AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!
I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González, as we spend the rest of the hour with the Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald of The intercept.
We will talk about his latest exposé on dog experimentation as well as Robert Mueller’s
probe of President Trump.
But we begin with today’s big entertainment news.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On Tuesday, ABC canceled its hit show Roseanne after its star, Roseanne
Barr, fired off a series of racist comments on Twitter.
In one tweet, Roseanne wrote, “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”
It was a reference to Valerie Jarrett, long-time adviser to President Obama, who is African
American.
Roseanne also accused billionaire George Soros, who’s Jewish, of being a Nazi collaborator
and attacked Chelsea Clinton.
The decision to cancel Roseanne was made by Channing Dungey, the first African American
president of a major TV network.
The reboot of the hit 1980s sitcom Roseanne last year drew huge audiences and praise from
President Trump who once called Roseanne Barr to congratulate her on the show’s success.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald joins us now from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he follows
the news in the United States and around the world.
Glenn, you’ve just been tweeting about this up until this moment.
Now, Roseanne Barr has been tweeting nonstop for the last I don’t know how many hours,
since she did that initial tweet equating Valerie Jarrett with an ape and being fired
by the first African American woman president of a major broadcast network.
Talk about the significance of what has just taken place.
You have been following what Roseanne Barr has been tweeting for years.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right.
I think we ought to be extremely cautious about awarding any praise whatsoever to anybody
at ABC for canceling Roseanne’s show.
There is no question at all that what she tweeted is completely in line and perfectly
consistent with what she has been saying and writing and tweeting for many years.
ABC had to have known exactly what she thought and the things that she believed when they
gave her the show that they gave her.
In fact, I went and looked at—because I remembered I had a very vitriolic exchange,
in fact several of them, with Roseanne, several years ago about Israel.
She has become a very fanatical defender of Israel.
And in the course of defending Israel, she often spewed some of the most grotesque and
overt naked racism against Arabs and Palestinians that you’ll hear from any public figure
this side of, say, David Duke.
She deleted a lot of those tweets but I do remember them because some of the exchanges
are still online, in which she was talking about Arabs and Palestinians being inferior,
being prone to violence, deserving to be slaughtered and killed.
She had previously said similar things about Susan Rice that she said about Valerie Jarrett.
So obviously her comments yesterday received a lot of attention because she now has a show
and they were so grotesque—just viscerally grotesque and racist to any person with a
conscience–that ABC had no choice.
But it wasn’t like this was something new for Roseanne.
This is stuff that she has been saying about lots of different groups, including African
Americans, but especially Arabs and Palestinians, for a long time.
It’s just that Arabs and Palestinians, racism towards them tends to be more acceptable.
I think the other issue is that there’s a lot of free speech debates now that center
around not what the First Amendment is about, which is government restrictions on free speech,
but private actors and their freedom to punish people who express ideas that are threatening
to their commercial interest.
There was a big controversy when Google fired an employee for expressing his views on the
inability of women to compete in the workplace.
There’s a similar controversy over the NFL now fining and punishing teams whose players
kneel in protest of racist police brutality in the national anthem.
And now we have this.
I think that we need to formulate consistent principles about what our views are, but in
Roseanne’s case, it was so far over the line of anything decent that I don’t think
anyone would think that ABC could do anything but fire her.
AMY GOODMAN: In fact, she I think had talked about Susan Rice, former Obama official, compared
her to an ape as well, back in 2013.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right.
That is what I’m saying is that Roseanne was the biggest TV star in the 1980s.
The show that she created and started—and actually it was pretty revolutionary in American
television because it was really the first time that a major television program focused
on a working-class family struggling with economic deprivation.
There were other shows that did it like Good Times and even All in the Family, but this
was kind of an updated version of how working class Americans are losing the American dream.
And because of her weight issues and lots of other things, it was a pretty revolutionary
show, for which she deserves credit.
She has kind of faded from the American consciousness, but she has been on Twitter and saying the
most insane racist things for the last four or five years.
And like I said, the only difference is that now people pay more attention to it because
ABC gave her a show.
But anyone paying any attention to her over the last several years would have known that
this is exactly who she is.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Glenn, really the question in my mind, looking back on it now, is why
ABC would even, given the climate, especially the polarized nature of our American society
today, considered giving her the show to begin with, knowing, as you say, that history of
hers.
And especially it seems they acted so quickly yesterday.
It was within hours of her statements.
It made me think, first of all, given the context of the Starbucks day of discussion
with their employees about racial bias and the fact that some African American leaders
were instantly talking about possibly boycotting the advertisers on the show, that—what was
stunning to me was how quickly ABC moved to cancel the show.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I think that Roseanne’s comments—like I said, it wasn’t the kind
of racism that’s sort of implicit or dressed up or disguised or in code, the kind that
is acceptable and common in everyday American discourse.
I mean, she compared an African American woman to an ape.
So it was so far over the line that—it was just shocking and visceral to so many people
that I do think ABC felt like their brand would be in jeopardy if they continued to
be associated with her any longer.
But you’re right.
That raises the question of why ABC then was willing to associate themselves with somebody
who had a record of saying those things in the past.
And I think what their gamble was was that Roseanne with her high salary and the success
of the show would kind of tamper down and would hide the things that she really believed.
I also think there’s an important cultural issue here, which is there is a huge part
of the country that voted for Trump.
I mean, basically half the people who voted—a little less than half—voted for Donald Trump.
And there isn’t a lot of representation of those people who support Donald Trump or
the Republican Party on television because the places that the entertainment industry
thrives in, which is Los Angeles and New York, tend to be very pro-liberal and pro-Democrat
and anti-Republican.
So I think ABC thought they were correcting an imbalance and offering representation to
people who are not often heard from, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing to do as long
as you’re not giving voice to the worst, most toxic, most racist aspects of that faction,
which is exactly what they did when they gave Roseanne Barr a platform.
AMY GOODMAN: Democracy Now!
can’t view Roseanne Barr’s tweets because she has had our account blocked for quite
some time.