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Journalist Pulls Plug on ‘Real Time’ Appearance in Flareup Over Controversial Booking

Feb 15, 2017  •  Post A Comment

A journalist is protesting a controversial booking on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” by canceling his scheduled appearance on the show. The journalist, Jeremy Scahill, has been a frequent guest on the program, but pulled out in protest over the booking of Milo Yiannopoulos.

Scahill explained the move in a Twitter post, warning that Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart News editor, will use the show to “legitimize his hateful agenda.”

Scahill was scheduled to appear as part of a panel that also included Larry Wilmore and Jack Kingston, with Yiannopoulos as the show’s “lead guest.”

In his Twitter essay, Scahill says of Yiannopoulos: “There is no value in ‘debating’ him. Appearing on ‘Real Time’ will provide Yiannopoulos with a large, important platform to openly advocate his racist, anti-immigrant campaign. It will be exploited by Yiannopoulos in an attempt to legitimize his hateful agenda.”

Scahill also writes: “Yiannopoulos has shown he will use his appearances to publicly attack and shame specific ordinary people by name, a practice which could lead to violence or even death. ‘Real Time,’ of course, has the right to book whomever it wants on its show, including Yiannopoulos. But I cannot participate in an event that will give a platform to such a person.”

Deadline.com notes that the show has replaced Scahill with Malcolm Nance, author of “The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election.”

6 Comments

  1. If Yiannopoulos is the lead guest, then Scahill should know that he would not be part of the regular panel. Maher does a “one-on-one” with the lead guest before the panel is even introduced. Also, if Scahill thinks Maher is going to let Yiannopoulos get away with his alt-right conspiracy theories without debating him, he obviously knows nothing about the show on which he supposedly has made many appearances. By cancelling his appearance, he ruins his own publicity.

  2. It appears Scahill doesn’t agree with Patrick Henry.

  3. Scahill is a COWARD ! How else can describe a person so willing to turn tail and run for the hills just to debate someone with a different viewpoint. I don’t know much about Yiannopoulus. I saw him on Tucker Carlson’s show, but that’s been about it for me. I watched the coverage on CNN and MSNBC about the campus riots at Berkley and it seemed he was the devil incarnate. I heard him speak on Carlson’s show and came away wondering what the other networks were so “aflame” over. Now I see a “journalist” who is too cowardly to grace a stage with him to debate differing viewpoints and I wonder if this “journalist’s” employers don’t assign him anything specific to cover, but just let him go do whatever doesn’t threaten him too much.

  4. Fuck Yiannopooolis! A provocateur, a jerk and another of Trump the Chumps cronies.

    To hell with all of them.

  5. Very intelligent, articulate comment.

  6. “Publicly attack and shame specific ordinary people by name”. Seems like that is what the left has been doing to anyone that shows any support for Trump. Including Trump’s immigrant wife, Milania and Joy Villa, a black singer and the gay immigrant designer of her dress, Andre Soriano. But I guess that is ok with Mr. Scahill, since they don’t support his view of life.

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