MSNBC Fires Then Rehires A Guy for Making a Polanski Rapes Kids Joke in 2009

I don’t watch cable news because sex and food and sports still exist. The Presidents of media outlets seem to be a swell combination of panicky and instinctively poor decision makers. Presumably they weren’t breast fed as children. Not by their own mothers.

In the wake of the “We can’t have a man on staff who has ever done or said or intimated something the least bit controversial regarding sex” wave sweeping corporate entertainment America, MSNBC fired TV show contributor and progressive radio talk host Sam Seder. This for a joke Seder posted in 2009 about Roman Polanski that a Conservative rabble rouser used on his blog to claim to show how MSNBC loves child rape jokes.

Dont care re Polanski, but i hope if my daughter is ever raped it is by an older truly talented man w/ a great sense of mise en scene

Words so offensive that news outlets like The Hollywood Reporter covering the Seder firing would only link to the archived Tweet. Don’t read the text aloud. You’ll go blind! Pretty Old Testament thinking for a largely areligious group of people.

Some percentage of social media denizen with functioning forebrains figured out pretty quickly that Seder’s Tweet was meant to be tongue in cheek. A satirical note about how Hollywood was passing out awards to Polanski at the time for his directorial work, while completely ignoring the fact he sodomized an 8th grader in Jack Nicholson’s hot tub in the 70’s. A sex crime to which Polanski pled guilty, so as not to confuse his illicit actions with those of the 2017 sex harassment verdicts lacking due process.

MSNBC’s inability to understand satire isn’t particularly startling. Nor their instinct to overreact to a single off-colored joke in a Tweet a guy made eight years earlier. The fact that they reversed their decision and rehired Seder so quickly and in such an embarrassingly obvious fashion is rather unexpected.

MSNBC President Phil Griffin fell on the dummy sword with the official comment:

“Sometimes you just get one wrong — and that’s what happened here. We made our initial decision for the right reasons — because we don’t consider rape to be a funny topic to be joked about. But we’ve heard the feedback, and we understand the point Sam was trying to make in that tweet was actually in line with our values, even though the language was not. Sam will be welcome on our air going forward.”

Someday, when you have the time, attend the Phil Griffin seminar on what versions of rape fall into or out of the MSNBC values circle. Definitely TED talk worthy.

Idiots will naturally act idiotic. It’s in their nature. People with important jobs and high profile decision making responsibilities might consider taking more than five seconds to render final judgement regarding people’s reputations and careers. Fuck everybody in this story. That’s gratuitous, but honest.