Impartial for a month

ABC producer John Green whose “loose-keyed” email was discussed here earlier under the “Myth of Impartiality” has been suspended by the network for a month, according to Howard Kurtz. I wrote then that Green’s coming out of the closet as a Bush hater was a good thing because his (and most media honchos’) vaunted impartiality was a fake anyway and should be revealed to the public. Deep down, ABC must agree because a month’s suspension isn’t much.

Interestingly, there is another leaked email involved in the suspension – cited in the Kurtz article – about which I had known nothing. In this one, Green wrote Madeleine Albright has “Jew shame.” Albright, as many know, suddenly “acknowledged” her Jewish roots, as Kurtz puts it, in 1997 after they were discovered by Washington Post writer Michael Dobbs in the midst of researching a book. I could have told Dobbs years before, if he had asked me. Albright is a dead ringer for my grandmother. As for Green’s email on the subject, I would count it as trivial, hardly a firing, or even a suspending, offense. More likely it was thrown in for its “equal opportunity” content (Albright being a Dem).