During a meeting about offensive words in comedy, Friedland said the word "nigger". We don't know the context, but we do know that people who were in the room with him were uncomfortable with his using it.
Later, he met with two black employees to talk about his use of the word during the meeting about offensive words. During this meeting, he used the word again.
Now, I can appreciate the incandescent radioactivity of that word. I can, I think, begin to imagine what a black person might feel upon hearing a white person say it.
But at some point we have to be able to talk about words as words. If you're having a discussion about offensive language, the demand that one word be euphemized is infantile. So, too, if you're having a discussion about some people's reaction to the use of that word. We have to be able to recognize that the discussion of a word as a word, and the use of that word as an epithet, are completely separate phenomena.
By way of illustration, if a sociologist were to conduct a study about the use of racial epithets among various groups of people, would you expect them to publish a paper that analyzed the use of "the N-word", or would you expect them to analyze the use of the word "nigger"? If the former, why? Of what stuff is built this wall of timid prevarication?