CNN Anchor Goes Rogue, Goes After Parent Company's Silence on Bee Remarks
A CNN anchor demanded an apology from the parent company his network shares with Samantha Bee after she made a wildly inappropriate remark about Ivanka Trump, The Daily Caller reported.
On Wednesday night’s edition of “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” the host called Ivanka Trump a “feckless c***” over a tweet she had made featuring a photograph with her son.
The vile remarks, with some degree of sick irony, came directly after Bee acknowledged the firing of Roseanne Barr over racist language directed at Valerie Jarrett.
Bee’s show is on TBS, which is owned by Turner Broadcasting — the same people who run CNN.
On Thursday, King was visibly unhappy with what Bee had said. So, he went rogue and said an apology was in order from both the star and corporate brass.
“Indecent conversation is indecent, period,” King said during a segment on Bee’s remarks.
“Just apologize,” he said. “And the company — forgive me, I work here — the company should say something too.”
At the time, Turner was not responding to demands they apologize and neither was Bee. That quickly changed.
First came Bee’s apology:
Soon afterwards, TBS chimed in.
“Samantha Bee has taken the right action in apologizing for the vile and inappropriate language she used about Ivanka Trump last night,” TBS’s statement read, according to Deadline.
“Those words should not have been aired. It was our mistake too, and we regret it.”
TBS has also pulled the video of Bee’s monologue from its media platforms.
Deadline, rather hilariously, reserved their contempt for White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders for “inaccurately” saying that, “The language used by Samantha Bee last night is vile and vicious. The collective silence by the left and its media allies is appalling.”
My guess is that they felt the last part was inaccurate, adding this: “In the morning news cycle’s outrage, some cast Bee’s remark as worse than Barr’s, which was made in a late-night tweet.”
I can only watch one channel at a time, but I never heard this said in any mainstream media account of the Bee/Barr sweepstakes. Perhaps someone out there said it, but they remained unmentioned in Deadline’s article.
Also, while Bee’s statement was reported on, it wasn’t until considerable steam built up on social media. By the next morning, it was a bit difficult to ignore, and the fact that the apologies from Bee and TBS only came in the afternoon were telling, especially since this was a scripted show where they had plenty of time to review what was going to air.
They should have known the dumpster fire that was to await them, and yet the best they managed was pro forma statements cobbled together well after social media had forced the mainstream media’s hand. In this instant-outrage era, that’s close enough to silence that I don’t think Sanders was being patently inaccurate. I also didn’t hear a lot of people calling for Bee’s job, or anything more than an apology, for her sickening remarks.
If Bee said something slightly more or less vile than someone else that’s said something really vile, she still said something vile. It’s not mitigated in any way if there’s someone out there in the media who did something more vile than Bee did.
In the days since Bee made her remarks, we’ve seen nothing but constant comparison to what Roseanne said as if there’s some kind of ideological competition as to which one is worse — and the idea that somehow, the right or the left has lost a cultural battle if one is indeed more abhorrent than the other. This is patently absurd.
In my opinion, both women should be extremely jobless at this point. Let’s please stop this utterly dimwitted competition as to which one said something more fireable. And Deadline (and the rest of the media) should probably be focusing on slamming Bee and/or Barr — not Sarah Sanders.
For what it’s worth, King got his wish. Bee and TBS have apologized. There’s no sign that anyone’s going to be suspended or fired for this sexist slur against Ivanka Trump, mind you. Everyone involved just had to tweet out a few sentences that every PR hack in existence can recite from memory. That’s (very literally) the least they could do.
However, I will say this — you know you’ve messed up when you go after a Trump on a Turner-owned network and even CNN doesn’t have your back.
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