Media Matters: Why ABC Should Not Have Fired Roseanne

Make no mistake, Roseanne Barr is a virulent racist; a propagator of divisive hate speech and dangerous conspiracy theories. She should not have a network TV show and the platform that accompanies it; certainly not in the America in which I want to live. Yet, after the initial adrenaline rush unleashed at the reality of a popular public figure actually suffering consequences commensurate with the ugliness of their bigotry in the era of Trump, a persistent uneasiness about her swift firing by ABC following a series of hate mongering Tweets last week started to gnaw at me. In the subsequent days, as the controversy raged on social media and cable news, the feeling only got more persistent.

My reservations aren’t rooted in the First Amendment. The right to free speech does not extend to the workplace. Furthermore, public figures, like CEOs, corporate spokespeople, and certainly titulars stars of top rated TV shows, are in a sense, always on the clock; their every action and comment a reflection of the company. To a large degree, such individuals forfeit the separation between public and private speech when they sign on the dotted line. That’s why they get paid the the big bucks - in Barr’s case, reportedly $3.25 million for next season.

The problem with ABC’s firing of Roseanne can best be summed up by the fable of of the frog and the scorpion. For those unfamiliar, here’s a quick synopsis. A scorpion asks a frog to carry it across a river. The frog is skeptical. How is he to know that the scorpion won’t sting him, pumping his body full of toxic venom. That is, after all, what scorpions do. The scorpion reassures him, pointing out that if he were to sting the frog while crossing the river on his back, they would both drown. Pacified by the seemingly sound logic, the frog agrees. Midway across the river, the scorpion plunges his stinger deep into the frog's flesh, dooming them both to death. As his stiffening body begins to sink into the murky water, the frog summons his remaining breath to ask why? “I’m a scorpion,” his similarly sinking passenger responds. "That's what scorpions do."

For all of her talent and indisputable commercial appeal, Roseanne Barr is a scorpion, and in recent years, Twitter has been her stinger. In 2013, she littered her timeline with a series of Tweets about “Islamic Rape Pedo Culture.” In 2015, she Tweeted, “I hope all Jews leave UC Davis & it then gets nuked!” The following year, she unleashed a Tweet describing Hillary Clinton aid Huma Abedin as a “filthy nazi whore.” That’s just a light sampler platter. Perhaps most instructively, Barr also once likened Susan Rice, a black Obama administration official, to an ape. Given that the Tweet which led to Barr’s firing likened Valerie Jarrett, also a black female former Obama official to an ape, the Rice Tweet epitomizes what we English majors call foreshadowing. 

Yet, upon catching wind of Barr’s Tuesday morning Tweet storm, ABC and parent company Disney expressed shock and outrage. ABC Entertainment president, Channing Dungey promptly issued a statement deriding Barr’s comments as “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.” Oh really? So are we to believe the company’s values have miraculously evolved in the year since it agreed to air the Roseanne reboot despite the star’s 4-plus years worth of similarly-toned Tweets? Or are we expected to assume that a multinational media conglomerate was unaware of Barr’s Twitter history? That would mean the network failed to subject the star of its most highly anticipated “new” show to the sort of rudimentary social media audit that 21st Century job seekers routinely endure when applying for so much as an assistant manager gig at Best Buy. Neither explanation passes the smell test.

The fact is, ABC and Disney knew full well Barr was a scorpion when they let her mount them. They simply chose to cross their fingers and jump into the river with her because they saw a big pot of gold on the other side locked in a safe that only she had the combination to. That combination included nostalgia, as well as a middle American sensibility largely missing from primetime television. But the third number in the code was the exact form of reactionary cultural angst for which Barr was ultimately fired. One of the most telling scenes from the Roseanne reboot came in an early in episode in which Roseanne and Dan Connor have fallen asleep in front of the television. Dan marvels that the now-elderly couple slept through “all the shows about black and Asian families.” Roseanne shoots back with her trademark sarcasm, “They’re just like us. There, now you’re all caught up.” 

On the surface, it appears to be a throwaway one-liner. But in the current climate, it can also be read as a dog whistle to a segment of the population who, like Barr, feels increasingly threatened by the growing diversity represented on the airwaves and in contemporary culture at large. Coupled with Trump’s proclamation at a rally, which appeared to be almost exclusively white, that the show was “about us,” it is hard to escape the conclusion that the very same resentments towards inclusiveness that catapulted Trump into the White House played a factor in Roseanne’s success. Though it may never have been spoken publicly, to ABC, Barr’s bareknuckled brand of polemic wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. As long as she kept it at a dog whistle. With last week’s Tweet storm, which also included personal attacks against Chelsea Clinton and her husband, and claims that philanthropist George Soros was a Nazi, the whistle turned to a full throated bark, and suddenly the network felt the bite of Barr’s stinger piercing down to its spine.

As such, firing Roseanne, while well within the network’s rights, appears opportunistic and self-congratulatory. ABC got exactly what they signed up for in bringing Barr back into the fold. They chose to lay down with a dog, woke up with fleas, and instead of giving the entire bed a long overdue flea bath, they simply shot the dog. The fleas - resentment, paranoia, and dehumanizing rhetoric - are still running rampant in the bed, as evidenced by the volume of profanity and conspiracy laced Tweets directed at the network (and Dungey in particular) since the cancellation. Now that the precedent has been set for firing media figures when their statements offend somebody, we may well have started down a slippery slope. Already angry Roseanne fans and opportunistic right wing pundits have begun calling for the cancellation of Bill Maher and Samantha Bee for making irreverent jokes about Trump and his family that they deem offensive.

An initially uncomfortable, but ultimately more productive solution would have been for ABC to issue a statement rebuking the star’s statements in the strongest possible language, while announcing that Roseanne would be returning for a second season as planned, out of respect for the show’s millions of fans. Make no mistake, the show most likely would still never have appeared on the airwaves again. With sponsors suddenly thrust front and center amid a deluge of difficult questions about Barr’s Tweets, as well as their own corporate positions on hate speech, selling advertising for the coming season would have been a slog, even with season 1’s stellar ratings. Behind all the bright lights and impeccably quaffed stars, television is ultimately the business of selling advertising. In short, no sponsors means no show.

Moreover, if the show did initially return, viewers themselves would have the opportunity to express their displeasure by simply tuning out. While the majority of Roseanne’s audience does come from the middle part of the country, it would be a mistake rooted in the same sort of broad stroke stereotyping for which we are condemning Barr to assume that they all share her views. The bet here is rating would decline significantly, giving advertisers even less incentive to weather the current storm with the show, all the while, living in perpetual fear of what its star will Tweet next. By essentially letting the free market cancel the show, as it recently did with Bill O’Reilly when advertisers pulled out of his Fox News program en masse after numerous allegations of sexual harassment emerged against the host, ABC would have insulated itself from claims of censorship. Meanwhile it would also deny the far right the gift of precedent for shows being yanked simply because a contingent of social media power-users are able to make a trending hashtag out of its star’s politics, which could lead to near daily haranguing for the cancelation of ABC mainstays from The View to Blackish to Jimmy Kimmel Live.

But I would like to have seen ABC push the envelope even harder. Why not include in their statement something to the effect of, “we look forward to using the second season as an opportunity to thoroughly explore issues of bigotry and intolerance upon which Roseanne’s statements have cast an inescapable spotlight.” Such a public missive would lay down the gauntlet for the show’s writers to lean into the blurring of the line between Roseanne Barr, the actress, and Roseanne Connor, the character, that Barr seemed intent upon obliterating through her initial insistence that the character be a Trump supporter to align with her own views. 

Last season the writers appeared to soft peddle the implications of the previously progressive Roseanne Connor’s unexplained hard right turn, while subtly subverting Barr by showing how policies advocated by Trump have hurt the Connor family. I’d love to see what they would do with a green light from the network to go scorched earth and use however many episodes the crippled second season limped through to show the hateful screeds of an increasingly unhinged Roseanne Connor cost the character her newly minted friendship with the Muslim neighbors introduced last season, as well the family’s long time black friends Chuck and Anna-Marie, and eventually even her job as an Uber driver in light of mounting customer complaints about the tenor of her smalltalk. I would eagerly tune in to watch Roseanne Connor grow increasingly alienated from her more open-minded children and grandchildren, most notably son DJ and his black wife and daughter. By season’s end, we could be presented with Roseanne, isolated and ostracized, drowning in a river of her own fear, anger, and hate, while the rest of her world moves forward towards a future of acceptance and inclusiveness.

Media Matters is an exploration of the news of the day, and what it can teach us about communications, contemporary culture, and life in the digital age.

About the Author

Jeffrey Harvey is a Washington, DC based writer and content strategist with experience in broadcasting, strategic communications, public relations, marketing and media analysis. He has written prolifically on subjects including technology, healthcare and arts and entertainment. His original one act play, Coffee won a staged reading at the Kennedy Center in the Source Theater Festival.