CNN Fires Anchor Rick Sanchez After Jon Stewart “Bigot” Comments

"Rick Sanchez is no longer with the company. We thank Rick for his years of service and we wish him well”

CNN has shown Rick Sanchez the door, a day after the news anchor slammed Jon Stewart as a “bigot” and implied that his employer and other news networks were all run by Jews.

"Rick Sanchez is no longer with the company. We thank Rick for his years of service and we wish him well,” CNN said in a statement.

The network said it will air "CNN Newsroom" in his 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. timeslot.

On Thursday, Sanchez appeared on Pete Dominick’s Sirius XM radio show to promote his book “Conventional Idiocy” and made a series of controversial comments.

Early in the interview, Sanchez called his bosses at CNN "elite Northeastern establishment liberals" who viewed him, as a Cuban-American, as belonging “in the second tier and not the top tier,” TheWrap.com reported. (Click here for a transcript of the 20 minute interview).

He went on to accuse Comedy Central star Jon Stewart of harboring the same elitism.

“I think Jon Stewart’s a bigot,” Sanchez said. “I think he looks at the world through, his mom, who was a school teacher, and his dad, who was a physicist or something like that. Great, I’m so happy that he grew up in a suburban middle class New Jersey home with everything you could ever imagine.”

In the past few months, Stewart has made fun of Sanchez on "The Daily Show" at least three occasions, The Associated Press reported.

After being pressed for examples of how Stewart is a bigot, Sanchez walked back the charge.

“I'll say prejudicial — uninformed," he said.

The newsman later scoffed at Stewart’s Jewishness as conferring any minority-status on the comedian, and widened his allegations to include higher-ups in cable news.

"Yeah, very powerless people,” he laughed. “He's such a minority. I mean, you know, 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?"

Following the interview, Sanchez drew fire from the vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, which urged him to retract and apologize for his comments.

"Shame on Rick Sanchez! His public feud with Jon Stewart does not give him license to malign the Jewish people with a classical retread of anti-Semitic bigotry,” Elan Steinberg told Politico. “As survivors of the ultimate expression of such racist stereotyping, we believe Mr. Sanchez spoke with insensitive thoughtlessness rather than calculated hate. Nevertheless, his words are deeply offensive and shocking.”

Selected Reading: Huffington Post, The Wrap, Politico
 

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