Open letter to Reza Aslan: come write for Scholars & Rogues
We can offer you one thing CNN can’t.
CNN has parted ways with Reza Aslan, whose “profane” anti-Trump tweets were widely criticized earlier this week.
In case you missed it, Aslan called Donald a “piece of shit” in a tweet reacting to Trump’s cynical travel ban grandstanding after the recent Manchester bombing.
At Scholars & Rogues, we’re not big fans of CNN, and this little dustup doesn’t change our minds.
So Reza, if you’re reading this, we’d like to invite you to come work with us at S&R.
We realize this would be a bit of a change for you. We don’t have any money. Our audience is in the hundreds, not the millions (although we have a fantastic quality:quantity ratio). We don’t have groupies. There’s no power here, no glory, no budget or resources and no real hope of any.
Of course, the great thing about not having advertisers is not having to worry about losing them.
We can offer one thing CNN can’t, though: we promise we’ll never fire you for telling the truth.
Let me know.
lullaby pit 
Don’t have groupies? Hell, we can’t get people to agree that US Representatives should be at least investigated for speech inciting violence or even to politely ask friends across the aisle to stop tacitly endorsing our wanton murder.
I’m long past wishing for groupies.
I didn’t know Reza Aslan until his CNN documentary series “Believer”. After watching a few episodes of his documentary it became obvious to me that his focus was sensationalism rather than an intelligent informed perspective. The episodes I saw showed obscure or even unknown aspects of a religion whose message to the audience was that the religion in question was a bizarre one, and towards the end of the documentary he would show an aspect of the religion which was more mainstream and moderate. His format was like showing KKK as Christian for the large part of the documentary, and then showing more mainstream Christians. As educated (or overeducated) Dr./Mr. Aslan is, his documentary format was more along the lines of a show like “Maury” for the most part, and then it would morph into a more reasoned perspective for about the last 10 minutes or so.
Dr./Mr. Aslan lending his voice to the condemnation of Donald Trump is valid. However, for S & R to invite him would, in my opinion, be deleterious to the intellectual health of S & R.
Someone once said (Dylan/Elston Gunn?) “Nothing succeeds like success … and failure is no success at all.” I guess Dr. Aslan falls in the former category. Let’s not cater to this culture of celebrity.
Be good for ratings, wouldn’t it? 🙂