jonesra@SILVER.UCS.INDIANA.EDU (rex jones) (02/10/90)
From watching Crossfire tonight (It's replayed sometime after 1am) it appears that Rooney had a meeting with the head of CBS News yesterday, and was not able to talk his way out of the problem. Rooney said that he would accept the d decision of CBS News and not fight the suspension. One of the guests (a former reporter for ABC) said that this seemed to him to be an admission of guilt by Rooney (the other guests were a member of the G/L Anti-defamation Association {or something like that} and a west coast media critic who is a major spokesman for Accuracy in Media). The GLADA person made the point that CBS should have suspended or fired Rooney for his anti-gay statements earlier, and that it was a double-standard tgat (sorry...that) they didn't. He also said that the head of CBS News is now allowing G/L literature to be passed out at CBS News. The reporter (who is African-American) seemed to think that the racist stateme- ments were MUCH more important than the anti-gay statements and went out of his way to explain why. The AIM person tried to paint the question as one of Rooney stating a scientific theory (going so far as to back it up with a cite of an Atlantic Monthly by a Harvard Professor...I don't remember the name...which allegedly says the same thing Rooney did...there wasn't a title of the article given by the AIMer) that he accepted as correct. Pat Buchannan (the EVIL co-host) made it clear that he feels Rooney's statement that gay unions = death was quite correct. Editorial: I wish someone would go on Crossfire and tell Mr. Buchannan that the only difference between his anti-gay bigotry and Rooney's is that Buchannan is smart enough to couch his hatred in Religious terms (Pat's Catholic) and Rooney isn't. It would make my day for someone on that show to say that Pat is a bigot, and that he should be called to the Woodshed by Ted Turner for that.