REEL LIFE: Was former CNN anchor Rich Sanchez’s firing provoked?
By Arit John
Oct. 12, 2010 2:18 a.m.
This is a story about a man. A brash man, a heavily flawed man and a man who will undoubtedly be receiving unemployment checks well after I figure out what to do with my English degree.
This is a story about Rick Sanchez.
Now, I can almost hear the collective sound of confusion resonating all across Bruin Walk. Who, you may ask, is Rick Sanchez? I got a lot of blank faces when I mentioned him to friends and strangers alike, but when you call him “the one Hispanic guy on CNN,” “the guy on CNN who Jon Stewart makes fun of all the time” or “the guy on CNN who called Jon Stewart a bigot and is now no longer on CNN,” then some light bulbs start to turn on.
Born Ricardo León “Rick” Sánchez de Reinaldo, Rick Sanchez was a daytime CNN anchor, who recently started anchoring his own two-hour show that focused on the latest news stories as told by Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. On Sept. 30, Sanchez went on the radio show “Stand Up with Pete Dominick,” when the conversation got around to Jon Stewart.
For every one of us who never watched Sanchez’ show on CNN (oh “Rick’s List,” we hardly knew ye), there may very well be 10 of us who have seen the “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central.
Yes, we are talking about that Rick Sanchez. The guy who jumped off a boat to show viewers what it’s like for people who fall off cruise ships. The guy who let the police taser him so he could describe the sensation. The guy whose CNN show was (not always kindly) dubbed the Twitter show because of the show’s dedication to presenting the news through social media sites. Jon Stewart makes fun of him a lot.
According to Philip Virissimo, a third-year political science student, Stewart taunts Sanchez more than he does most people on CNN.
Apparently, Sanchez was upset about that. So upset that he accused Jon Stewart of being a bigot on public radio. For him, Stewart’s attempt at humor translated into full-blown prejudice.
(He backtracked later and called him “prejudicial” and “uninformed,” which was like putting a used bandage on a bullet wound.)
At one point on the show, the host, Pete Dominick, implied that because Stewart was Jewish he was sympathetic to minorities.
Sanchez laughed in response.
The transcription from the Huffington Post reads: “Please … 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.”
Read what you will into that, but as Jon Stewart said soon after all this went down, “All he has to do is apologize to us, and we’ll hire him back.”
It may be easy for Stewart to joke about this (he still has a job and career prospects, after all) but this sort of incident has the power to start a serious debate. Did Jon Stewart go too far?
Did he push Sanchez over the edge?
There are students here, fans of “The Daily Show” who think he didn’t. Ryan Barnoya, a third-year physics student and self-professed “Daily Show” fan, thinks not. He said Stewart is a comedian, so he’s actually supposed to be doing things like that, making fun of Rick Sanchez, so he doesn’t understand how Stewart can be a bigot.
It’s almost safe to say that the blogosphere has come to a consensus that Sanchez temporarily lost his mind. And though he later came out and said he screwed up (and that he had nothing against CNN or Stewart) the damage had been done.
But is there room to sympathize with Sanchez? Virissimo said he believes that, to an extent, Sanchez was provoked on the show, and while that doesn’t excuse his actions, it explains them. And the media, no matter who’s controlling it, only talks about the juicy parts of the radio interview. No one ever mentions that Sanchez went on to publicize his new book ““ “Conventional Idiocy.”
