Rick Sanchez gets the boot from CNN

I feel for Rick Sanchez, I really do.  But blaming his problems on the Jews who run the media is insulting and stupid (the Jews who run the media were offended!)  Now he's out of a job, and the sad part is, Jon Stewart is still mocking him.

Here's how the WaPo television writer summed up the story:

CNN fired Rick Sanchez on Friday afternoon in response to a radio interview on a SiriusXM radio show during which Sanchez called Comedy Central late-night host Jon Stewart a "bigot" and implied that the media as a whole are controlled by Jews. Appearing on "Stand Up! With Pete Dominick" to promote his new book, "Conventional Idiocy," Sanchez went on to assert that he has been the victim of discrimination at the cable news network.


 . . . Sanchez paraphrased what he said a CNN executive had once said to him: "I really don't see you as an anchor, I see you more as a reporter. I see you more as a John Quiñones -- you know, the guy on ABC. . . . Now, did he not realize that he was telling me. . . . An anchor is what you give the high-profile white guys, you know. . . . To a certain extent Jon Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert are the same way. I think Jon Stewart's a bigot."



Later in the interview, Dominick noted Stewart is Jewish, which he said is "a minority as much as you are."

"Very powerless people," Sanchez said, with a laugh. "He's such a minority, I mean, you know. . . . Please, what are you kidding? . . . 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." In the audio, which circulated online Friday, Sanchez's sarcasm was evident. 

During the Sirius interview, Sanchez told Dominick he was discussing Stewart because he was sick of "The Daily Show" host's repeated needling. One example of Stewart's derision came on March 2, when Stewart's show ran clips of Sanchez anchoring CNN's live coverage of a Chilean earthquake and the accompanying fears of a tsunami. In the clips, Sanchez is seen mistaking the Galapagos Islands for Hawaii and asking an expert to explain to him what nine meters means "in English." Stewart called CNN "the most trusted name in overcaffeinated control freaks," and Sanchez's photo was shown above an identifier that read "The Uninformant!"



"I just realized something," Stewart jabbed. "Rick Sanchez delivers the news like a guy at a party who's doing a lot of coke and traps you in a corner and explains really intensely how an ant is the strongest animal on Earth."

Jon Stewart said that he was planing to mock Rick Sanchez on his subsequent broadcast, but in the meantime, CNN fired him, so Stewart (sort of) stuck up for him instead:

“I think the guy’s probably got a good heart. . . . I want to clarify something here - we weren’t making fun of Rick Sanchez because of some slight to his ethnicity. It’s just that we here see him as kind of a complex television character who is flawed but fascinating to watch every week. . . . If CNN got rid of Rick Sanchez because they didn’t like his show, fine. We weren’t that crazy about it either. But if they fired him for making some intemperate statements and some banal Jew-baiting, I gotta tell you, I’m not even sure Sanchez believes what he was saying .”

To be fair, I think that Rick Sanchez probably (hopefully) meant powerful media people like Stewart are biased against Hispanics, and Jews are not oppressed, but the way he said it conflated the two, making it sound like he was saying Jews run the media. He also probably has no idea how touchy Jews are on that particular subject.  On the other hand, insulting your employer, in any way, doesn't tend to be good for your career.