The Defenestration of Rick Sanchez

By John Ballard

By now everyone knows about Rick Sanchez' termination from CNN.

CNN fired news anchor Rick Sanchez on Friday, a day after he called Jon Stewart a bigot in a radio show interview where he also questioned whether Jews should be considered a minority.

Despite appearances I'm certain this is not an abrupt move on the part of CNN. We have yet to know the full backstory and may never, but I for one am sorry to see him go. He was imprudent to say the least, but Sanchez at his most offensive never came close to the deliberately poisonous swill often served up by at least one other well-known television network.  I, for one, hate to see him gone.

Jon Stewart, his target, along with a handful of other multimedia journalists who now constitute the American Fourth Estate has been an important voice in many an issue that routinely sail way over the heads of our elected representatives. Sanchez didn't shirk from embracing Twitter, which is still a squirmy subject for many (despite the fact that Congressmen and Senators Tweet and C-SPAN's Washington Journal routinely invites Twitter comments, now treated with the same respectability at live phone calls). He was bi-lingual and never let language stand in the way if he was talking with someone whose mother tongue was Spanish. I watched him one afternoon acting as translator for a phone guest whose English was okay but too limited to express nuanced thoughts.

But he made the mistake of touching the third rail of journalism, offending someone (like his bosses) of whatever the opposite of antisemitism might be. Who ever heard of prosemitism? We don't even have a word for it, so all that's left is words like prejudice, bigotry and invoking Godwin's law.  Zionism comes close, but the tern is now archaic (as well as antisemetic, like the N-word) when used in the wrong sense by the wrong people.  Thanks to the phenomenon that got Sanchez fired, the paragraph you are now reading even qualifies as "offensive" for breaking this taboo.

Sanchez said that Stewart is bigoted toward "everybody else that's not like him." He said Stewart "can't relate to what I grew up with," saying his family had been poor and he had seen prejudice directed at his father.

Sanchez dismisses it when Dominick points out that Stewart, who is Jewish, is also a minority.

"I'm telling you that everyone 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?" Sanchez said, adding a sarcastic "yeah."

"I can't see someone not getting a job these days because they're Jewish," he said.

But I also love Jon Stewart.
It is a sad commentary that issues that should be perfunctory in the legislative process must instead be pushed along by public opinion spotlights like late-night comedy monologues and alternative TV channel shows like Comedy Central.

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Modern politics retains a timeless essential character, forever enshrined in every deck of playing cards, the Jester.  Long before the advent of modern representative democracy, kings and queens often permitted Jesters to say aloud in the royal presence ideas and words that would have been a capital offense for anyone else. Professional comedians understand well how tragedy and comedy are intertwined.Sanchez made the mistake of being serious when he ought to have made a joke. That's how it's done by Stewart and the late night comics. As well as Al Franken, come to think of it.

But losing your job is no joking matter. Looking ahead, Sanchez is still a very young man and as time unfolds this event may be seen as the first step in a long,  impressive professional career. If he plays it right, Rick Sanchez can become a latter day Till Eulenspiegel.