I found this article quite by accident this evening and was so shocked (why, I don’t know, after all the things I have read and heard in the last year, but especially in the last 7 months) that I decided to reprint it on my blog. The remarks made by these people go beyond comedy. They are absolutely disgusting. Joking about skin color is bad enough, but then to joke about assassinating our president on top of that, is unbelievable, and truly crosses the line. This actually was part of a radio show done before the President was sworn in, so they can’t even say that they are disgruntled with his policies. He hadn’t made any yet. See what you think.
Radio Canada:
Easier to Shoot a Black
President in
the White House
Posted May 29th 2009 11:25AM by Denver Louis
Filed under: BlackSpin, News, Opinion, Obama
The radio segment featured a slew of offensive statements in which the hosts seemed to revel in their own banter. At one point, one of the hosts stated, “We’re not racists. It will be good to have a Negro in the White House. It will be practical. Black on white, it will be easier to shoot him.”
To its credit, the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council said it found, “nothing redeeming in the allegedly comedic notion that an American president should be shot, still less that this would be easier to achieve because of the color of the president’s skin. It was a disturbing, wounding, abusive racial comment.”
On another segment of the show, an Obama impersonator was featured in a faux interview in which the host said, “The blacks, you all look alike,” and then warned viewers to hide their purses.
Talk About It: Is It Ever Funny To Joke About Killing the President?
The council added that the comments and sketches breached regulations, saying they “went too far in terms of Canadian broadcast standards.” Which is kind of a given, provided that they probably went too far as far as global broadcasting standards are concerned, save for, of course, those ever-resilient neo-Nazis and maybe the Klan on close-frequency ham radios.
Not surprisingly, the producers of the show actually denied the skits had been racist, saying they had meant to mock the characters making the offensive remarks, which is akin to saying Rush Limbaugh isn’t a racist… total BS.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is supposedly conducting a probe of the show. And although it doesn’t have the power to fine Radio-Canada, it can issue a public reprimand.
According to a spokeswoman for the commission, such reprimands could cause problems for the network when it comes time to renew its broadcasting license. Radio-Canada is due to apply for a license renewal in 2011.
And amid all this is the fact that Canadians, like much of the world, overwhelmingly love President Obama. Polls regularly show that Canadians like Obama far more than they do their own leaders. Tens of thousands turned up to cheer him when he made a brief visit to Ottawa in February. That makes it even more mind-boggling that a radio station would think it was appropriate to air something so belligerent.
From My Corner Of The World 