At Rally, Stewart Says the Fired Rick Sanchez Is No Bigot
Muslim Congressman Wants Conversation With Juan Williams
“Mallard Fillmore” Strip Plays Part in Culture Wars
CNN en Español Employees Told to Reapply for New Jobs
Jon Stewart addresses a throng estimated at 215,000 on Saturday on the National Mall. (Video)
At Rally, Stewart Says the Fired Rick Sanchez Is No Bigot
Late-night satirist Jon Stewart, the target of complaints by then-CNN anchor Rick Sanchez that many in the news media characterized as anti-Semitic, said at his “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” on the National Mall Saturday that it was “an insult” to call Sanchez a bigot.
“There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats, but those are titles that must be earned,” Stewart said at the end of the rally. “You must have the resume. Not being able to distinguish between real racists and tea partiers, or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people, but to the racists themselves, who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate — just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe, not more.”
Without stating a reason, CNN announced Oct. 1 that “Rick Sanchez is no longer with the company.”
In a satellite radio interview the previous day, Sanchez asserted a glass ceiling for Latino journalists at CNN, and disparaged Stewart, who had made fun of Sanchez. Sanchez called Stewart a “bigot” with a privileged worldview — later changing the term to “uninformed.” Asked whether Stewart, as a Jew, might also be considered a member of an oppressed minority group, Sanchez said, “I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.’
Sanchez’s firing was followed by that of Williams from NPR in what critics have called a string of overreactions by media companies over the words of media personalities.
Sanchez apologized to Stewart, who said Oct. 22 on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” where he was promoting the “Sanity” rally, “Should they have fired him? No. With the crap you guys have put on for the past 10 years … fire somebody if you think he is doing a bad job as a newsperson. I think it’s absolute insanity that people have to be accounted for [comments away from work] as far as their livelihood. Were you pleased with his jobs, or was this just an excuse [to fire him]?”
An estimated 215,000 people attended Saturday’s rally, organized by Comedy Central hosts Stewart and Stephen Colbert, according to a crowd estimate commissioned by CBS News,” Brian Montopoli of CBS reported.
Comedy Central said 2 million people watched the rally, more than 250,000 attending in person, Eric Deggans reported on his St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times blog.
In the New York Times, David Carr took issue with Stewart’s closing message faulting cable news for the increasing polarization in the national discourse.
“Most Americans don’t watch or pay attention to cable television,” Carr wrote. “In even a good news night, about five million people take a seat on the cable wars, which is less than 2 percent of all Americans. People are scared of what they see in their pay envelopes and neighborhoods, not because of what Keith Olbermann said last night or how Bill O’Reilly came back at him.”
A conservative organization, the Media Research Center network, dedicated to “documenting and exposing the Times liberal bias,” in turn criticized the Times for enjoying the rally too much. It also said, “The Times also dropped its concern for racial diversity, with no mention of the predominantly white crowd at the Mall on Saturday, a mainstay of coverage of Tea Party gatherings and ‘Restoring Honor,’ which Kate Zernike described on August 29 as an ‘overwhelmingly white and largely middle-aged crowd.’ “
- Clarence Page blog, Chicago Tribune: A day of Sanity/ Fear with Stewart / Colbert
Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., right, took the oath of office in 2007 with a copy of the Koran once owned by Thomas Jefferson.
Muslim Congressman Wants Conversation With Juan Williams
Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the nation’s first Muslim member of Congress, said Monday that “I personally plan on writing a letter to Juan Williams and inviting him to have a conversation with me, because I don’t think he has bad intention. I personally believe that, you know, we need to really promote the interfaith dialogue.”
Ellison was referring to Williams’ now-famous Oct. 18 comment on Fox News’ “O’Reilly Factor” that Muslims dressed in “Muslim garb” on planes made him nervous. NPR fired him two days later from his news analyst job on that network.
Ellison said on Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now!,” “I was a little bit upset by Juan Williams’ comment, not because I think he is a bigot — I don’t think he is — but I was just disappointed because I thought if anyone would know better, certainly, you know, the producer and author of ‘Eyes on the Prize’ would know better. But I just sort of now think that, you know, it would be great if maybe you or somebody else would interview Juan and say, ‘Look, let’s unpack your fear, unpack your worry, so that we can get down to some real humanity here.'”
Williams wrote the companion book to the “Eyes on the Prize” television history of the civil rights movement.
Host Amy Goodman asked Ellison, “Did you think that NPR should have fired him?
Ellison replied “You know what? I have decided not to sort of weigh in on their personnel decisions. You know, if they would have kept him, would I have thought they made a mistake? No. That they fired him, did I think they made a mistake? No. It’s their prerogative. But I do think that Juan’s comment offers us an opportunity for a conversation. I would point out to Juan Williams and people who think like him that the people who boarded those planes on 9/11 did everything they could do to not look Muslim. They weren’t wearing Muslim garb, whatever that may happen to be in Juan Williams’ mind.”
Meanwhile, Williams apparently rejected a meeting with NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, according to NPR spokeswoman Anna Christopher.
Asked whether it was known whether Williams responded to a letter Schiller sent him, Christopher replied, “Yes.”
Asked whether they will meet, she said, “no.”
Christopher was also asked about instances recounted on “Fox News Sunday” in which NPR correspondents had offered their opinions elsewhere. Schiller had said Williams had crossed the line from “news analyst” by opining in his “O’Reilly” appearances.
“Some are trying to connect the lines between what happened with Juan Williams and every other reporter or commentator that appears elsewhere,” Christopher replied. “We are not going to get into parsing every comment.”
She also said no decision had been made about replacing Williams, who was awarded a three-year contract worth nearly $2 million at Fox News. “It’s important to remember, too, that Juan Williams did not have a staff position — he was part-time, and had a contract,” Christopher said.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates blog, the Atlantic: Where Bigotry Can Be Taken Pure, Without The Base Alloy Of Hypocrisy (video)
- Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting: Don’t Defund Public Broadcasting — Improve It
“Mallard Fillmore” Strip Plays Part in Culture Wars
““ ‘I shot this authentic grainy video of the legendary “Muslims who repudiate violent Islamic groups,” ‘and Mallard replied: ‘I don’t see anything,’ meaning, I suppose, that few Muslims have repudiated Muslims who commit violence, e.g., 9-11,” Rob Richter, public editor at the San Antonio Express-News, wrote on Oct. 24.
, “That’s telling it like it is, eh? Clever? Satirical? Some readers didn’t see it that way. . . .”
“Mallard’s” artist, Bruce Tinsley, repeated the same slur Wednesday, showing, to me, that he’s an agitator, and drawing this observation from Dawn Kleborn-Curuk, a self-described mulatto, Catholic, wife of a Muslim businessman and mother of three Muslim children, including twins who turned 10 Saturday.
“ ‘Your paper has insulted my family,’ she told me. ‘What do I tell my 9-year-old, who reads the comics? “Mallard Fillmore” is telling him he doesn’t exist.’
“Speaking to someone intimately about herself and her family helped me see the light. I can defend Tinsley’s right to insult President Barack Obama — who chose his occupation — but why insult an entire religion?”
Richter quoted Express-News Features/Niche Products Editor Terry Scott Bertling, whose jurisdiction includes the comics.
“Frankly, I’d rather choose strips that can be consistently funny without insulting anyone’s religion. … I think most readers look to the comics pages hoping to get a respite from the negativity they sometimes find in the news and just need a chuckle to help them through the day.”
On Sunday, Richter told readers he had received more than 150 e-mails, some 60 telephone calls and 53 online comments in reaction.
“About 70 e-mailers and 35 callers defended the Bruce Tinsley cartoon, saying Mallard is amusing, clever, patriotic, beloved, thought-provoking, not politically correct, ‘tells it like it is’ and acts as a counter-balance to the liberal Doonesbury.”
And yet, Richter said, “without much effort, I found four stories published in the Express-News since 9-11 that did what Tinsley said Muslims haven’t done. . . . “
“What reader Charles Bigelow called ‘the Mallard Kerfuffle’ is a microcosm of the political scene in America — groups who have many reasons to be united, but who see even a silly cartoon character as either good or evil — no retreat, no surrender.”
CNN en Español Employees Told to Reapply for New Jobs
Management at CNN en Español, under the new leadership of Cynthia Hudson-Fernández, “called employees to an impromptu staff meeting where they were told that all positions in Atlanta were being eliminated,” Veronica Villafañe reported Friday for her Media Moves column.
“Staffers were told new positions were being created and that all current employees would have to reapply for the new jobs. Those jobs will be posted starting this Monday. Sources tell me that staffers will be told within the next 2-3 weeks, who will stay and who will be given a [severance] package.”
CNN es Espanol spokeswomen did not respond to messages on Monday. As reported Friday, the network announced it is adding three new anchors — Fernando del Rincón, Mercedes Soler and Camilo Egaña, and is planning “the most comprehensive channel reface in its history.”
In an Oct. 20 interview with Laura Martinez of Multichannel News, Hernandez said, “More than a reface this is really an evolution. We continue to be the news network for Latin American and for the U.S. Hispanic but we are going to be adding more programming to the mix, when before we were only una rueda de noticias [the typical news reel]. We would be every half hour or every hour repeating the same stories on a daily basis. But now we are becoming more about programming; more analysis, more context. We do the ‘what’ is happening very well. But we will be doing more of the ‘why’ is happening?”
Short Takes
- “John Howard Griffin, a native of Dallas who grew up in Fort Worth, was white. And he had the audacity in 1959
to darken his skin and spend several weeks in the Deep South as a black man,” Bob Ray Sanders recalled Sunday in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “Some of his closest friends and family would not know what he did until his story was first told in a five-part series in Sepia magazine, a national publication headquartered in Fort Worth that rivaled Ebony.” ” ‘Uncommon Vision: The Life and Times of John Howard Griffin’ by filmmaker Morgan Atkinson premiered Thursday night before a standing-room-only crowd at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Griffin’s family and some of his former neighbors were in the audience. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of ‘Black Like Me,'” the book of Griffin’s experience. - Cristina Saralegui was to bid a star-studded farewell Monday to her Univision show “”El Show de Cristina,” but the 12-time Emmy winner already has landed a new job, which she can’t disclose until her contract with Univision ends Dec. 31, Maria Elena Fernandez reported Monday for the Los Angeles Times. “But she says she will be back on TV in March.”
- Essence magazine “announced several additions to its fashion editorial team: Marielle Bobo is now the senior fashion editor and Zandile Blay takes the title of Essence.com’s fashion editor. In addition, Toccara, of ‘America’s Next Top Model’ fame, will Essence as a contributing style editor,” Alex Alvarez reported Friday for Fishbowl NY.
- In Los Angeles, a 65th anniversary party for Ebony magazine “was a who’s who of Hollywood,” Ebony reported on Monday. “Samuel L. Jackson (wearing gym shoes!), actress Loretta Devine, music mogul Clarence Avant, film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, actress and activist Holly Robinson Peete, producer and writer John Singleton, Princess Gloria Von Thurn und Taxis, Candy Spelling, Secret Life of Bees writer Gina Prince Bythewood, society favorite Charles King and Ebony cover girl Nia Long were just a few of the famous faces in the audience.”
- Debra Lee, CEO of Black Entertainment Television, was among the honorees last week at the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame ceremonies in New York. NBC’s “Today” Show was also honored, represented by on-air personalities Hoda Kolb, Natalie Morales and Al Roker.
- Azam Ahmed of the Chicago Tribune and Ben Protess of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund will join the New York Times’ DealBook team and Business Day, Times business editor Larry Ingrassia and Dealbook blog editor Andrew Ross Sorkin announced on Friday, according to Talking Biz News. “Azam has worked at the Tribune since 2006, where he most recently has covered education.”
- Moroccan authorities have indefinitely suspend Al-Jazeera’s reporting in Morocco, withdrawing accreditations from Al-Jazeera staff, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported on Monday. The Ministry of Communications “conducted ‘a comprehensive assessment’ of Al-Jazeera’s news reports and programs on Morocco and found that its coverage ‘seriously distorted Morocco’s image and manifestly damaged its interests, most notably its territorial integrity’ — an allusion to Western Sahara, a territory in dispute between Morocco and the Algerian-backed Polisario Front.”
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