CNN Fires Rick Sanchez

CNN Fires Rick Sanchez
Dismissal Comes On Heels Of Controversial Comments About Jon Stewart, Jews

By Marisa Guthrie (Broadcasting & Cable) -- Multichannel News, 10/1/2010 6:47:00 PM


CNN anchor Rick Sanchez has been fired from the network after making incendiary comments about Jews and Daily Show host Jon Stewart.

The announcement from CNN came Friday evening, one day after Sanchez made the comments on Pete Dominick's SiriusXM radio show.

The network will broadcast CNN Newsroom in his timeslot from 3-5 p.m. for the foreseeable future.

In an often heated conversation with Dominick, who is a friend of Stewart's (Dominick used to warm up the studio audience at the Daily Show), Sanchez called the Stewart a "bigot" and suggested that prejudice can cut both ways.

Sanchez comes in for frequent ridicule on The Daily Show. And audio of his appearance on Dominick's show had burned up the Internet by Friday morning.

Sanchez, who is Cuban-American, also asserted that he's been the target of prejudice because of his ethnicity.

"Deep down, when they look at a guy like me, they see a guy automatically who belongs in the second tier, and not the top tier," he said.

When Dominick suggested that Jews have endured similar societal prejudice, Sanchez scoffed.

"Yeah," said Sanchez, sarcastically. "Very powerless people... He's such a minority... Please, what 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."

Sanchez is the second CNN employee this year to be fired from the network for inflammatory remarks. In July, longtime Middle East editor Octavia Nasr was dismissed after a Tweet expressing regret at the death of Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, a Lebanese-born cleric and among the leaders of Hezbollah, which the U.S. government has deemed a terrorist organization.