Media: Why MSNBC fired Buchanan

Pat Buchanan has been purged by MSNBC, said Brett Decker in The Washington Times. Buchanan, an author and commentator, was fired by the left-wing cable network last week after MSNBC’s president said that the tart-tongued conservative’s latest book, Suicide of a Superpower, contained ideas that “weren’t appropriate for the national dialogue, much less on MSNBC.” Critics have condemned the book—which contains a chapter titled “The End of White America”—as homophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic. But during his 10 years as the network’s house conservative, Buchanan has consistently argued that America needs to stay true to the values of the white Christians who founded it. So why the sudden urgency to fire him? If MSNBC really wanted to fight bigotry, said W. James Antle III in The American Spectator, it would have sacked Al Sharpton, who has his own show on the network. When he was a community activist, Sharpton denounced “white interlopers” and “diamond merchants” in Brooklyn, provoking violent attacks on Jews. “You will search Buchanan’s oeuvre in vain for anything approaching Sharpton at his most hateful.”

I’ve searched, and you’re wrong, said Richard Prince in TheRoot.com. In 2008, Buchanan warned that the Caucasian race was “going the way of the Mohicans” because of a “baby boom among these black and brown peoples.” He’s also claimed that Adolf Hitler was “misunderstood,” spoken bitterly of American Jews he calls “Israel-firsters,” and said that the U.S. should have sided with Germany against the Soviets in World War II. The only shocking thing about Buchanan’s dismissal is that it took so long. Conservatives should also welcome his firing, said David Zurawik in The Baltimore Sun. The increasingly liberal MSNBC held up the snarling former Nixon speechwriter “as the nasty, mean-spirited face of conservative values.” Buchanan was nothing but a straw man who “confirmed the worst stereotypes that liberals believed about the Right.”

Look, I disagree with Buchanan on nearly every issue, said Andrew Sullivan in TheDaily​Beast.com. But he’s intellectually honest, often funny, and always willing to debate his “extreme out-of-the-mainstream views.” Clearly, he was fired because liberal interest groups heavily lobbied MSNBC to silence him. But the best answer to repellent views is to argue with them, not pretend they don’t exist. By banishing Buchanan, MSNBC has given up any pretense of “real debate,” and is “now completely indistinguishable” from the conservative zealots at Fox News.

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