this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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This is presented as some kind of gotcha post, but it just completely misses the point unless ABC was, then, also pressured to cancel that show by the chair of a government dependent regulatory agency by threatening to revoke or not renew their broadcasting license.
If you don't understand the difference, you don't understand free speech.
I still don't understand how dowd got bumped from msnbc for saying bad thoughts lead to bad words and then to bad actions. Where was the outrage over "just kill 'em" on fox.
There are plenty of similarities in all these cases, but the bottom line is that all of these things were business decisions that flowed with the then administration of US. Roseanne wasn't thrown to the curb by ABC because somebody high up didn't like what she was saying. She was fired because they didn't like what her sayings were about to cause their finances.
Gina Carano changed her pronouns to "beep/bop/boop" and got fired.
I'm not trying to say that any of these were ok because the other side did it too. That would be dumb. I'm trying to say that the correct way to think about is either A) all of these firings are bad or B) all of these firings are fine. There are no other options.
Rosanne did not have the government threatening that she needed to go out the regulatory agencies were going to do things the hard way to them. She made a very specific raciat comment about a specific person.
Same with Gina, there was zero government threat. BTW the event that triggered her dismissal was not what you said, it was saying the Republicans had it as bad as Jews during the Holocaust. Some people got offended by her pronoun thing, but her job was intact for a long time after that because most people didn't care.
Kimmel had the FCC chair openly threaten to make life miserable for abc and its affiliates. This was not because he says anything about Charlie himself, but called out MAGA for trying to politically weaponize the event. In the wake of the event, another right winger on NPR similarly said he was glad that NPR was defunded because the interviewer was so hateful. What did she say? That political violence was a problem for both sides, giving the example of the assassination of democratic politicians this year. This undermined his rant about how only leftists were violent and he got super pissed.
That is the stupidest fucking thing I have read on this site. Nothing on this world is black and white, and your refusal to actually look at this situation and see the difference is willfull ignorance. Do better or just shit the fuck up.
c) each of these firings are different
Yeah, no.
One thing is a company not wanting to be represented by a controversial statement of a public figure (because it would affect their business negatively), the other is the government suppressing dissent. It would be insane, or moronic, to think these two cases should be assessed equally.