President Trump is continuing to react to the controversy over the cancellation of “Roseanne,” which was taken off the air Tuesday after lead actress Roseanne Barr posted offensive and racist tweets.
“Iger, where is my call of apology?” Trump tweeted. “You and ABC have offended millions of people, and they demand a response. How is Brian Ross doing? He tanked the market with an ABC lie, yet no apology. Double Standard!”
Trump is referring to ABC News reporter Brian Ross, who was suspended after making an error in a report last year when he said Trump had directed his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, to make contact with the Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Ross later corrected the report, noting that Trump made the request after the election when he was the president-elect, not a candidate. Ross and ABC News apologized for the mistake.
It was the second day that Trump aired his grievances against Iger and ABC. He tweeted Wednesday morning that Iger “never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn’t get the call?”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, during a briefing later that day, offered a list of network personalities who had made anti-Trump comments. “The president is pointing to the hypocrisy in the media saying the most horrible things about this president and nobody addresses it,” she said.
Iger has yet to respond publicly, and an ABC representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, ABC found another critic in Tom Arnold, the comedian and ex-husband of Barr, who said in an interview with CNN on Wednesday night that he couldn’t believe the network hadn’t done more after bringing back “Roseanne” to curb Barr’s long-standing habit of sharing conspiracy theories on Twitter. “I was surprised they didn’t do anything about it,” Arnold told Anderson Cooper. “I figured someone would take her phone away or monitor, because it’s dangerous.”
He said he had predicted Barr’s Twitter feed would land her in trouble. “When I read her social media in the very beginning, and I saw how she was so into the conspiracy stuff with Donald Trump and so how far gone she was, and the ‘Pizzagate’ and ‘Hillary is a pedophile’ and ‘Obama wasn’t born here,’ she was, you know, a ‘birther,’ and how crazy that was — I just knew that this would not end well,” Arnold said.
Barr, though, continued to tweet following her firing, and she spent hours Wednesday retweeting supporters and continuing to defend herself on the platform. She even said that the support she has received from like-minded people had made her consider “fighting back.”
And it seems that John Goodman, the actor who played Barr’s TV husband, is the only one who isn’t weighing in on the matter. Unlike his fellow castmates, many of whom distanced themselves from Barr and her words, Goodman says he prefers to stay mum on the matter.
“I would rather say nothing than to cause more trouble,” he told an interviewer for Entertainment Tonight, who caught up with the actor at an auto-repair shop in Goodman’s hometown of New Orleans. Asked what he thought of the “fallout,” he demurred. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “I don’t read it.”
Read more:
Day 2: Roseanne Barr lashes out at co-stars; Trump wonders why he hasn’t gotten an apology from ABC, too
Original: ABC cancels ‘Roseanne’ after its star, Roseanne Barr, went on a vitriolic and racist Twitter rant