Whenever possible, my Friday evening includes the "News Hour" with Jim Lehrer and his marvelous team of professionals. And, of course, the duo of Shields and Brooks is always informative and often entertaining. Though they may not have attained post-partisan Nirvana, they have obvious respect and affection for each other.So it was particularly interesting to me that, in the short time devoted to the Juan Williams Firing on last night's program, they seem to have achieved common consensus: it was a mistake that was only compounded by being badly handled.Today's Washington Post picks up some of the pieces:

In a meeting with employees that had been scheduled before the Williams story broke, Schiller acknowledged that NPR didn't manage the firing well, but offered no specifics. She said NPR would conduct a "post-mortem" next week to review how the firing was handled, according to employees who attended the meeting, which was closed to the news media. Schiller didn't say who would handle the review or what the consequences of it might be.An NPR spokeswoman, Dana Davis Rehm, said the review won't second-guess the decision itself, but would focus on how it was carried out. Schiller declined to comment.Staffers said that at the Friday meeting, Schiller apologized again for telling an audience in Atlanta on Thursday that Williams should have kept his comments about Muslims between "himself and his psychiatrist.""There wasn't anger" among NPR employees at the meeting, "but I did get a sense of despair and disappointment," said one NPR journalist, who asked not to be named because employees are not authorized to speak on the record about the matter. "I got the impression that [management] felt they had acted rashly and without deliberation. When [Schiller] made the psychiatrist crack, it just made matters much, much worse."

The rest of the Post's story is here.