Roseanne’s racism is worse than Bee’s potty mouth
On the political entertainment front, everyone seems to be on apology tour, but not with apologies for everybody.
President Donald Trump is miffed that Disney chief Bob Iger phoned Valerie Jarrett, former top aide to President Barack Obama. He reportedly wanted her to be the first to know that Disney-owned ABC is canceling its reboot of the 1990s sitcom “Roseanne,” despite its commercial success after its star Rosanne Barr posted racist tweets about Jarrett.
Barr had used Twitter to attack Jarrett, describing her as looking like the “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes” had a baby.
But Trump got to the heart of what he saw as the important issue here: him.
“Iger,” Trump tweeted “where is my call of apology?”
It was Trump’s second tweet in two days that called for an apology from Iger for “the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn’t get the call.”
He cited ABC News reporter Brian Ross, who mistakenly reported last year that Trump had directed aide Michael Flynn to contact Russians during the 2016 campaign. Trump actually was already president-elect when he made that request. Trump blasted Ross for issuing “no apology.”
Not true. Ross and ABC apologized for the error. That’s what professional journalists do when we make a mistake, contrary to the impression Trump leaves with his rants about “the fake news media.”
Why does the White House get involved with a TV show? Because, one, we have the nation’s first president who appears to follow TV ratings as closely as he watches Wall Street. And, two, TV shows have become one of the arenas for culture wars.
Roseanne Barr, a fervent Trump supporter, has co-created a comedy about a family that is divided, as many real American families are, by support of or opposition to Trump.
Then, on the other side of this political and tribal gap, comedian Samantha Bee apologized for describing Ivanka Trump with a vulgarity on her TBS show, “Full Frontal.”
Bee showed a photo of the president’s elder daughter with her younger son. Circulating online at the same time reports that the government couldn’t account for the whereabouts of almost 1,500 migrant children, the photo sparked outrage online and in Bee’s monologue.
“Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child, but let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless c—-!”
The audience exploded with laughter, but the White House was not amused. “The language used by Samantha Bee last night is vile and vicious,” fumed White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in a statement.
To many of the women I know, the C-word is no more acceptable than the N-word is to African-Americans. Bee and the TBS network profusely apologized and the show immediately lost Autotrader and State Farm as sponsors.
But the show was not cancelled, and Sanders did not say it should be. Even Roseanne said to her credit she did not want people to compare her case to Bee’s or anyone else.
Good for her. But Barr’s racist tweet received the sort of passive judgement Trump expressed when he blamed “both sides” for the violence that left one dead and many injured in Charlottesville, Va., last year. It plays well with his base, which he seems to be most concerned about.