No Laughing Matter: Time-Warner Boots Comic for Lampooning Leader

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No Laughing Matter: Time-Warner Boots Comic for Lampooning Leader

Written by Chris Floyd

Thursday, 05 October 2006 12:22

"Clowntime is over; time to take cover..." -- Elvis Costello

Ah, the ethos of the Leader-State officially ratified by Congress last week is spreading fast! Of course, the corporate media has long been sprawled prostrate on the floor in trembling obesiance to the Leader's mighty mojo; indeed, the media's craven but highly profitable complicity was a key factor in establishing our new "Unitary Executive States of America" in the first place. So it's no real surprise to see Time-Warner -- the quintessential MSM conglomerate -- reacting with such efficent dispatch to the new dispensation. As the canned African-American comic, Paul Mooney, put it in this ringing Niemollerian phrase:

"My point is ever since 9/11, we lost all our rights. They're practicing on the minorities, but when they get good at it they're going to do it to the white folks."

Time Warner Gives Bush-Bashing Comic the Hook (from Radar Online.com, via Buzzflash). Excerpts:

Is Time Warner getting into the censorship business? A host of Showtime at the Apollo cla

ims he got the hook for angering top brass at the media megaconglomerate with jokes about President George W. Bush.

Comic Paul Mooney (most recently of Chappelle's Show) was midway through a taping of the famed Harlem theater's weekly variety show when the plug was abruptly pulled. Mooney claims the show's producer, Suzanne de Passe, told him material in his monologue had offended unnamed officials from Time Warner, whose chairman, Richard Parsons, heads the Apollo Theater Foundation's board of directors and is among the country's most prominent black Republicans. De Passe was traveling and unreachable for comment, but a Time Warner spokeswoman called the story "ridiculous..."

Mooney, however, seems certain who shut him down. "They wanted me out of there, the Republicans, the Time Warner people," he says. "They said I was Bush bashing, and it was hatred. I felt like I was in Iran or Cuba or somewhere."

***