TAMPA, Fla. — Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer on Wednesday weighed in on the firing of Yahoo! News Washington Bureau chief David Chalian, who lost his job after getting caught on microphone accusing Mitt Romney of being “happy” at the Republican National Convention “to have a party with black people drowning.”
“It baffles me that somebody like that could be even hired in the first place,” Fleischer, the former spokesman for George W. Bush, told a gaggle of reporters and bloggers at the Republican National Convention.
“You know, you don’t hear that type of rhetoric coming in the other direction from newsrooms, do you?” he said. “But you hear it regularly in the direction of anti-Republican in newsrooms.”
Yahoo! News fired Chalian for his comments Wednesday. In an apology, the news organization said his “statement was inappropriate and does not represent the views of Yahoo!.”