The Fox TV network will retain Nick Cannon as host of “The Masked Singer” following his apology for making anti-Semitic remarks on a podcast that has since been deleted from YouTube for violating the website’s terms of services.
“First and foremost I extend my deepest and most sincere apologies to my Jewish sisters and brothers for the hurtful and divisive words that came out of my mouth during my interview with Richard Griffin,” said Cannon in a statement released by Fox. “They reinforced the worst stereotypes of a proud and magnificent people and I feel ashamed of the uninformed and naïve place that these words came from. The video of this interview has since been removed.”
He continued, “While the Jewish experience encompasses more than 5,000 years and there is so much I have yet to learn, I have had at least a minor history lesson over the past few days and to say that it is eye-opening would be a vast understatement.”
Cannon went on to express “gratitude to the rabbis, community leaders and institutions who reached out to me to help enlighten me, instead of chastising me. I want to assure my Jewish friends, new and old, that this is only the beginning of my education—I am committed to deeper connections, more profound learning and strengthening the bond between our two cultures today and every day going forward.”
In its statement, Fox said, “When we were made aware of Nick Cannon’s interview with Richard Griffin on YouTube, we immediately began a dialogue with Nick. He is clear and remorseful that his words were wrong and lacked both understanding and context, and inadvertently promoted hate. This was important for us to observe.
“On that basis and given a belief that this moment calls for dialogue, we will move forward with Nick and help him advance this important conversation, broadly,” it said. “Fox condemns all forms of hate directed toward any community and we will combat bigotry of any kind.”
While Fox is keeping Cannon, ViacomCBS announced on Tuesday that it has fired him. Cannon produced the comedy improv series “Wild ’n Out” for VH1, a ViacomCBS-owned cable channel.
A YouTube spokesperson told JNS, “We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube and quickly remove content that violates those policies when flagged by our users. After updating our guidelines last year to better address hateful content, we saw a 5x spike in video removals and have terminated over 25,000 channels for violating our hate speech policies.”
