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Liz Trotta

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She made a joke about Obama being assassinated and now people are calling for her to be fired.

Here's the "joke":

She's done a fine job for many years, is one mistake enough to fire her?

"The first female to cover a war for television, Trotta has had enough important journalistic currents flowing through her reportorial life to keep one of those public television media panels going for months. It was her good fortune to be assigned to some of the biggest stories of recent years -- the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, the Yom Kuppur War, Chappaquiddick, the McGovern campaign, the hostage crisis in Iran, the von Bulow trial, the invasion of Grenada. Her misfortune was to almost always be the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time." -Columbia Journalism Review

She even apologized:


However, there's still a petition to have her fired.

"Liz Trotta's comment about Presidential candidate Obama on the 25th of May is inexcusable. We ask the FOX news management to sack Liz Trotta ASAP." --See it here

Other Links you might find useful:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,34775,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Trotta
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/05/26/liz-trotta-apologizes/
The Huffington Post


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LoneRanger85 said this on

LoneRanger85 said this on digg and gave me permission to share it with everyone here.

NPR’s Nina Totenberg, who covers politics at taxpayer expense, wished Jesse Helms would contract AIDS and publicly hoped Gen. Jerry Boykin “is not long for this world.” Should she be fired?

Columnist Julianne Malveaux publicly cast a pox on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, saying, “I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter, and he dies early, like many black men do, of heart disease.” Should she be fired?

Air America’s Randi Rhodes has repeatedly “joked” about doing in President Bush. Should she be fired? (well, assuming she is employed.)

In October 2004, UK Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker asked, “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. - where are you now that we need you?” Should he be fired?

If the selective outrage of liberals were enforced equally, across the board, and we fired everyone who ever said anything hateful (i.e. exercised their freedom of speech), there would be liberals on every street corner carrying signs that say, "Will hate for food." And passing conservatives would drop nickels into their unwashed, open palms.

See the digg discussion as it continues here

re: LoneRanger85

My answer to all of the situations you raised is, Yes they should all be fired. Wishing death or disease on another person has no place in media. Every single case should be met with swift, decisive action.

That being said, you commit a common rhetorical fallacy in your final paragraph by equating a specific act of speech (wishing someone would die) to every act of speech in a larger and more generic category ('everyone who ever said anything hateful'). Freedom of speech does not give you the right to incite violence. General 'hateful' speech does not necessarily fall into this narrow category.

Are you kidding me!

The humor in all of this is that we are even discussing if Liz Trotta should be fired. News personalities have been fired for much, much less. This is an abomination in my opinion. I would feel the same way if it were said about Rush Limbaugh. To suggest that a U.S. Senator running for President is related to Osama Bin Laden, and it would be ok to have him assasinated is news in it's most gross form. For the suggestion to come from a major news agency magnifies the issue exponentialy. How about not watching FOX or any of it's affilliates. I love "24" but I can skip it on principle.

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