WHBF: Equal On-Air Opportunity Employer

Kudos to Nexstar’s WHBF Rock Island, Ill., for recognizing that the First Amendment is about more than freedom of the press. It is also about religious liberty.

You may have read this week about the CBS affiliate’s new reporter Tahera Rahman. She’s like a lot of other ambitious, young TV reporters, except that she is Muslim and when she made her on-air debut on Feb. 7 she wore a hijab.

According to the station’s research, she is the first mainstream TV reporter in the U.S. to wear a hijab on air.

GM Marshall Porter downplays the milestone, saying that he wasn’t aware that it was a first until after the fact and the station looked into it.

And he says that the hijab really didn’t figure into her promotion one way or the other. She joined the station two years ago as a producer and was once passed over for an on-air job.

But when the latest opening came up, she reapplied and simply outshone the other candidates. At WHBF, he says, “it’s all about the best candidate.”

Porter downplays it, but he was also aware the hijab might stir up anti-Muslim blowback so he checked with headquarters. It has no problem with the promotion either.

In fact, Porter says, there has been “very little” negative reaction other than ugly comments on a pickup of the story on an anti-Islam website, barenakedislam.com.

Porter had reason to be concerned. There is an virulent strain of Islamophobia in the land that can’t make the distinction between ISIS and the folks at the mosque down the street. Sorry to say that the President of the United States is guilty of blurring that line.

I like this story very much. I like that the station handled it fairly routinely and I like that the good citizens of the Quad Cities have pretty much shrugged. They’ve essentially said, in the most American way, “Hey, let’s give the kid a chance.”