CNN host fired for remarks about Jews

How many of us have our own daily two-hour TV show, named after ourselves, on a major network, on which we can pontificate about any subject we want? Well, Rick Sanchez was one of those fortunate few, with his program, Rick’s List, on CNN. But in a 20 minute diatribe on Thursday he let on how the Jews, who run the media, were keeping him down because he’s an Hispanic. Yesterday CNN fired him.

Just the other week I was saying that Cuban Americans, while they have a reputation for being more conservative than other Hispanics, because they’re anti-Castro and Caucasian, are just as much into the aggrieved minority bit as their darker cousins. Sanchez, a Cuban American, has made my point for me.

By the way, I just happened to see Rick’s List for the first time earlier this week. I thought Sanchez was terrible. He has a rough, guttural, unpleasant voice. Back in the days before cable lowered the standards, a man with a voice like that would never have had a prominent spot on television.

The below story from Yahoo has audio of some of Sanchez’s remarks.

CNN fires host Rick Sanchez over controversial remarks
By Michael Calderone Fri Oct 1, 6:17 pm ET

Rick Sanchez fired.CNN host Rick Sanchez came under fire Friday after making controversial remarks the previous day on a satellite radio show.

Sanchez called out Comedy Central host Jon Stewart as a “bigot” for mocking him, and complained that Jews—like Stewart—don’t face discrimination. He also suggested that CNN, and perhaps the media industry more broadly, is run by Jews and elitists who look down on Hispanics like himself.

Clearly, those comments didn’t sit well with the network, which put out a terse statement around 6 p.m. Friday.

“Rick Sanchez is no longer with the company,” the CNN statement read. “We thank Rick for his years of service and we wish him well.”

So far, Sanchez hasn’t spoken out about the explosive interview Thursday on “Stand Up! with Pete Dominick.” On the radio show, the now-former CNN star didn’t just make a single impolitic statement, but spoke at length—for roughly 20 minutes—about Stewart and a media world he believes to be filled with “elite Northeast liberals” who consider Hispanic journalists “second tier.” Sanchez is a Cuban-American.

He specifically called out Stewart as someone with “a white liberal establishment point-of-view” who “can’t relate to a guy like me.” Also, Sanchez claimed that Stewart is “upset that someone of my ilk is at, almost, his level.”

Sanchez also has yet to address the controversy via Twitter, where he is a frequent user. He even made the social media platform a signature part of his afternoon show, “Rick’s List.” Sanchez didn’t appear on his 3 p.m. show on Friday, but CNN’s public relations department put out word that he was going to be at a book signing at the CNN Center in Atlanta. It’s unclear whether he attended it.

Sanchez joined CNN in 2004 after working as an anchor in Miami. Prior to that, Sanchez worked as a correspondent at MSNBC, providing breaking news updates at CNBC, and at other local stations.

CNN plans to air “CNN Newsroom” in the “Rick’s List” time slot, weekdays from 3 to 5 p.m.

You can listen to part of Sanchez’s rant against Stewart and his dismissive comments about Jews below:

[end of article]

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Randy writes:

It’s another example of how Hispanics show so much “gratitude” toward their leftist supporters and patrons. The left fully supports the surrender and colonization of parts of the U.S. by Hispanics and this is what they get. Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people. Seems that in the eyes of Hispanics, there is no difference between their leftest supporters on one siad and Jan Brewer or the “racist” George Bush on the other. After all, Brewer, Stewart, and Bush are not “of” La Raza so they will never “understand.” This is the arrogant, Hispanic racism we are dealing with.

Tim W. writes:

You noted that Cuban-Americans, despite being white and mostly conservative, engage in the same racially aggrieved politics as other Latinos (Mexican Mestizos, for example). It’s strange that they do this, because throughout Latin America there’s a clear color line, with whites forming the elite in everything from government to entertainment. People have joked that there are so many blonde girls on Mexican soap operas that if you turned the sound off you’d think you were watching a TV channel from Helsinki.

So why do Cubans side with their brown-skinned Latino “brothers” here when they don’t do so back in their homelands? Likewise, in the last election, Asians voted mostly for Obama. Surely, Americans of Asian ancestry should have more in common with whites than with blacks or Mestizos, yet they seem to be trending in the liberal racial identity politics direction.

Why do they do this? It’s because they view whites as losers. They see minorities making demands for racial preferences, and whites simply deferring. Whites don’t even argue, they just fold like a collapsed deck of cards and give in to the demands. If whites stood up to these demands, and said, “No, we will not give you preferences over our own people, we will not discriminate against our own children on behalf of your children,” things would be different. Cubans and Asians would respect us and mostly throw their votes and support our way. But they see whites backing down and cowering, so they figure their best route to protect themselves is to become a racially aggrieved anti-white group, too. At least they’ll be guaranteed a quota. Siding with whites, when all whites seem to do is apologize, capitulate, and pander to every minority demand isn’t a good ethnic tactic for people who understand ethnic solidarity. And Asians and Cubans have ethnic solidarity. Whites, of course, do not.

Alexis Zarkov writes:

Sanchez comes across as an appallingly ignorant buffoon who surely never should have been hired as a newscaster. He admits he doesn’t know anything about the metric system. He thinks the Galapagos Islands are the Hawaiian Islands. How did this ignoramus even get through middle school in Florida, let alone get a journalism scholarship to the University of Minnesota? Affirmative action. Yet he screams discrimination. He thinks Jon Stewart is a bigot. He mocks Stewart because ” [Stewart] … grew up in a suburban middle class New Jersey home with everything you could ever imagine.” His muddled careless thinking comes through clearly when you listen to the interview that got him in trouble. Let’s hope he never gets another job in journalism.

LA writes:

I haven’t yet read or listened to the interview that got Sanchez in trouble. However, according to today’s New York Post, part of what he said—in response to his interviewer’s point that Jon Stewart is a Jew and therefore also a minority—was the undeniable truth that Jews are dominant in the news media and it’s ridiculous to describe them as an oppressed minority. Should someone lose his job over a true remark?

Again, without having read the interview, but in a preliminary way, I would say this:

The context of his remark, which he brought up, not his interviewer, was to make invidious comparisons between Stewart’s “group,” Jews, and Hispanics. If you’re in a mainstream position, you simply do not make invidious comparisons between groups, e.g., “my group is more oppressed than that group.” That simply is not done. For a person in his position to speak that way was moronic.

I’ve told this story before. When I was 13 years old at an all-boys summer camp in northern Pennsylvania, Camp Susquehanna, I got into a conversation with a boy in my cabin about the Jews. He started by making some derogatory comments about Jews, and in response I toted out my knowledge (which I had heard from my ten-year older left-wing sister), that the Jews Marx, Freud, and Einstein had made the greatest contributions to modern civilization. Even though the other boy had been denigrating Jews, and I had only been defending (or boasting of) them, both of us were punished. The idea was that making invidious comparisons between ethnic groups, debating about which ethnic group was “better,” was simply not done at this camp. The two of us were taken out to the woods, we dropped our pants, bent over, and received several lashes each with a leather belt for our transgression. (However, I could tell that I was being hit less hard than the other boy.)

If 13 year olds in summer camp could be punished for denigrating or comparing ethnic groups, it’s not out of line for the grown-up host of his own TV show to be punished for the same thing.

LA continues:

Again, it’s funny, that just a few days before Sanchez got in trouble and was fired, I happened to see his progam for the first time. I want to add that in addition to his unpleasant, unprofessional, gutteral voice, which I mentioned above, he also struck me as unintelligent looking. I did have the thought, “What is this man doing with his own TV show?” I also thought that “Rick’s List” was a stupid title for a TV news program.

Mark Jaws writes:

Nothing delights me more than watching liberal constituencies go at it with each other, like seeing white Spaniards such as Sanchez who call themselves “Latinos” complain about the white man when they are held to account. I’ve watched Sanchez several times. He is no Stewart, no Limbaugh, no Geraldo (who is half Jewish), and no O’Reilly. He is a mediocre talent who got the gig on CNN most likely because of his last name. However, he was right on the mark when he cynically questioned Dominick’s inference that Jews are a powerless minority. As I have stated in this forum many times, when it comes to the media, Jews are in charge and their liberal bias is evident. I believe Sanchez was axed because he took on the powerful Kosher Nostra simply by mentioning its existence. The good news for us right-wingers is that if we ever wanted to divide and weaken the Left, this wide fault line between liberal Jews and “Latinos” would be the place to start. I grew up with Puerto Ricans, and I served in the Army with Panamanians, Mexicans, etc. My church now has more than a few families from South and Central America. They are almost as “Jew-obsessed” as Muslims.

LA replies:

Numerous commenters at various sites, most of them likely anti-Jews, are eagerly repeating that the firing of Sanchez proves that Jews run the media and will fire anyone who points out that fact. I repeat what I said before. While it may be that Sanchez’s remark that Jews are not an oppressed minority in the media because they themselves are in charge of the media, would have been enough, by itself, to get him fired, we do not know that that is what got him fired, because CNN did not give its reasons for firing him. He made numerous offensive statements, any or all of which might have been enough to get him fired. Specifically, his remark about Jews running everything cannot be separated from his ethnically hostile remark that Jews like Stewart were keeping down Hispanics like himself. To ignore his ethnically hostile comments, and focus only on his factual (and true) assertion that Jews are obviously not an oppressed minority in the media because they dominate the media, is to distort and over-simplify the picture so as to lead it to a pure anti-Jewish conclusion. Only anti-Jews would do this.

LA adds (Oct 3, 11:00 p.m.)

I just realized that my comment implicitly called Mark Jaws an anti-Jew. That was not my intention. When I was writing the comment I was thinking of numerous comments I had seen on the Web saying identically, one after the other, that the Sanchez incident proves that the Jews are in control, that you can’t say anything about this, etc. Mark, who is half-Jewish by birth, has had numerous critical comments about liberal Jews, and they are often nuanced and rich in human interest and psychological detail. I would never characterize him as an anti-Jew. My apologies to him for suggesting otherwise.

At the same time, I emphasize that for people to ignore the ethnically hostile context created by Sanchez, which would not be allowed by a station like CNN regardless of the ethnic groups being referred to, but instead to focus only on his one remark that Jews are powerful in the media and to state conclusorily that he was fired for this remark alone, is so tendentious as to be prima facie an anti-Jewish statement.

As I’ve said, it is possible that he was fired for that one remark alone, but we do not know that. for people to act as though they know that, is wrong.

.

LA continues:

One must underscore the amazing, despicable cowardice of the CNN management in not giving their reasons for firing him. All they said was, “Sanchez is no longer with CNN, we wish him well.” Here is a huge organization, the job of which is dealing with public issues. Yet they didn’t feel a responsibility to articulate to themselves, and to explain to the public, why they were firing one of their hosts after he had made controversial statements. The most likely explanation for their cowardice is that in our hyper politically correct environment anything having to do with ethnicity and specifically Jewishness is so sensitive that there is no way to think about it or discuss it rationally. You simply stay away from it, and you instantly fire anyone who gets too close to it. But this is a massive avoidance of responsiblity. It was incumbent on CNN to state why they fired Sanchez.

But how silly I’m being. I’ve said myself that liberalism turns strong men into cowards. And now I’m expecting the liberal bureaucrats who run CNN to be brave?

Richard W. writes:

Subject: Appreciation and Gratitude is due your camp councilors.

You are the only person I know who was physically punished for praising Marx as a child.

Surely it is not a coincidence that you are now among the fiercest critics of leftism on the planet.

The old ways are the best ways, and in this case I would like to thank your camp authorities for following tradition and not sparing the rod.

We could probably eliminate leftism from the West in a generation if every parent followed this simple practice. Promptly administer corporal punishment to children for any praise of liberalism or parroting of leftist ideas at first outbreak.

LA replies:

That’s amusing, and I’ll post it, but leftism wasn’t the issue. In that incident in summer camp, I was giving Marx as an example, along with Freud and Einstein, of prominent Jewish figures. The issue was Jewish contributions to society. I was punished for engaging in ethnic comparisons, not for praising Marx.

October 4

Bobby D. writes:

It seem to me he was fired because he rejected the idea of the Jews as a victim class. This is actually an idea that many PaleoCons agree with (you excepted of course). But the Jewish Leftists would not allow this type of sentiment to be expressed so they punished Sanchez for it. Although, interestingly enough, Oliver Stone recently expressed exactly the same sentiment and suffered no punishment. Oliver Stone apparently has certain immunities to Leftist attack than Rick Sanchez does not have. This is probably another example of Auschwitz-phobia that you discussed some time ago. Many Leftists are afraid to have the Jews no longer be considered a victim class. This however is never applied to Israel though which is routinely demonized by both Jewish and non-Jewish Leftists.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 02, 2010 08:45 AM | Send