ROBIN YOUNG, HOST:
MSNBC host Martin Bashir has resigned because of controversial comments he made about Sarah Palin. But the resignation comes late for critics of the network. Earlier this month, Alec Baldwin's show, "Up Late," was canceled after the actor spewed homophobic slurs at a photographers in the street. Critics like the New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser questioned why a firing for a gay slur but little reaction when Bashir first made his comments about a conservative woman.
NPR media correspondent David Folkinflik joins us to tease this apart. David, welcome.
DAVID FOLKINFLIK, BYLINE: Hey, thanks so much.
YOUNG: Well, and Bashir, Martin Bashir, made his comments two weeks ago. He then made an on-air apology. He went on a vacation. Do we know why the resignation's coming now?
FOLKINFLIK: Well, it followed, you know, almost immediately followed a conversation he had with MSNBC President Phil Griffin, who was kind of in an impossible spot. Bashir had essentially no defenders on this one, the graphic nature of his insult to, you know, former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was just so - it was just so distasteful and so personalized in a way that, you know, nobody was rallying to support him.
You know, people talk about double standards. It's not to clear to me there really is any standard. I think people are finding their way when you think about how charged a conversation and how opinion is in the cable news sphere, and MSNBC in particular at times. You know, they're trying to figure out what the boundaries are, how far they can go without spilling into just outright unacceptable behavior, as clearly appeared to have occurred here.
YOUNG: Well, let's go over what happened, and you alluded to how vulgar these comments are. So a warning, they are - although we're not going to say them. We're going to try to describe what happened without doing that because of standards here. But Bashir's comments were in response to comments made by Sarah Palin.
She said if the U.S. debt, much of it to China, wasn't paid off, Americans would be enslaved to China. Let's listen to a little.
SARAH PALIN: And this isn't racist. So try it and - try it anyway. This isn't racist, but it's going to be like slavery when that note is due.
YOUNG: OK, so she compared not paying the debt to slavery to China. On his program on MSNBC, Bashir reached back to the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, this is an 18th-century slave owner. In these diaries, Thistlewood describes a pretty despicable punishment, a slave who was made to eat something that we will just say was foul.
Bashir's point was, this is what slavery really was. But then he went on to say this:
MARTIN BASHIR: When Mrs. Palin invokes slavery, she doesn't just prove her rank ignorance, she confirms that if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, then she would be the outstanding candidate.
YOUNG: David Folkinflik, vulgar, threatening, but in your mind firable at that point?
FOLKINFLIK: Well with your permission, I'll just say it involved the consumption of human excrement. I mean, it's a vile thing to suggest. And at the same time, yes, you know, look, it is controversial to compare a national debt, something over which there are legitimate policy debates, to human slavery, a, you know, centuries-long, you know, stain on the American history with horrible ramifications both abroad and immediate.
You know, what Bashir did was really make it personal about what should happen to her in a way that seemed to be a transgression that was vile, but, you know, when one thinks about what are the standards here, there's no standard for what you can or cannot say about an individual.
I mean, if you think about what people say online, things get much rougher than that. If you think about the British journalistic tradition, from which Bashir, who was born in London, you know, emerged, you know, the print publications, particularly tabloids, engage in some really rough stuff.
If you think about the New York Post, which after all is led by an Australian and owned by a company led by Rupert Murdoch, himself born in Australia, who has got those tabloids in Australia and the U.K., you know, what those guys engage in at the Post and at other Murdoch tabloids can be extremely rough, both on the commentary pages but at times on the front pages, as well.
So the idea that we have very clearly defined lines of what's appropriate or what's not really I think in the current age is defined by public reaction to it. I think Phil Griffin was sort of stumbling his way towards a resolution on this. After the meeting, Bashir came out and said - you know, he apologized, and it was a full apology both to his colleagues and the public, as well as to Sarah Palin herself.
But, you know, not within bounds.
YOUNG: But as you said there are many other occasions where this kind of language happens on the left and on the right, but the New York Post's Andrea Peyser says that this goes beyond Bashir, beyond Alec Baldwin, who also is a well-known, liberal-leaning former MSNBC host. He said it was a double standard that, you know, he was immediately suspended, and he had said his comment on the street. Bashir, it took weeks, and he had said his on the air.
But Peyser points out that Mark Halperin was suspended for a month in 2011 when he insulted President Obama; although Ed Schultz, another MSNBC host at the time, only got a week suspension in 2011 after calling conservative columnist Laura Ingraham a rightwing slut. Peyser says this is part of a war on conservative women. Are you saying, David, that depending on the media outlet, you might see this different kind of perspective, that punishment is often seen through a political prism?
FOLKINFLIK: I would say that's right. I don't think there is a war on Republican or conservative women emanating from MSNBC, but it is a place that is going to be exceptionally receptive and sympathetic to liberals and to Democrats and a place that's likely to be very skeptical, bordering on hostility, towards conservatives and Republicans.
If you think about, you know, MSNBC only found profit and only found a clear-sighted vision for what it wanted to be once it banked to the left, in some ways in sort of a mirror-image homage to the way in which Fox consistently, from its opening in 1996, understood that it would be speaking to a more culturally and politically conservative base.
And so the - you know, they want to keep true to who they are and what their audience expects of them. So I do think that there is something more instinctual about their rejection of Alec Baldwin when he made homophobic comments to a paparazzi photographer, you know, which is more likely to upset progressives and liberals than when you have something against Sarah Palin.
That said, you know, different circumstances. Baldwin was basically two weeks into a program that had just started at MSNBC. Bashir was one of their - that was a weekly program, airing Friday night sort of as an experiment. This was something else, which was really one of their mainstay weekday late-afternoon anchors.
But, you know, for the New York Post to take great umbrage when it, you know, it's done some things that people have seen as so objectionable is really as much for public consumption as for a true journalistic standard.
YOUNG: NPR media correspondent David Folkinflik, thanks so much.
FOLKINFLIK: Hey, thank you, you bet.
YOUNG: And people are already weighing in, Jeremy, at hereandnow.org. We'd love to hear your opinion on all of this, hereandnow.org. Back in a minute. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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