Chilling and Routine
The self-immolation of former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, fired October 1 after delivering a lengthy anti-Semitic rant during a radio interview, offers a depressing reminder of how terribly routine the public maligning of Jews has become in 21st-century America.
Perhaps it should not shock us that an educated individual in this day and age can still believe that Jews exercise some sort of malign, collective control over much of the media, as Sanchez asserted September 30 on Sirius Satellite Radio. Even so, it is alarming to learn that a mainstream network news anchor thinks it is acceptable to say so on the air. It is chilling, and chastening, to hear him laugh in mocking disbelief at the notion that Jews could be called a vulnerable minority. Something has changed.
As recently as a decade ago, open talk of Jewish conspiracies was understood to be taboo in polite society. In the perilous world of post-9/11 America, however, it is commonplace to hear ex-presidents and college deans rail defiantly against a shadowy, all-powerful Israel lobby that subverts the national interest. At some point, the line between policy critique and conspiracy-mongering disappears. Sanchez reached that point.
Sanchez’s defenders claim he fell victim to the bullying of this same powerful Jewish cabal. They claim the Jewish lobby stifles all criticism of itself, while bigots of every other stripe are permitted to rant away undisturbed. This would come as a surprise to Don Imus, the radio jock whose national program was canceled in 2007 after he insulted an all-black girls’ basketball team.
Imus is hardly an exception. Tennessee GOP leader Chip Saltsman was forced out of the race for chairman of the Republican National Committee in 2009 after circulating a CD with a racist ditty called “Barack, the Magic Negro.” Radio talk jockey Michael Savage’s Jewish background did not save his job when MSNBC fired him in 2003 for anti-gay language. On the very day that Sanchez delivered his soliloquy, Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia fired a staffer for posting anti-gay slurs on a political website. Those are just a few prominent instances.
Sanchez was spewing anti-Semitic venom on the radio. If he knew what he was doing, he doesn’t belong in the news business. If he simply didn’t know better, that’s worse.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
