall diversity status critically," released NPR's own set of figures about the staff makeup and in December hired Keith Woods, one of the foremost trainers and educators in journalism diversity and then the No. 2 administrator at the Poynter Institute, the school for professional journalists, for the new position of vice president of diversity in news and operations. In August, NPR hired another black journalist, Wall Street Journal reporter Corey Dade, as a Washington-based digital news correspondent.

At staff meetings on Thursday and Friday, African American employees questioned whether blacks were being singled out for dismissal and wondered whether a white employee would have been fired in the manner Williams was.

Spokeswoman Anna Christopher did not respond to a message asking whether NPR planned to replace Williams, who had become a contract worker.

In the Williams-connected conversations about NPR's diversity, little was said about the on-air homogeneity of Fox News, which attracts the fewest black viewers of the cable news networks.

Joe Strupp noted additionally for Media Matters for America, "Whether or not Juan Williams deserved to be fired from NPR, it's clear that Fox News regularly airs far worse anti-Muslim commentary."

Williams maintained on "Good Morning America" that one reason he was so angry about his dismissal was that his remarks were taken out of context. After all, he said, he had a track record as a historian on civil rights issues.

Even so, Williams' statement that he felt nervous around Muslims dressed in "Muslim garb" on planes became a lightning rod, despite his additional comment that Muslims should not be stereotyped.

"I’ve been a Muslim for 32 years. I’ve been all over the world, especially the Middle East," Sunni Khalid, senior reporter at WYPR-FM in Baltimore, told Journal-isms.

"What the hell is 'Muslim garb?' I bet Juan and Bill O’Reilly couldn’t distinguish Sikh or Hindu traditional garb from Saudi or Kuwaiti clothing. What about people from Indonesia, who wear the black, oval-shaped songbok on their heads? I wear it when I travel. Should people from those countries, where the bulk of extremist attacks occur, be 'nervous,' too? What about Obama, when he hosts Karzai or King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? I remember there was a time, not too long ago, when white women crossed the street when I was walking IN A SUIT! And, of course, it’s still tough to catch a cab in DC if you’re a black man," said Khalid, a former NPR foreign correspondent who settled a discrimination lawsuit against the network in 2003.

"Again, it should be pointed out that the 9-11 skyjackers were not dressed in so-called 'Muslim garb,' but Western clothes, in order to fit in. In fact, I’d be more comfortable to see someone dressed in traditional garb, because I could be assured that they had already passed through the same security measures that I had."

However, Asra Nomani, a scholar in the practice of journalism at Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies, said Friday on NPR's "Tell Me More," "What Juan Williams expressed, I believe, is the sentiment of many people and including Muslims. Muslims profile each other all the time. When you walk into a mosque and you see other Muslims, you say, oh, look, he looks like a Jihadi. Or, that's a niqab, a woman who wears a full-face veil. It doesn't mean, you know, that we need to go to the point of civil liberties, you know, offensive or anything like that. . . . I believe, unfortunately, that NPR short-circuited a conversation that we really need to be having."

NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard reported that "NPR’s initial story garnered more than 6,800 comments, many supporting Williams and others asking why it took so long to fire him. At noon, the deluge of email crashed NPR’s 'Contact Us' form on the web site."

According to one national survey of 1,017 Americans Thursday evening, 46 percent of those polled said NPR was wrong to fire Williams, 19 percent said NPR was right to fire him and 35 percent said they had no opinion on the issue, according to Ted Iliff of the organization Poll Position.

The controversy went far beyond the journalism realm when former governors Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who also are paid Fox News contributors, jumped to Williams' defense and called for a "defunding" of NPR by the federal government.

But as Andrew Phelps of public station WBUR in Boston noted, "NPR receives no direct funding from the federal government for operations," although individual stations benefit from grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

"NPR does receive grants from CPB for special projects, but that funding is not included as part of the network’s operations budget," he wrote.

"So while federal dollars do flow to NPR, the connection is indirect. It may be a fine point, but it’s an important distinction. The federal government can’t 'defund' NPR. What Congress can do is cut CPB funding — which has diminished over the years and has, at times, been threatened."

The Williams affair at heart was a debate over the proper role of journalists, however.

"After dismissing Mr. Williams, who was one of its senior news analysts, NPR argued that he had violated the organization’s belief in impartiality, a core tenet of modern American journalism," Stelter wrote in the New York Times. "By renewing Mr. Williams’s contract, Fox News showed its preference for point-of-view — rather than the view-from-nowhere — polemics.

"Kelly McBride, the ethics group leader for the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists, called the Williams case an 'object lesson in how different news organizations have different values.' She said the ethics guidelines at many news organizations matched those at NPR.

" 'If you make some outlandish statement on your Facebook page or at a public event somewhere, you are still representing your newsroom,' she said. 'So there are consequences to that.' "

This columnist was pleased to have participated Friday in a smart, hour-long discussion of the case withMark Jurkowitz of the Pew Research Center, host Kerri Miller and listeners of Minnesota Public Radio, among other conversations.

Akbar Ahmed, washingtonpost.com: A Muslim response to Juan Williams 

Chris Ariens, TVNewser: Juan Williams, Rick Sanchez, Helen Thomas et al. and the 'Taliban-like drive' for journalistic purity 

Ed Bark blog: NPR's dopey dismissal of Williams is worthy of a dunce cap

Farai Chideya, Huffington Post: What Everyone Is Missing About NPR's WilliamsGate [Oct. 23]

 Juan Cole blog: End Federal Tax Subsidies to Fox! 

Javier E. David, theGrio.com: NPR tunes out First Amendment with Williams firing 

Editorial, Washington Post: NPR's hasty decision to fire pundit Juan Williams 

David Folkenflik, NPR: Fox News Gives Juan Williams $2 Million Contract 

Matea Gold, Tribune Washington Bureau: Prominent Muslims fear NPR analyst's firing may fan hostility 

Keach Hagey, Politico: Sarah Palin joins calls for defunding NPR 

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, syndicated: Gone Juan: A Faux Liberal NPR Should Have Canned Long Ago 

Arsalan Iftikhar, CNN.com: NPR right to fire Juan Williams 

Jimi Izrael blog, "Tell Me More," NPR: Here Today, Juan Tomorrow? 

Wil LaVeist, UrbanFaith.com: NPR Firing of Williams Disappointing

Michael Meyers, New York Daily News: NPR's firing of Juan Williams wrong, but not excuse to take away funding from public radio 

Richard Prince and Mark Jurkowitz with Kerri Miller on "Midmorning," Minnesota Public Radio: When news commentary crosses the line 

Richard Prince with Latoya Peterson on "The Michael Eric Dyson Show," WEAA, Baltimore: Juan Williams’ Firing 

Richard Prince, Asra Nomani and John Watson with Michel Martin on "Tell Me More," NPR: NPR Fires Juan Williams, Journalists React 

Rem Rieder, AJR:;Moving too Fast: NPR’s mishandling of the Juan Williams imbroglio 

Kevin Roderick, LAObserved: NPR memo to stations: why we fired Juan Williams 

Betsy Rothstein, Fishbowl DC: QUOTES of the DAY

Betsy Rothstein, Fishbowl DC: Ambivalence 

Alicia Shepard, NPR: NPR's Firing of Juan Williams Was Poorly Handled 

Brian Stelter, New York Times: Williams Episode Shows 2 Versions of Journalism

William M. Welch, USA Today: Williams' firing from NPR [renews] debate over Muslims

Except for the posting of a smart-phone video of President Obama greeting black bloggers and journalists — a video that found its way to the Drudge Report — the White House does not believe that ground rules for the Monday session were broken, according to the White House liaison for African American media.

Controversy over the meeting, which had gone virtually unreported in the mainstream media, increased late in the week after a Wednesday blog posting about the session by Jeremy W. Peters of the New York Times. It began, "The White House is usually quite good at keeping a muzzle on the mediaafter one of its off-the-record sessions with President Obama and senior members of his administration.

"But not this week."

Providing the meeting further notoriety, the Drudge Report and RealClearPolitics.com posted the blogger's smart-phone video under an identical headline: "Obama: Blacks Probably Don't Watch 'Meet the Press'."

What Obama actually said during his surprise visit to the online "summit" was, "The media is changing so rapidly. It allows us to reach audiences that may not be watching ‘Meet the Press’ — not that there’s anything wrong with ‘Meet the Press.’ I’m just saying that, you know, it might be a different demographic," prompting laughs from the group.

Kevin S. Lewis, director of African American media for the White House, told Journal-isms on Friday that the bloggers did not break the ground rules, save for the posting of the video. Under those rules, as Peters wrote, the first half of the briefings was to be on background, meaning they could report any information they learned but not attribute it to any specific official; the second half was off the record entirely.

But Lewis, defending the bloggers, said of the meeting, "We didn't make it a secret." He noted that the White House posted its own account of the session on Wednesday morning, complete with a list of attendees.

As reported on Monday, the session took place as the Democrats attempt to solidify their African American base for the midterm elections. Among the 20 Web workers who attended were representatives of theRoot.com, Black Entertainment Television, Essence, Jack & Jill Politics, City Limits, Concrete Loop, AOL Black Voices, Black America Web and even the gossipy MediaTakeOut.

The session prompted a range of opinions about its propriety and the choice of invitees.

"Tell anyone who reads MediaTakeout.com that the site was invited to the White House as part of its effort to 'broaden online engagement' with the black community and it will be at least 5 minutes before you can continue the conversation due to the laughter that will ensue," wrote J Danielle, identified as a professional speechwriter and media coach, on her Media Strut site.

"As a black woman and confirmed policy wonk, I can tell you, I don’t look to music and gossip blogs for thought leadership. It’s almost as if the White House decided that any blog or web site that is owned or read by black people would be sufficient."

But Cheryl Contee ("Jill Tubman"), blogging at Jack & Jill Politics, wrote, "Look, if black bloggers and black online media weren’t having a consistent impact in reaching people — if what we are trying to do wasn’t meaningful & important — no one would care what we did, when we did it and whether or not we did it at the White House. Naw mean? You could read this as an attempt to drive a wedge between increasingly effective and powerful black online forces and a new center of power at the White House. We can’t let that happen."

Introducing his observation with, "Oh my people," Ta-Nehisi Coates, blogging for the Atlantic, posted an excerpt from Peters' piece and said, "Insert your favorite line from 'The Poundcake Speech' [by Bill Cosby], 'The Ballot or the Bullet,' Ice Cube or Chris Rock," all of which offer advice on or criticism of some black behavior.

"Can't have an off-the-record convo. Why? Cause bloggers are videoing the president . . ."

On the "barbershop" segment of NPR's "Tell Me More" on Friday, columnist Ruben Navarrette said the president was playing "to the lowest common denominator in terms of the guest list," adding that "the real story" was, "What was the president thinking in reaching out to a bunch of people who are, frankly, probably beneath him and beneath the office?"

Bloggers who attended the session defended themselves — and acted to blunt the criticism.

"I took it upon myself to remove the video, solely due to certain media (who were not present at the Summit) who have publicly misconstrued the facts," Natasha Eubanks of TheYBF.com (for "The Young, Black and Fabulous") celebrity-gossip site wrote in a Twitter posting. "I refuse to give any ammunition in any way to those who have a negative agenda for such a positive event."

Angel Laws, editor of ConcreteLoop.com, another celebrity-gossip site, tweeted of Peters, "i hate the undertone of his article. he is basically saying we can't be trusted." She accused the reporter of not checking his facts and urged others to contact him.

In the comments section under Peters' article, some predictably accused Obama of being "racist" for meeting with black bloggers.

Also in that space, entrepreneurial journalist Mike Green, who is black, said Peters had buried the lead. He said it was this passage:

"The attention the meeting received in the black blogosphere highlighted the vast gap that remained between mainstream media outlets and ones focused at minority groups. Though the meeting occurred on Monday and had been a topic of discussion in black media circles for three days, it received virtually no attention in the mainstream press."

At the White House, Lewis defended the choice of guests, which he said was determined after "a collection of folks got together. We're reaching out to all Americans. People get their information from different places," he said. Lewis added that Peters had not contacted him for his article.

Obama held a session on Friday for members of the Trotter Group of African American columnists. The Journal-isms author, an 18-year member of the group, was disinvited when the White House cut the number of attendees from 18 to 10 and Trotter organizers said attendance would be limited to newspaper columnists and a founder.Thus, there is no firsthand report here.

Matt Dornic, Fishbowl DC: Behind-the-scenes of Obama’s Youth Town Hall 

David Jackson, USA Today: Obama: 24/7 media makes it hard to focus 'on the long term' 

Steve Krakauer, Mediaite: Meet The Press Gets Worst Ratings In 18 Years

Gina McCauley, AOL Black Voices: The New York Times vs. Black Media Mogulettes: When Black Bloggers Visit the White House, We've Arrived 

Ruben Navarrette Jr., Washington Post Writers Group: The Disillusioned Latino Voter 

Christopher Nelson, the Grio.com: Obama tries to recapture his youth vote 

Eugene Robinson, Washington Post: Can Obama deliver the black vote? 

David Squires, Daily Press, Newport News, Va.: Schools are failing black males 

Leutisha Stills ("The Christian Progressive Liberal"), Jack & Jill Politics: Why the NYT and Drudge are Having Coniptions about Black Bloggers 

Shernay Williams, Afro-American: Black Vote May Have Strong Impact on Maryland Gov. Race

Essence.com Spotlights Lesbian Couple in Brides Feature

Essence.com showcased its first lesbian couple in the site's "Bridal Bliss" feature on Wednesday. The couple married on Long Island, N.Y., last month.

Aisha Mills, a public affairs consultant, and Danielle Moody, an environmental lobbyist, secured their marriage license in the District of Columbia, where same-sex marriage became legal this year. Their story began:

"When Aisha's dear friend Rashad accepted a job in NYC, he invited her and another close friend over to help him pack and reflect on his life in Washington D.C. But when Danielle walked through the door, Aisha put down the cardboard boxes and the packing tape and focused on the vision of love in front of her. It was love at first sight.

"Danielle and I sat in Rashad's window sill and talked about our lives for hours," Aisha remembers.

"Six and a half years later, Aisha and Danielle continue their conversation of love."