Rick Sanchez’s Firing Wasn’t Fair

The Nation had an interesting piece about the Rick Sanchez firing from CNN recently.  Essentially what Leslie Savan says is that there are other factors at play, that Sanchez’s actions were never taken over his words, and that Jon Stewart from “The Daily Show” kind of bullied Sanchez for no real reason.

A few choice quotes:

“It’s as if he really wanted to call Stewart another two-syllable b-word—bully—but couldn’t, for fear of sounding whiny. He was simultaneously trying to criticize the cable news industry for its dearth of Latino and African-American hosts in prime time, but, with the tongue-twisted displacement that often made him fun to watch, Sanchez managed instead to defame his most prominent tormenter in the same way he feels he has been maligned, as an ethnic stereotype.”

And then:

“So, even if Sanchez is mockable, why mock him so often?

It’s an “equalization issue,” Sanchez himself explained on GMA. “If he does a piece on Glenn Beck calling the president a communist, then he has to do a piece on somebody at CNN, and I’m the one he chooses.” Sanchez is describing the old false-equivalency two-step: overreaching to produce examples of liberals who appear to be as extreme, angry or ludicrous as conservatives. Of course, Stewart isn’t presenting Sanchez as Beck’s political opposite number. Sanchez serves instead as a non-Fox performer whose media tropes can be just as gob-smacking cheesy. It’s an attempt at equal redistribution of parody.”

Good points.  Sanchez definitely does a good job of making a mockery of himself, but is the fact that he’s Latino — and worse, unabashedly so — something that makes him a target?  Would it be as easy to mock him if he were just another Anglo newscaster who had a funny way with words?