An interesting update to our item from earlier: Alec Baldwin has reportedly lost his job at MSNBC:
“Up Late With Alec Baldwin” has been canceled by MSNBC following the host’s homophobic outburst at a New York City photographer earlier this month.
“The decision has been made. He’s gone,” an insider at MSNBC told the New York Post. “The [parent company] Comcast guys have decided. Word is spreading through the building.”
The decision to fire Mr. Baldwin was made in part due to his “diva-like” behavior toward colleagues, the Post said.
A spokesman for Mr. Baldwin had an issue with the term “fired,” but said, “The show is not coming back. He had questions on whether he wanted to continue.”
Host Martin Bashir, on the other hand, still has his. Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro provides some context:
Bashir read his misogynistic vile from a teleprompter. Meaning a producer put it there. And then MSNBC tweeted it. He's still employed.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) November 26, 2013
And probably will continue to be. If anything, MSNBC’s decision to cut Baldwin loose but keep Bashir on the payroll will only fuel the outrage fires even more. Baldwin's comments were hurtful and unacceptable, of course, but he didn’t go as far as to spend time researching, scripting, and broadcasting a scatological monologue on national television that deeply offended a former conservative female vice presidential nominee, not to mention men and women everywhere. How is Baldwin’s behavior more offensive to the network than Bashir’s? Why did he get let go, and Bashir didn’t?
UPDATE: Baldwin wasn’t fired, apparently. He and the network parted ways after both parties came to a mutual understanding, or something (via Mediaite)
Sources close to the situation insist that Baldwin was not been fired from the NBCU news cabler, but that the sides “mutually” agreed to end the show in light of the dust-up.
That dust-up, of course, was when Baldwin was caught red-handed uttering that anti-gay slur. So his conduct, it can be said, at the very least influenced the network’s final decision to cancel the show. Still no word about what will happen to his former colleague, though. We’ll see if this latest development changes anything.
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