US President Donald Trump on Wednesday broke his silence about a racism row engulfing US entertainer Roseanne Barr, not to condemn her, but to accuse TV network ABC of media bias.
The network on Tuesday canceled Barr’s hit sitcom Roseanne after she fired off a tweet about former White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, who was one of former US president Barack Obama’s closest aides.
Jarrett said that Bob Iger, CEO of The Walt Disney Co, ABC’s parent company, telephoned her personally to tell her that the network was cancelling the show.
“Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that ‘ABC does not tolerate comments like those’ made by Roseanne Barr,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday. “Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn’t get the call?”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Trump, saying that he was hitting out against media bias.
“The president is pointing to the hypocrisy in the media,” she said. “This is a double standard that the president is speaking about. No one is defending her comments. They’re inappropriate, but that’s not the point that he was making.”
When the scandal first broke, the White House deflected questions, with Sanders saying: “We have a lot bigger things going on in the country right now.”
Barr, 65, a vocal Trump supporter who has used Twitter to voice far-right and conspiracy theorist views, took aim at Jarrett in a post that read: “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby = vj.”
She later apologized for what she called a “joke.”
However, ABC said that it was canceling the show, condemning her “abhorrent, repugnant” tweet, which was “inconsistent with our values.”
“I’m not a racist, I never was & I never will be,” Barr tweeted on Wednesday, attempting to defend herself against an onslaught of criticism. “One stupid joke in a lifetime of fighting 4 civil rights 4 all minorities, against networks, studios, at the expense of my nervous system/family/wealth will NEVER b taken from me.”
A since-deleted tweet blaming her outburst on a dose of the sleeping pill Ambien prompted a swift retort from French pharmaceutical company Sanofi SA.
“While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication,” the company tweeted in an acerbic post that quickly went viral.
Roseanne in March returned to US screens after a 21-year hiatus, with Barr’s character recast as a Trump supporter in a rare depiction of working class life on the US small screen.
The show scored huge ratings and had been renewed for an 11th season following largely positive reviews — including from Trump.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS