Most of his "controversies" would not even be news in the US. A person on a humorous show cracking a racial/ethnic joke is on TV every night.
We have nothing like OFCOM where you could actually get in trouble with the government for being highly offensive either.
And celebrities behaving badly is typical, so assaulting someone probably wouldn't lead to any major public outcry for his firing. It's not as though Sean Penn has trouble finding work.
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/mar/13/univisio...
And even then, it depends on audience. FOX News personalities express far worse sentiments daily and mean them than Clarkson ever has. Their audience is fine with that.
Paula Deen was supposed to be a nice upstanding older woman showing people cooking. Even the claim that she might have used a racial slur in the past torpedoed her career.
Clarkson's public image, and one that he intentionally curates, is one of being bombastic and politically incorrect. He can crack whatever jokes he wants without it going to hurt his career in the US. In some respects, Howard Stern might be a good comparison of someone with a fairly similar type of image.
Can't find much more beyond that. Some wanton racism on their trips, played on stereotipes and misunderstanding, but critiquing vietnamese cousine or italian way of driving doesn't sound openly racist.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/9247835/J...
suddenly one point out what other airport are doing calling it by its name and he's racist.
> ...the only possible solution is to introduce a bit of racism. Nobody likes a racist. Nobody likes prejudice. It has no place at work, at play, or in government. But at Heathrow airport? Hmmm.
By the way, you are mistaken if you think that a large number of other airports systematically engage in racial profiling as a matter of policy.
moreover if the main smoking gun is a quote by Clarkson himself I'm not really impressed, I mean, what Clarkson DID matters. He's a comedian and you hear far worse things coming out; I mean Colbert said far worse thing and I don't see people screaming and kicking at his door.
at the end of the day one has to distinguish what's fiction and what's reality. can you blame Clarkson for being in character on it's own satirical column? it's not like it happened in an interview.
This is not the policy of the TSA. The only people who advocate such a policy are racists like Clarkson.
>can you blame Clarkson for being in character on it's own satirical column?
It's not a satirical column. If you think that Clarkson is doing a Colbert-like performance, you've just got the wrong end of the stick.
>moreover if the main smoking gun is a quote by Clarkson himself I'm not really impressed,
What kind of backwards logic is this? Clarkson's own words are (obviously) the most reliable source of information regarding his beliefs.
"America", perhaps? Clarkson is racist and violent; Jackson is a human being with human body parts - the latter crime is far more severe.
My opinion? The people who care about such things aren't likely to be watching shows on Amazon anyway, so they would never even see them. Compare to the BBC where someone could be flipping through a channel and find it accidentally.
Both incidents the BBC have him for he was coerced into situations (singing a song he didn't want to sing because he only knew the racist version from when he grew up and didn't want to say the word, then being kept up for 24 hours, and made to drink profusely as part of a show stunt) he wasn't comfortable with. They were looking for reasons to cancel such a popular show because it had such a disparate budget from the rest of their shows and that was upsetting parties within the BBC.
There are many more than two incidents!
> They were looking for reasons to cancel such a popular show because it had such a disparate budget from the rest of their shows and that was upsetting parties within the BBC.
Surely they could have just pointed to the money it made back? "We give it huge budget because it earns more money for us than anything else we produce".
The BBC has a history of poor management of talent. See eg Chris Evans getting sacked from the Breakfast Show after making demands.
The scripts are written by the cast & the script editor (Richard Porter).
> made to drink profusely as part of a show stunt
It's well known that Clarkson is a fan of the booze to the point where you could reasonably categorise him as a functioning alcoholic. He recently publicly announced after the death of Charlie Kennedy that he was giving up. So I'm pretty sure that no-one was making him drink..
He likes to paint himself as the last bastion of free speech, innocent victim of the facist Big Brother Corporation, and a lot of other things inbetween; but the reality is that he's just that embarrassing Uncle who you have fond memories of when he used to let you smoke his cigarettes and drive his car around the block when you were 10, but now you're all grown up, going through your contacts, deciding who to invite to your wedding; you just skip past because you just know he'd end up shitting in the font and asking anyone with a tan what weddings are like where they're from.
I genuinely don't understand why people think his sacking was part of some grand BBC conspiracy. He was good for ratings, they paid him well, it was in both parties' interests to keep him around as long as possible. Remember we're talking about the most popular TV show in the world here.
Unfortunately he put them in a situation where they really had no other choice.