ROSEANNE'S RACIST TWEET REVEALS SHE FORGOT WHAT ERA WE ARE NOW LIVING IN

ROSEANNE'S RACIST TWEET REVEALS SHE FORGOT WE ARE NOW LIVING IN A NEW ANTI-RACISM ERA:

JIM CROW RACISM IS NO LONGER TOLERATED OR COMICAL.......NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN.

SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ABUSE AGAINST WOMEN IS NO LONGER TOLERATED OR COMICAL........NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN.

EVERY MEDIA NETWORK NEEDS TO ADAPT STARBUCKS' ANTI-RACISM TRAINING MODEL FOR ALL EMPLOYEES, INCLUDING CELEBRITIES.

ABC WAS ABSOLUTELY CORRECT TO CANCEL ROSEANNE'S NEW SHOW.

TWEETING SUCH RACIST RHETORIC WAS DUMB & IRRESPONSIBLE.

THE BLACK VOTE IS STILL EXTREMELY VALUABLE.


Post Sources: CBS News, CNN, Fox News, NY Times, Youtube


****** Roseanne Barr Crosses a Line, and ABC Draws One


There is, it turns out, a line. Early Tuesday morning, Roseanne Barr crossed it. And within half a day, ABC, though Ms. Barr had given the network its biggest hit of the past season, enforced it.

First, the comedian and star of the revived “Roseanne” leveled a dehumanizing insult at Valerie Jarrett, calling the African-American former adviser to Barack Obama the offspring of “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes.” Then she tried to pass off the slur, by way of halfhearted apology, as a “joke” — as if, somehow, a racist joke were any better than a racist statement.

Here’s the sad thing. Ms. Barr’s tweet, while shocking, was not unbelievable. What was truly surprising was that a commercial TV network took action against a valuable star, quickly and definitively, and in plain words.

“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” the ABC entertainment president, Channing Dungey, said in a statement.

You could criticize ABC for working with Ms. Barr, who has a long history of offenses, especially since she joined Twitter. You could argue that the network was just trying to stave off bad publicity or boycotts. You could wonder if behind-the-scenes troubles or declining ratings (common to many TV revivals) played a role.

But credit where due: ABC canceled its highest-rated show, a linchpin of its fall schedule, as a stand against its star’s racism. That decision will probably cut into the network’s advertising profits. There may be no perfect moral actors in this world, but that’s still a moral action.

As we’ve seen with #MeToo, which has taken figures like Louis C. K. and Matt Lauer off TV, this is the sort of decision that corporations in our society often make more quickly and punitively than voters. But it is not a step you can take for granted.

Take Donald Trump. Forget his statements as president or on the “Access Hollywood” bus. He began peddling the birther slur — that Mr. Obama, the first black president, was not born in the United States — while the fourth “Celebrity Apprentice” was on NBC. The network kept him as host for three more seasons, and aired one more on which he was executive producer.

In 2013, the “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson gave an interview likening “homosexual behavior” to bestiality and suggesting that black people in the South were more content before the civil rights movement. The A&E network suspended him for nine days before reversing its decision, less a slap than a tap on the wrist.

The “Roseanne” decision, on the other hand, will come at a price for ABC — and like any such step, will have collateral costs. In a Twitter post, Sara Gilbert, Ms. Barr’s co-star and an executive producer of the revival, deplored Ms. Barr’s comments as “abhorrent.” She added that the series was “separate and apart from the opinions of one cast member.”

There’s some truth to that last comment. “Roseanne,” the revival, was imperfect but complicated, trying to engage with important if volatile issues. At times, it had ugly racial overtones, including a snide swipe at ABC’s sitcoms about “black and Asian families” and references to “illegals.” At other times the show pushed back against her character, or even ridiculed her.

But finally, none of that matters. “Roseanne” is a story. The issue here was the real act of a real person, saying the sort of thing that leads to real corrosion in the real world when it becomes normalized.

Make no mistake: The “Roseanne” decision would also have been expensive if ABC hadn’t canceled the show. It’s just that the costs would have been borne, as they generally are, by vulnerable people whose tormentors would be emboldened by seeing someone famous and powerful get away with it.

For that matter, it would insult people in small towns like the Lanford, Ill., of “Roseanne” — towns like the one I grew up in — for a TV network to imply that the only way to represent them is by indulging racism.

The character Roseanne said something like that a quarter-century ago, when her son was reluctant to kiss a black girl in a school play. “I didn’t raise you to be some little bigot!” she told him. “Black people are just like us. They’re every bit as good as us, and any people who don’t think so is just a bunch of banjo-pickin’, cousin-datin’, barefoot embarrassments to respectable white trash like us!”

Corporations involved in controversies like this usually simply want them to disappear. This one, because “Roseanne” has long since been drafted into the culture war, probably won’t.

Even if the president, who praised “Roseanne” to his supporters as being “about us,” doesn’t weigh in, even if Ms. Barr herself stays off Twitter, recent history tells us people will seize on the opportunity to say that the p.c. thought police are repressing us, because a rich woman lost her job for calling a black woman an ape. ABC will have picked a side regardless.

At least it picked the right one here. The battle against bigotry is not just about bigots. It’s about those who reap the benefits of ignoring bigots, and still think they should be able to call themselves good people. When an institution like ABC takes a stand — in prime time, where people notice it — that matters.

I’ll be cynical again tomorrow. For now I’m glad that a corporation had an opportunity to think only of its bottom line, and chose to draw a line instead.

DONALD TRUMP IS A MEDIA GENIUS, HE WON'T BE FIRED

#‎trump‬

DONALD TRUMP IS A MEDIA GENIUS, HE WON'T BE FIRED:

Attention Liberal Mainstream Media networks, which includes FOX NEWS!

Go ahead and continue to Attack DONALD TRUMP.

TRUMP is a Media King, who knows how to use the Media to his Advantage.

Bashing TRUMP only makes him Stronger and more Popular.

And it's FREE ADVERTISING!

So raise your hand if you believe DONALD TRUMP is indeed a Media GENIUS who won't be Fired anytime soon.

Post Sources: Washington Post, YouTube

David Shuster Suspended Indefinitely From MSNBC For CNN Gig

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Shuster Is Suspended


MSNBC brass wasn't happy when news broke this week that David Shuster had taped a pilot for CNN, and the anchor wasn't on-air yesterday.

Now comes word of Shuster's fate through an MSNBC spokesperson: "David has been suspended indefinitely."

It's not the first time he's been suspended.

Shuster was off the air a couple weeks in 2008 after he talked about how Hillary Clinton had "pimped out" Chelsea on the campaign trail.

And in January, he was reprimanded for a series of tweets criticizing James O'Keefe (who he was covering at the time). Since then, Shuster's Twitter account has gone silent.

According to the Observer's report, the CNN pilot was for a news show featuring Shuster and NPR's Michel Martin as co-anchors. It also included, according to the report, "medical and opinion segments, and included appearances by several current CNN contributors."

Word of Shuster's CNN pilot caught the network by surprise.

TVNewser reported that MSNBC president Phil Griffin learned about it on vacation, and on the phone with Shuster, "ripped him a new one."

Shuster, who's been on MSNBC at various times over the past couple of years, while also filling in on shows such as "Countdown," most recently had the 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. slots.


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Sources: MSNBC, Politico, NY Times, Newser, Facebook, Google Maps

Tea Party Activists vs. The Mainstream Media

Nashville Storyline: MSM vs. Tea Party Activists









Distrust of the mainstream media has been among the strongest sentiments uniting philosophically diverse tea party activists, who almost universally believe the national media have purposefully underestimated their ranks, highlighted their extremes or portrayed them as racists, rednecks or worse — that is, when it wasn’t ignoring them completely.

What then, to make of the fact that an increasing number of media outlets appear to be devoting increasing resources to chronicling the movement, culminating in a massive media presence at this weekend’s self-proclaimed National Tea Party Convention?

Organizers initially moved to limit access to outlets deemed friendly to the cause, including Fox News Channel, The Wall Street Journal, Breitbart.com, Townhall.com and World Net Daily. But they later relented and now say they’ve issued 200 press credentials, including multiple passes each to many of the elite national media organizations regularly disparaged by conservative activists as Democratic shills — the hated liberal mainstream media, or MSM.

Both the organizers and convention participants have seemed to revel in the media spotlight and have used the attention to chastise the press for what they view as shoddy coverage, though some refused to talk to reporters at all.

“The mainstream media is the enemy,” declared Bob Bunting, a retiree from Hilton Head Island, S.C., attending the convention with his wife, Nancy Bunting. “You are for socialism and Barack Obama.”

Convention organizer Judson Phillips, who in the run-up to the convention was the subject of some tough stories examining his finances and those of the for-profit company he set up to run the convention, said he doesn’t think most mainstream journalists are deliberately mischaracterizing the movement but simply do not understand it.

“There are a lot of studies out there saying that journalists tend to be significantly more liberal than the general populace,” he said. “So when you are coming from a liberal mindset — for a majority of those folks — I don’t think you understand conservatism.”

Speculation about political ideology aside, the tea party story does present some unique challenges for many political reporters It is a diffuse national movement composed of activists with a variety of philosophical motivations that lacks clear leadership to turn to for analysis or leaks and that has little presence in Washington, where most national political reporters and their sources are based.

Still, in recent weeks, The New York Times, the paper conservatives love to hate, has had its reporter who covers conservatives, Kate Zernike, produce a couple in-depth pieces analyzing countervailing efforts by tea party activists to take over local Republican parties from the ground up and Republican Party efforts to harness the energy of the movement.

Meanwhile, The New Yorker magazine, the bible of liberal intellectuals, ran a nuanced 7,500-word analysis of the movement called “The Rise of Tea Party Activism,” which the thoughtful conservative blogger Dan Riehl assessed as fair, even as he noted it highlighted “fringe elements” that some tea partiers see as embarrassing anomalies held up by critics to marginalize the movement.



“All in all, one might have expected much worse given the source,” Riehl wrote.

Even PBS’s "Frontline" is doing a documentary about the movement and is here doing interviews.

CNN, which embedded a reporter on a cross-country tea party bus tour in September, aired its own three-part tea party series last week, with segments about rifts in the movement and an unusual tea party cruise. The network, which some convention goers somewhat grudgingly praised for fair coverage, sent some name talent to cover the convention, including correspondents Mary Snow and Randy Kaye, deputy political director Paul Steinhauser and political analyst John Avalon.

In all, the network was granted credentials for 11 journalists and crew members, according to a convention list reviewed by POLITICO.

That’s more than the eight granted to Fox News, which drew early criticism for crossing the line between covering the movement and actively promoting the tea party movement. (though Fox News Sunday got five additional credentials to facilitate host Chris Wallace’s interview with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the convention keynote speaker).

“The tea party movement was clearly something that was an important political story that we wanted to cover and try to capture for our viewers,” CNN political director Sam Feist told POLITICO. “We wanted to cover it the appropriate amount and appropriately — not to become advocates, not to become critics but simply to cover it as we would cover any other political story.”

A Fox spokesperson rejected the suggestion that the network promoted the tea party movement, and differentiated the network's news coverage from the treatment given the movement by some of the network's opinion commentators, who have actively encouraged participation in protests.

The convention credential list — which reflects granted press-pass requests, not actual attendees – also included five journalists and crew members from NBC News and four from ABC. Time magazine was allotted passes for a total of four journalists (likely including at least one photographer), while The Washington Post and The New York Times had a couple journalists each included on the list, and The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and Newsweek each had a reporter on the scene (as, of course, did POLITICO).

And C-SPAN, which has a crew at the convention, aired hours of live sessions and speeches, and intends to carry Palin’s Saturday night speech live, as do Fox, MSNBC and CNN.

That’s to say nothing of the foreign journalists from 11 countries, or the conservative media outlets Big Government (which is affiliated with Breitbart.com), PJTV and Human Events, which were credentialed for nine, five and two people, respectively.

Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart.com and Big Government, said he didn’t request the credentials but was happy to be at the convention — during which, on Friday night, he was approached by a steady stream of fans thanking him for his work and wanting to shake his hand or buy him a drink — and he stressed the need for conservative outlets to chronicle the movement.

“Every time I’ve spoken to this crowd, I ask them how many of you hold the media in contempt,” he said. “And they all raise their hands. It’s almost absurd the degree to which these people can’t stand that they’re portrayed as racist and sexist and homophobe and retrograde knuckle-draggers.” He said his goal is “to break through this New York-Washington-Hollywood, Columbia Journalism School ‘we’re the elite and you need to hear it through us’ axis of media control.”

To be sure, media bashing has always made good conservative rhetoric.

But tea party activists generally point to a few specific grievances to highlight their distrust of the media, dating back at least as far as the first widespread protests on April 15, 2009, when MSNBC’s David Shuster and CNN’s Anderson Cooper had some fun with the double entendre "Tea Bagging".

In their coverage of the explosion of protests at congressional town hall meetings last summer, some media outlets, notably MSNBC, focused heavily on the roles played by a few corporate-funded Washington conservative groups in facilitating the protests to label them as “Astroturf,” a characterization that minimized the grass-roots opposition to Democratic plans to overhaul health care.

In the wake of the Sept. 12 “Taxpayer March on Washington,” many tea party activists alleged attendance at the rally was vastly and purposefully under-reported by media outlets, which — always reluctant to wade into the charged game of giving precise crowd sizes — generally described the crowd as numbering in the “tens of thousands” or “between 60,000 and 75,000,” while conservative bloggers asserted there more than a million people.

And since then, tea partiers have grown weary of a hardening media narrative holding that in-fighting is tearing the movement apart, a theme that took hold after POLITICO revealed philosophical and personal disputes among activists nationwide.

But Chuck Smith, a 66-year-old retiree from the Knoxville area who attended the conference, acknowledged that the occasionally extremist rhetoric, combined with the overwhelmingly white composition of many tea party crowds — including the one gathered in Nashville — make it “easy to paint us as racist or extremist, and I can’t fault the mainstream media for that, but that misses the point.” Smith said reporters "don’t understand what’s happening. We’re not exclusionary. We’re everyday, hard-working Americans fighting back against big government.”

The demographic make-up and extremist sentiments are part of the movement and deserve to be covered as such, said MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who has been among the leading antagonists of the movement on the left-leaning network, and is not attending the convention.

“Certainly there must be a large percentage of disaffected, overtaxed minorities, too. How many of them have we seen at any of these events?” he said. He also pointed to the incendiary opening convention speech Thursday by former Colorado congressman and Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, who declared American values under siege from the "cult of multiculturalism," as well as "Islamification" and asserted President Barack Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."

“Thank God for Tancredo: He really tore off the mask of this thing,” said Olbermann. He asserted the speech should “wind up changing everybody's coverage” of the tea party movement. “You cannot invoke the 'literacy tests' of the Jim Crow South, or claim a president was elected by people who don’t speak English, without revolting decent Americans — conservative, liberal, and otherwise.”


Sources: Politico, AP, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Washington Post, NY Times, Biggovernment.com, Twitter, Countdown, NY Magazine, TIME, Newsweek
Sources: Politico, CNN, MSNBC, Media Matters, Youtube

Conan O'Brien Is Tired Of Being Leno's Flunkie; He's Leaving NBC!

O'Brien Rejects NBC's Proposal To Follow Leno At 12:05 a.m.


Conan O'Brien says he's rejecting NBC's attempt to move "The Tonight Show" to a post-midnight slot to accommodate Jay Leno's return to late-night.

In a statement Tuesday, O'Brien says that NBC has given him a scant seven months to try to establish himself as host of "Tonight."

NBC wants to move "The Jay Leno Show" out of prime-time and to the 11:35 p.m. EST daily slot, bumping "Tonight" to 12:05 p.m. EST.

O'Brien said he hoped he and NBC could resolve the issue quickly so he could do a show of which he and his crew could be proud — "for a company that values our work" — raising the possibility he might go to another network. But he said he has no such offer.

O'Brien released the statement below on Tuesday afternoon:

People of Earth:

In the last few days, I've been getting a lot of sympathy calls, and I want to start by making it clear that no one should waste a second feeling sorry for me. For 17 years, I've been getting paid to do what I love most and, in a world with real problems, I've been absurdly lucky. That said, I've been suddenly put in a very public predicament and my bosses are demanding an immediate decision.

Six years ago, I signed a contract with NBC to take over "The Tonight Show" in June of 2009. Like a lot of us, I grew up watching Johnny Carson every night and the chance to one day sit in that chair has meant everything to me. I worked long and hard to get that opportunity, passed up far more lucrative offers, and since 2004 I have spent literally hundreds of hours thinking of ways to extend the franchise long into the future. It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule. Building a lasting audience at 11:30 is impossible without both.

But sadly, we were never given that chance. After only seven months, with my "Tonight Show" in its infancy, NBC has decided to react to their terrible difficulties in prime-time by making a change in their long-established late night schedule.

Last Thursday, NBC executives told me they intended to move "The Tonight Show" to 12:05 to accommodate "The Jay Leno Show" at 11:35. For 60 years "The Tonight Show" has aired immediately following the late local news. I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. "The Tonight Show" at 12:05 simply isn't "The Tonight Show." Also, if I accept this move I will be knocking the "Late Night" show, which I inherited from David Letterman and passed on to Jimmy Fallon, out of its long-held time slot. That would hurt the other NBC franchise that I love, and it would be unfair to Jimmy.

So it has come to this: I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this program and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it. My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of "The Tonight Show." But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction. Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn't matter. But with "The Tonight Show," I believe nothing could matter more.

There has been speculation about my going to another network but, to set the record straight, I currently have no other offer and honestly have no idea what happens next. My hope is that NBC and I can resolve this quickly so that my staff, crew, and I can do a show we can be proud of, for a company that values our work.

Have a great day and, for the record, I am truly sorry about my hair; it's always been that way.

Yours,

Conan



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Sources: MSNBC, NY Post, Associated Press, Google Maps

Will Conan Stay Or Go To Another Network?

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NBC to Conan O'Brien -- The Choice Is Yours


As TMZ first reported, after the Olympics, Jay Leno will get his 11:30 PM time period back. We're told network execs have told Conan they will let him decide if he wants the midnight to 1:00 AM time slot. If he does, Leno's show will only be a half hour. If Conan walks, Leno will get a full hour, informed sources tell TMZ.

Our sources say Conan has not decided what he wants. We do know he's pissed, because he was given no advanced warning this was coming. Conan's people told NBC they are considering the offer. Translation: Mr. O'Brien -- I have Rupert Murdoch on line one, Stephen McPherson on line two, John Landgraf on line three, Jeff Wachtel on line four ...

We're told if Conan gets another offer, even though NBC could block the move, they will let him go and give Leno the full hour.

Stay tuned ...







NBC Plan Would Move Leno Back to Late Nights


Pressed by affiliates and shrinking ratings, NBC has a plan in the works to radically alter its late-night television lineup, restoring Jay Leno to his old spot at 11:35 each weeknight, while pushing the man who replaced him, Conan O’Brien, to a starting time of 12:05 a.m.

NBC executives held extensive discussions with Mr. Leno and Mr. O’Brien on Thursday about the future of the network’s late-night lineup.

And while NBC officially said no final decision on the plan had been made, two senior NBC executives who had talked to the top management about the moves said that under the plan being discussed, Mr. Leno would definitely shift back to 11:35 but in a half-hour format, while Mr. O’Brien would slide back his start time by a half hour and then produce an hourlong show.

“We remain committed to keeping Conan O’Brien on NBC,” the network said in a statement Thursday evening. “He is a valued part of our late-night lineup, as he has been for more than 16 years, and is one of the most respected entertainers on television.”

The third NBC late-night star, Jimmy Fallon, would then begin his show at 1:05 a.m., the executives said. The revised lineup would go into effect after NBC concludes its coverage of the Winter Olympics on Feb. 28. NBC will pre-empt its prime-time and late-night lineup for more than two weeks to cover the Olympics, creating a natural break in which to put the late-night changes into effect.



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Sources: MSNBC, TMZ, NY Times, CNN, The Daily Beast, Youtube, Google Maps