In his "Fourth Watch" newsletter this week, former CNN producer Steve Krakauer highlighted new audio recorded right after a very contentious segment in March that ended Sharon Osbourne's ten-plus years on the CBS afternoon chat show The Talk.
On Twitter, Osbourne had come to the defense of her friend Piers Morgan over his comments about Oprah Winfrey's interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.
Morgan said he didn't believe anything Markle said. Some felt that was racist. Osbourne felt surprised with being placed on the defensive on CBS without warning and said she felt she was being put in the "electric chair." As a star of the show, she was soon canceled.
Co-host Sheryl Underwood asserted Morgan's dismissal of Markle was racist, and Osbourne energetically protested she wasn't racist. "We need people to stand up for anti-racism," another black co-host, fashionista Elaine Welteroth, said at one point. "Anti-racism is what's being called for, not just not being racist."
After the segment was over, here's what went down, as Krakauer recounted the Daily Mail transcript:
"I'm just so sorry that went the way it went," Welteroth tells Osbourne. "It's so f--ked up." Welteroth tried to distance herself from the segment as a whole. "I have enough s--t going on in my personal life, to be honest Sharon, I didn't even read the tweets. I don't even know what people said," she told Osbourne.
Then it got really interesting, around the 5 minute mark. "Sheryl [Underwood] and I are held to a different standard by Black people and people of color out there, who expect us to say something about every racist anything," Welteroth said. "And it puts us in such a f--ked up position. That even if we don't have information, if we don't even really care, if we don't really want to engage, it feels like a spotlight is on us."
Later, Welteroth said, "There's this pressure to demonstrate how to talk about this stuff. But we haven't ever been guided on how to fucking do this. I'm not a DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] expert. I don't know how to do that."...."CBS set me up, and they don't care because they just want ratings," said Osbourne at one point, with Welteroth calling it "inhumane," while another man in the room diagnosed it as "CBS offering up one of their own so they didn't have to make an apology."
Krakauer thought it was a "stunning admission" that Welteroth would tell Osbourne she felt great pressure -- probably from Twitter and other social media -- to harp on the "anti-racism" talking points, to speak for the Black experience. He said "The discussion went the way it did not because it was 'real' or authentic, but because of factors far outside the realm of honesty -- a fear of a backlash. Welteroth describes a pressure to 'demonstrate' -- nodding to a certain performative aspect of the discussion and debate."
Welteroth was upset at the leaked audio, issuing a statement: "my kindness has been taken out of context and weaponized in an attempt to absolve responsibility for someone else’s actions." She didn't like it being revealed that she was so shallow, she didn't even read the tweets before Osbourne's CBS tenure was ended over them.
