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We’re Zucked
Allison Gollust got Zucked by the boss (Photo: CNN)
Reportedly it was an open secret within the network but those in the know were afraid that if they were identified saying anything Zucker would exact revenge. It only came to light because of an outside law firm’s investigation in L’affaire de Chris Cuomo. In a previous life, Gollust had been Comms Director for none other than former NY Governor Andrew Cuomo. And before that, she worked in publicity at NBCUniversal.
Zucker, of course, came from NBC where he was the Executive Producer of Today. In her book, Going There, former Today anchor Katie Couric alluded to what was going on. Zucker tried to force Gollust into the role as the publicist on Couric’s ill-fated daytime talker.
They were joined at the hip. The problem was, we’d already hired a PR person for the show. There really wasn’t a role for Allison.
I had to wonder why Jeff was angling so hard to bring Allison on board. She and her husband and kids had moved into the apartment right above Jeff and Caryn’s — everyone who heard about their cozy arrangement thought it was super strange. By that point, Caryn (Zucker’s ex-wife) had become a close friend and it made me really uncomfortable.
When Zucker moved from NBC to CNN his first hire was Gollust. Quelle surprise.
In other media news, Whoopi Goldberg (real name Caryn Johnson) has been suspended by Disney for two weeks for suggesting the Holocaust was nothing more than an internal squabble between two groups of white people. “I think of race as being something that I can see,” she said. “So, I see you and I know what race you are.”
Evidently, all Jews look alike to Whoopi. Now, can we talk about her cultural appropriation of the name “Goldberg?”
Published in General
I don’t know that Zucker would have survived the transition from AT&T ownership to the Discovery venture, in any event…EJH, any thoughts on this?
Discovery CEO David Saslav is a reliable donor to the Democrats so I’m not sure that he disagrees with the tone Zucker has set at CNN. He is, however, a bottom line man and had no trouble re-upping Mike Rowe for a new series of Dirty Jobs ten years after the show’s cancellation of it’s original run.
This is not how I interpreted what she said. I thought she said she did not see a racial difference between German Jews and German Aryans. She saw just white people with one group claiming White Supremacy.
I’m reminded of life with a previous employer back in the last century. Whenever an exec got canned, the announcement would state that they “left to pursue other opportunities”. Then it turned out that the CEO and one of VP’s were doing the thang together. The announcement on that one came out as “John Doe is no longer associated with this company” and “Jane Dame is no longer associated with this company.”
Well, that was emphatic!
I have a post up exploring exactly this. Nor did Whoopi minimize the Holocaust as “nothing more than an internal squabble between two groups of white people.” She said it was evil and an example of man’s inhumanity to man, but it wasn’t racism. She could be wrong (let’s explore it together and find out) but she isn’t minimizing.
Nope. This is what she said later in the day to Stephen Colbert:
Colbert: Have you come to understand that the Nazis saw it as race? Because asking the Nazis, they would say, “Yes, it’s a racial issue.”
Goldberg: The Nazis lied. It wasn’t. They had issues with ethnicity, not with race, because most of the Nazis were white people and most of the people they were attacking were white people. So to me, I’m thinking, “How can you say it’s about race if you are fighting each other?”
Would you like to try again? Because there ain’t no way that can be spun.
Yes, she’s wrong. Nazi’s regarded Jews not just as a different race but as a different species, a subhuman species. And it was something they could see, like Whoopi insists on. They described anatomical features of Jews at great length and contrasted them with “Aryans”.
Whoopi is trying to minimize anti-Semitism and maximize anti-black racism as the evil of all evils. It’s ideological claptrap and evil in itself.
The idea that slavery in America was much worse than anti-Semitism because it went on for generations and the Holocaust was confined to a few years is bogus, too, since vicious, violent anti-Semitism had been going on in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, for hundreds of years. That’s the background against which Hitler emerged.
Well say what you will about the whole affair, but at least Zucker was shtupping someone over the age of majority. I think we can all agree that’s a refreshing change, given all the reports about CNN producers that came out recently.
CNN sure seems like it’s nothing but a bunch of sex maniacs.
Indeed. Pizzagate just doesn’t seem so far-fetched anymore.
This is called a “legover” in Canada and I have to admit I was perplexed when I saw the headline as I thought the head of Facebook had evolved from an android form to a human boy like Pinnochio.
EJ, that doesn’t mean she’s minimizing it just because she thinks its an ethnic thing rather than a race thing. The nazis were wrong – neither aryan nor Jewish is a race. Does that minimize the Holocaust or the evils of nazis? No!
Whoopi wants everyone to know that skin tone is all (except when those with excess melanin are conservative) when it comes to discrimination. To say otherwise is to denigrate her great African claim upon humanity for the slave trade that brought so many to America without their consent. Poor, defenseless, tribal peoples were stolen away and sold. But humanity is far more cruel than exhibited by the slave traders. In Germany men sought to exterminate an entire “race” of people. Actually, they sought extermination of gypsies as well. They also targeted blacks, homosexuals and disabled people. Racism is a misnomer. Humanity, when it becomes clannish and tribal, can reduce any others to sub-human status. Physical characteristics simply make identification of members and non-members easier. We can call the exploitation of others, however tribally identified, “racist”, but what it is really is cruel and evil.
Look to the dark continent itself, a corrupt and dangerous mix of centuries of tribal and racial grudges and civil conflict. Africa is not thriving despite incredible natural resources.
Whoopie and others like her should celebrate their citizenship in America, however it resulted. Nearly every American story begins with great sacrifice and hardship. The consequence of their predecessors’ arrival is important only in the fact that it successfully led to today. Their hardship speaks only to their courage, perseverance and character. She is one lucky woman who has no claim on the descendants of any other American. We are a plural nation. We celebrate every American story.
For many of these guys progressivism is little more than an excuse for a libertine* lifestyle.
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*A libertine is a person devoid of most moral principles, a sense of responsibility, or sexual restraints, which are seen as unnecessary or undesirable, especially someone who ignores or even spurns accepted morals and forms of behavior sanctified by the larger society. -Wikipedia
Another man with a Zeus complex.
It was given to the leader of the gods because it is how these men act.
Glad to see him get in trouble for it. But I don’t kid myself it is not rampant.
Ok, but were the nazis right in any of that? I don’t think they were. Do you? So 80 years later, do we have to conceive of the Holocaust in those terms? Does that make it any less evil or impactful? No.
So nazis thought Jews were subhuman. People thought blacks were subhuman. If what these people thought matters, then why don’t we call them species-ists because technically that’s actually what they were right? The answer is that we know they were both wrong and evil and murdering/oppressing humans, so we can and do call them racists based on our current knowledge and current usage of the terms. Except with the nazis, we can also apply our current knowledge to say that neither aryan nor Jewish is actually a race. Does that make it less evil or impactful? No. Does that mean Whoopi is minimizing or excusing anything? No.
Fox pundits are losing targets these days.
This opens up something that should be explored further.
Whoopie is not an authority on race. No one really is. For a while now it’s much more about perception and self identification. Someone who is less than 50% black is welcomed to identify as black.
Tim Pool who identifies as Asian can easily pass as white ( I think he’s mostly white) .There are many examples of this including my daughter who is predominantly white percentage-wise but identifies as African American.
Race is a construct. And I don’t think I’m wrong that a lot of people thought Whoopie was partly Jewish in her ancestry given her last name.
If the perpetrator incorrectly believes that the victim is of another race and is motivated by that belief, is that not racism?
If someone answers that differently than you, does that mean they’re minimizing the crime or the evil of the crime? Is the crime racism or murder and oppression?
If someone commits a crime on the belief that the victim isn’t even human and is motivated by that belief, is that not species-ism? Why wouldn’t we use the perpetrator’s terms in that case?
There are limits to looking at things in terms the perpetrator uses. I’m answering you with questions precisely because I’m not sure of much except that my reaction to Whoopi has been different than pretty much everyone else around me, and I’m trying to figure out why that is. So far it seems that many people conceive of racism as perhaps more evil than other motives (I don’t agree with that). Others say there is no such actual thing as race (I don’t think I agree with that but I’m not certain); others say race is a thing but it means different things to different people (yeah, pretty much); others think that race and ethnicity are distinctions – ethnicity as a subset of race (this is closest to what I think I think).
In any event, people seem pretty certain that Whoopi is minimizing the Holocaust and the evils of the nazis, but it seems to me that they have to do so based not on what Whoopi actually said but on a series of assumptions they hold about her. It may be reasonable to hold those assumptions too, but I’m not so certain of that.
I’ve said all I could, I think. I’m going to step away and let others discuss or move on as they see fit.
I’m sure she picked the name for the shock value. “Can you imagine they introduce somebody named Goldberg and I walk out?”
It’s an old joke really. A staple of the Rat Pack schtick was one of them reacting to Sammy Davis, Jr by saying, “Funny, he doesn’t look Jewish!” (Davis had been converted to Judaism through his friend Eddie Cantor following a near-fatal automobile accident.)
Going further back, there was a now-controversial character on network radio called “Beulah.” She was a black, and obvious heavy-set woman who served as a domestic and her tag lines, “Love dat man!” and “Somebody bawlin’ for Beulah!?” was ingrained into the culture. Her every appearance on Fibber McGee and Molly was met with uproarious screams of laughter. Why? Because that booming black voice belonged to a diminutive white man by the name of Marlin Hurt, who would keep his back to the studio audience until it was time for the grand reveal.
As you can tell the quality of the lines do not match the laughter that accompanies them. Hurt would get his own show in 1945 and then drop dead of a heart attack at age 40. Eventually the role would be made famous by Ethel Waters on television. Waters quit the role after a single season, calling it “degrading.” Louise Beavers, who had played Bing Crosby’s house keeper in Holiday Inn, took the role for another two years.
John Malone, who is on the Discovery board and is chairman of Liberty Media, said in an interview:
“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing.”
He also said:
Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have ‘news’ news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions”
Just one guy on the board, but an influential one.
Demonising identifiable groups of people in order to justify wicked actions against them has been a strategy for as long as strategies have existed. The target group doesn’t necessarily have to be identified by inherited or inherent attributes but that probably is most often the case. I can see how one might argue that when the two groups have similar physical features, it can’t be “racism”. Personally, I think that is as superficial as believing that race is always and only about skin colour or tone.
Let’s see what she actually said:
“But these were two white groups of people.” She means the Nazis and the Jews. So how could it be about race? She asks.
Why is it important to her to make this distinction? Because if it’s not about whites oppressing non-whites it can’t be racism. This is the mantra of the woke.
This is how woke culture has distorted the concept of race and racism.
To the woke racism is all about white privilege and black victimhood and nothing else. It’s all a bunch of self serving claptrap.
When the the Nazis said they committed the industrialized massacre of millions of people on the basis of their race we should believe them. To deny that the Holocaust was ‘about race’ is to diminish it.
If it’s not about white supremacy and white fragility the woke don’t care.
Interesting how that network has and keeps falling apart……..
Some are saying that Chris Cuomo came after him with this. I don’t know about that but I bet blackmail controls a lot of those in politics and exposure is really a threat.
Zuck Trudeau.
What a disgusting lot of narcissists ….. beauty is skin deep, but ugly goes to the bone.
I saw a Keith Olbermann comment on a Stephen L. Miller @redsteeze twitter post that said that Keith figured this affair out 15 years ago in 2006 or 2007. Non-traditional open marriage?
I agree with you more than halfway. She was saying the Holocaust wasn’t about race because the German Jews and German Aryans all looked like the same race to her.
I want to repeat something I wrote on the Daily Wire: Let’s say the year is something like 1930. Let’s say Goldberg is a very white looking woman with some black ancestry enrolling in a college in the South. (I read, at that time, there sometimes were employees at some colleges whose job it was to check the ancestry of students to make sure no one passing for white got or stayed in the school.) So let’s say Goldberg is kicked out because she’s discovered to have black ancestry. Now, it’s still the case, obviously, that all the students at the college look to be what we now consider to be the same race—-white. Whoopi Goldberg is certainly predominantly of that race. That’s why she looks white. And she certainly isn’t being told to leave the college because she suddenly got darker. My question to Whoopi Goldberg would be: is the persecution she would be experiencing in this imaginary situation—-this situation that was quite real for a lot of people who tried to “pass” as white—-is the persecution about race? I think it very much is.
The Holocaust was about race not because the Jews were a different race (I don’t know enough about them or race to have an opinion on whether the Jews were or are a race.) but because the people persecuting and then murdering them justified that persecution and murder by claiming that Jews were a different and inferior race. They didn’t need the Jews to look especially different racially to do that.