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Is CBS News Guilty of Andy Rooney-Bashing?

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Hey, Andy, did you ever notice how a certain network speaks from both sides of its mouth?

The CBS News suspension of “60 Minutes” curmudgeon Andy Rooney--for statements he denies making about blacks and admits making about gays--reeks of hypocrisy.

CBS News President David Burke made this statement about the Rooney affair: “CBS News cannot tolerate such remarks or anything that approximates such comments since they in no way reflect the views of this organization.”

Very righteous. Very touching. Very image conscious. But not the entire story.

In 1981, Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes” made a crack about blacks and Latinos that some might consider more repugnant than those recently attributed to Rooney in The Advocate, a gay newspaper published in Los Angeles.

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Wallace’s slur was disclosed by The Times in 1982. Unlike Rooney, however, he was neither suspended for three months without pay nor even publicly rebuked by CBS. On the contrary, Wallace--the biggest of the “60 Minutes” all-stars and arguably the network’s highest-profile news figure next to Dan Rather--was allowed to continue his CBS career without interruption.

In contrast, Rooney is being impaled on the network’s double standard.

Here is Rooney’s alleged quote about blacks as it appears in a story by Chris Bull in the Feb. 27 issue of The Advocate:

“I’ve believed all along that most people are born with equal intelligence, but blacks have watered down their genes because the less intelligent ones are the ones that have the most children. They drop out of school early, do drugs, and get pregnant.”

Here, in preparing for a “60 Minutes” segment about the plight of mostly low-income Californians--including a black and a Latino--is what Wallace was reported to have said in San Diego about the complexity of some sales contracts:

“You bet your ass they are hard to read . . . if you’re reading them over the watermelon or over the tacos.” After saying that, Wallace was reported to have “laughed and thumped a desk with his hand.”

The “watermelon” and “tacos” crack was taped without Wallace’s knowledge by a non-CBS camera crew that happened to be present. Lumped together in this context, they evoked demeaning stereotypes of blacks and Latinos.

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Wallace acknowledged to The Times then that the version of his remark printed in the newspaper was “close” to accurate and caught the “flavor” of what he said. Wallace said the remark was meant to be “jocular,” adding: “Anybody who knows me, I’m afraid, knows that I do ethnic jokes and I do obscenity from time to time.” Wallace, a Jew, said that he also does Jewish jokes.

Now, let’s examine the remarks that Rooney insists were wrongly attributed to him:

--”. . . Most people are born with equal intelligence.” Those are not the words of a racist. Racists believe in the superiority of their own race.

--”. . . Blacks have watered down their genes because the less intelligent ones are the ones that have the most children. They drop out of school early, do drugs and get pregnant.” This is merely a blunt, coarse way of stating an essential truth--the one that Rooney claims he actually did express to The Advocate in a discussion about education: That “the least fit among us are proliferating,” that in urban schools “you have kids dropping out of seventh grade, and then those kids (are) having babies, making for a society of people that don’t go through schools,” and that “in most cases, those are black kids.”

Aren’t these comments and the disputed quote in The Advocate another way of putting what civil-rights leaders and other thoughtful citizens have been preaching for years about poverty and despair being passed from generation to generation?

Johnny Carson and Arsenio Hall quickly made Rooney a butt of their late-night monologues Thursday night. When examined carefully, however, even the quote that Rooney claims is false is not racist. Yet the hip shooters who fire first and think later inevitably prevail, just as they did in 1988 when Jimmy (The Greek) Snyder was fired from his CBS Sports job because his inarticulate comments about black athletes were misinterpreted as racist.

Concerning some of Rooney’s observations about gays--in a lengthy letter to The Advocate appearing in the same issue as his remarks about blacks--there is no defense. Unless denseness is a defense.

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In his December year-end special on CBS, Rooney outraged gay rights groups by lumping “homosexual unions” with cigarettes, alcohol and other “self-induced ills” that often lead to early death. In his subsequent letter to The Advocate--a letter that was not mean-spirited but that reflected profound ignorance--Rooney apologized for offending gays, but only refueled the flames by writing about homosexuality:

“With very little definitive medical or scientific evidence to go on, it seems to me that it is a behavior aberration caused by some kind of trauma or caused when a male is born with an abnormal number of female genes, or vice versa.”

Rooney went on to ask: “Is it ethically or morally wrong and abnormal behavior? It seems so to me, but I can’t say why, and if a person can’t say what he thinks, he probably doesn’t have a thought. So I’ll settle for thinking it’s merely bad taste.”

The bad taste is his.

The year-end special and letter to The Advocate are merely the latest public displays of homophobia on the part of the 70-year-old Rooney, who some years ago made absurd and inflammatory comments about gays before a gathering of the nation’s television critics in Los Angeles. Those comments made headlines, too.

The point is that whatever Rooney’s opinions on any topic, he is not the sort of person who hides what he thinks.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume the worst-case scenario, that Rooney is indeed a rabid racist and gay basher. In more than three decades at CBS, including a dozen years with “60 Minutes,” he would not have conveyed such evil biases to his colleagues and bosses? An off-color crack at the water cooler, a passing comment at lunch? Trading taco and watermelon jokes with Wallace?

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Of course he would have. Whatever Rooney is, be assured that CBS did not learn of it just this week. The network’s rule of thumb in such matters seems to be: Be a jerk, just don’t embarrass us by being one publicly. If you do--Wallace exempted--we’ll slap you with a three-month suspension.

Three months? If CBS does believe it has a racist homophobe on its hands, does it really believe three months at home will clear up Rooney’s problem?

How sad this whole affair is, and how much it detracts attention from festering, deeper maladies infecting America and, in this case, television, where blacks and other minorities are still largely outsiders with their noses pressed against the candy store window.

Hey, CBS, did you ever notice how “60 Minutes” seems almost monolithically white, how it has only one black correspondent, Ed Bradley, who was hired way back in 1981, and how Diane Sawyer’s departure led to the addition of two white correspondents?

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Time is passing, CBS, and suspending Andy Rooney is only camouflage.

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