Tuning back in to cable news' Rick Sanchez
SAN DIEGO -- After some close calls, Rick Sanchez is ready for his comeback.
Not surprisingly, the newsman's return to the airwaves is not without controversy. Who would have thought that the son of Adela and Paco -- Cuban refugees who came to the United States in 1960 fleeing communism -- would wind up working for a global cable television network funded by the Russian government?
The road from Havana to Miami to the Washington bureau of RT America makes for one heck of a story. And I was glad that my friend of more than a dozen years shared it with me.
When we last tuned in, CNN -- which has often, because of its shortage of Hispanics both on staff and on air, seemed to specialize in black-and-white television -- had come up with a strange way to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month.
In October 2010, it wastefully fired the most prominent Latino journalist on television because of something he said.
Yet other TV talkers have said dumb things and lived to offend again. See: Bill Maher, Joy Behar, Tucker Carlson, etc.
I asked Sanchez about the double-standard.
"It used to make me mad, then I got over it," he told me. "The universe has a way of making things right if you don't stew."
Supposedly, Sanchez was let go because, during a radio interview, he made light of the claim that Jews were an oppressed minority given their strong presence in media and entertainment.
I suspect the real reason was because, in the same interview, he implied that a senior executive at CNN didn't think he could anchor because of his ethnicity.
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