ABC Changes the Channel on Roseanne

Roseanne Barr posing for the 2009 "German" issue
of the now-defunct satirical Jewish magazine Heeb

In some parts of America, there will inevitably be some individuals who view ABC's decision to cancel the successful reboot of Roseanne Barr's 1/2 hour sitcom this morning as an example of "the liberal media" trying to silence the voice of the pro-Trump conservative perspective.

I am not one of those people.

Roseanne's bizarre decision to wake up this morning and use Twitter to compare President Obama's former African-American senior advisor Valerie Jarret to an ape belongs to her, and her alone.

Roseanne is a big girl and while she's always taken a peculiar, juvenile pleasure in basking in the afterglow of the shock value of her frequently-controversial public opinions (like posing as Hitler taking people-shaped cookies out of an oven for a magazine article in 2009), she isn't stupid.

She understood exactly what the historical racial connotations of comparing an African-American to an ape were when she tweeted "Muslim brotherhood & Planet of the Apes had a baby = VJ" earlier this morning.

While there's absolutely nothing about those words that strike me as even remotely funny, and it's her right to say or write that if she wants to, no one made Roseanne say it, and no one made her do it.

Like her now-cancelled sitcom, it's her show, she owns it.

And she's quickly reaped the harvest of the offensive seeds she's sewn by pandering to the lunatic fringe of American conservatives who idolize the incompetent con-man-slash-failed businessman-turned reality show star who now occupies the White House.

ABC Entertainment Group Pres. Channing Dungey

Disney, the family-themed media behemoth and parent company of ABC, dispatched newly-tapped ABC Entertainment Group President Channing Dungey (pictured left) to drop Roseanne's show like a bad habit within hours of the toxic tweet going public.

Her statement this morning left little confusion about what ABC brass thought about the face of one of the networks most-watched shows in 2018 using her platform to spout the kind of racist nonsense that 45 has used to try and divide the nation:

"Roseanne's Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show."

Disney / ABC wasn't the only organization that scrambled to disassociate their brands with Roseanne either.

Her LA-based talent agency ICM quickly dropped her as a client.

On the same day that Starbucks closed 8,000 coffee shops across the U.S. in order to conduct racial sensitivity training for its 175,000 employees in response to a since-fired white manager who called the police to arrest two African-American customers waiting for a third person to arrive back in April, other media companies responded quickly to Roseanne's tweet as well.

As the Hollywood Reporter noted earlier this afternoon, Disney's content and programming rival Paramount announced that they will pull planned reruns of the Roseanne reboot from the schedules of three of its Viacom channels; TV Land, Paramount Network and CMT.

Streaming giant Hulu also announced reruns of the show will be pulled from their content list; so in terms of residual payments from the broadcasting of reruns, Roseanne cost herself and the leading members of her cast millions of dollars.

African-American comedienne Wanda Sykes, who served as a writer and consulting producer on the first season of the Roseanne reboot also announced she would not return.

Former Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett

Now at this point there's little need to tune in to watch the conservative talking heads on Fox News complain about whiny "snowflakes" or how political correctness is ruining America.

By now the usual suspects of extremist, right-wing media like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones are likely raging to their audience that Roseanne being blacklisted by Hollywood within the space of a day is some kind of anti-Trump conspiracy theory.

After all, it was only two months ago back on March 29th that a gloating Trump told a live audience about the rebooted Roseanne show:

"Look at Roseanne's ratings they were unbelievable, over 18 million people and it was about us!"

Let's also just remember who the woman Roseanne Barr compared to an ape is.

Valerie Jarrett (pictured above) was born in Iran to an African-American father, James E. Bowman, who was a geneticist and pathologist who ran a hospital for Iranian children in 1956 during the reign of the former Shah of Iran.

Her mother (who is 1/4 African-American) Barbra T. Bowman was a prominent child education advocate, professor and author who co-founded the Erikson Institute.

Valerie Jarrett with the Obamas in happier times

Jarret spoke English, French and Farsi as a child, earned her B.A. from Stanford and her law degree from the University of Michigan.

She worked for former Chicago Mayors Harold Washington and Richard Daley, was chairwoman of the Chicago Transit Board and later served as the CEO of a real estate management company - she's also served on the board of trustees of several high-profile organizations including the University of Chicago Medial Center and the University of Chicago.   

That was before serving as a senior advisor to a sitting president of the United States.

So in this age of #MeToo and the repercussions of Harvey Weinstein's treatment of women, Roseanne's decision to compare Jarrett to an ape says less about Jarrett than it does about Roseanne's desire to pander to the base-level ignorance and bigotry of the same extremist right-wingers to whom she retweeted about the widely-discredited Pizzagate conspiracy.

In the past, when she was a media behemoth and one of the biggest stars on television, some of Roseanne's controversial public statements generated negative publicity that her fame, power and money insulated her against.

She's notorious (and on the record for saying) that she doesn't care what people think.

But in this age of social media and the 24/7 news cycle, Roseanne finally jumped the shark - and with midterm elections just six months away, brand-conscious major media organizations want nothing to do with that in the age of Trump.

ABC's decision to cancel her show is a reflection of how fed up most Americans are with the moronic bigotry, ignorant prejudice and baseless conspiracy theories that Trump just can't seem to shut up about.

It was Roseanne's decision to peddle that kind of nonsense, and pander to that kind of thinking; whether it's her promoting quack theories like calling 911 "an inside job", or calling Israel a "Nazi state", she's been spouting that quasi-delusional crap for years.

Today it caught up with her, people have had enough - and I'm hoping that's a reflection of how Americans will vote at the polls this November.

Unfortunately for the many hardworking people who work behind the scenes on Roseanne who will now lose their jobs, their boss' delight in appealing to the lowest common denominator has had consequences that extend far beyond Roseanne's now-deleted Twitter account.

Roseanne chose to use her lofty public platform to weigh in on politics (unfortunately it was the politics of the absurd) and within a day, the mainstream media changed the channel.