Ex-POLITICO Reporter, Fired for Racial Anti-Romney Comment, Reveals New Life in Retail

As the 2012 election cycle began to heat up the spring of that year, POLITICO reporter Joe Williams found himself on a rocket ship to celebrity. After joining the organization in April, 2010, Williams became a go-to guest for liberal networks like Current TV and MSNBC, and saw his reporting featured prominently on the front page of that Beltway-based journalistic institution. Williams was a reporting rock star.

As a regular guest, Williams provided MSNBC and its audience with what they wanted most – tenuous confirmation that opposition to President Barack Obama was illegitimate. His logical bases for this charge varied; latent racial antipathy toward a minority president was most often cited, but he also suggested that the political press is engaged in an overt conspiracy to excuse Republican “obstructionism.” That last conspiracy theory lives on today, as so many do, in the bowels of the internet.

Williams often accused a variety of undefined groups of Americans of harboring racial animus. He regularly asserted that Republican candidates appealed to “dog whistle” racism, which he was willing and able to decode, in order to “de-legitimize” the president among “poor whites.” Williams also insisted that the tea party, broadly, were guilty of “using racially-tinged imagery and racially-tinged sort of statements” to attack the president. But the POLITICO reporter went a step too far when he singled out an individual Republican, Mitt Romney, to tar as having racially impure thoughts.

Appearing on former MSNBC host Martin Bashir’s program (a broadcaster who also fell prey to his penchant for rhetorical excess), Williams accused Romney of appealing to racism by virtue of the venues he chose to appear on – most notably, Fox News Channel.

Romney is very, very comfortable, it seems, with people who are like him. That’s one of the reasons why he seems so stiff and awkward in some town hall settings, why he can’t relate to people other than that. But when he comes on Fox & Friends, they’re like him. They’re white folks who are very much relaxed in their own company.

This was the final straw for POLITICO. The news organization suspended Williams pending a review of his conduct. The organization seemed to have had their fill of Williams’ antics when a review of his public Twitter account revealed that he had even accused his own employer of racism. “[W]hat’s most irritating is the overlay of blatant racism,” Williams wrote. “[T]hat’s the secret sauce in the Politico shitburger.”

Williams was let go. He showed up briefly on Current TV after his firing, but he was never again hired by a reporting institution of note. On Tuesday, Williams reemerged in the pages of The Atlantic. Except this time, he was not reporting on the developments in the political world, or opining on the machinations behind closed doors inside the halls of power, or even leveling baseless accusations of racism. Williams was, instead, sharing his “nasty, brutish, and cheap” experience as a retail sales associate at a sporting-goods store.

In the exposé, Williams seemed unrepentant. He blamed investigators with Breitbart for digging up an admittedly a “crude Romney joke” he had made on Twitter in his capacity as a reporter for forcing POLITICO’s hand in 2012. “Because I’m an African-American, enraged conservative bloggers branded me an anti-white racist,” he wrote, failing to take responsibility for his own repeated racial accusations.

He went on to reveal that he and his ed-wife had a fight months after his firing which resulted in her filing charges against him. Williams was ordered to serve six months’ probation, further complicating his search for a new job in the reporting industry.

“That’s how I found myself working a retail job at a sporting-goods store—the only steady job I could find after six months of unemployment in a down economy and a news industry in upheaval,” he revealed. “ In a matter of months, I was broke, depressed, and living on food stamps. I had lost my apartment, and ended up living out of a suitcase in a guest bedroom of an extraordinarily generous family I barely knew.”

Williams observed that his new job is significantly more physically demanding than his old one, and that he was forced to live on Maryland’s minimum wage working only part time hours. “You’re part-time,” a friend explained to him. “If you work 40 hours or more, they’ll have to give you benefits.”

But Williams’ story ends on a positive note. The former reporter, having paid his penance, was able to leave the sporting-goods store he freely maligned in the pages of The Atlantic to take a temporary position as a communications director with a nonprofit on Capitol Hill.

Williams’ is a cautionary tale about the allure of the spotlight and the desire to give the audience all that they want, even against your better judgment. The Siren of the studio lights cost Williams his career. But the lessons of Williams’ folly appear lost on him. Reading his piece, one is left with the unmistakable impression that he still views himself a victim – a target of slander from his political adversaries. That he continues to see himself as even having political adversaries is a window into why Williams regarded himself as a political actor and not simply a reporter.

Williams is a victim, but his only abusers are the delusions that haunt him still.

[Photo via screen grab ]

This post has been updated since it’s original publication

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.