By Aaron Miller-
CNN has sacked its second contributor for racist comments in the last week .
CNN dropped former Republican U.S senator Rick Santorum as a senior political commentator after racist remarks he made about Native Americans at an event in April, just a week after the broadcaster sacked Adeel Raja for anti-semetic comments.
The diverse broadcaster which is one of the most prominent in the world is known for its stance against racism and regularly upholds ethical principles on a range of issues.
Santorum remarks came during an event for the Young Americans Foundation, a conservative youth group, Santorum said that there was “nothing” in the US before Europeans colonizers arrived.
“We came here and created a blank slate,” he said. “We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans, but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”
The comments sparked outrage among indigenous groups, including the National Congress of American Indians, which specifically called on CNN to fire Santorum over the remarks.
“Televising someone with [Santorum’s] views on Native American genocide is fundamentally no different than putting an outright Nazi on television to justify the Holocaust,” said Fawn Sharp, the group’s president, in a statement from last month. “Any mainstream media organization should fire him or face a boycott from more than 500 Tribal Nations and our allies from across the country and worldwide.”
Santorum later told Chris Cuomo of CNN that he “misspoke”, and denied allegations that he was “trying to dismiss what happened to Native Americans”.
“Far from it. The way we treated Native Americans was horrific. It goes against every bone and everything I’ve ever fought for as a leader in the Congress,” he told Cuomo.
CNN anchor Don Lemon, who follows Cuomo’s show on the network’s primetime expressed shock absence of an apology from Santorum.
“I can’t believe the first words out of his mouth weren’t ‘I’m sorry, I said something ignorant, I need to learn about the history of this country,” he said. “Did he actually think it was a good idea for him to come on television and try to whitewash the whitewash that he whitewashed?
Only last week, CNN fired another of its freelance contributors, Adeel Raja’s , after he tweeted anti-semetic remarks.
Raja, who had worked as a freelance contributor for CNN since 2013, tweeted the anti-Semitic remark at around 12:45 p.m. Sunday, and deleted it at around 3:15 p.m., according to the Washington Examiner.
In 2016, Raja won the Agahi Award for Investigative Journalist of the Year, according to his Twitter account. The Agahi Awards are an annual series of awards for journalism in Pakistan.
Raja had a history of making anti-semetic tweets on social media in the past.