Samantha Bee has a couple of claims to fame. She is late night TV's only female host and easily its most vulgar. Her TBS network show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee is crass, nasty and predictably liberal. And, it seems, she’s capable of bullying the network that employs her to fall into political line.
Here's the story. On the first night of the DNC, @TBSNetwork tweeted out a video produced by "The Heckler," a TBS-owned humorous news website. The video mocked Hillary Clinton's laughter, interspersing footage of the democratic nominee with packs of hyenas cackling.
Even though the Full Frontal host has herself joked about Clinton in the past, Bee (or one of her staff members) quickly retweeted the post with a pointed message to TBS: “Delete your account.” This probably wasn't random wording. As The Hollywood Reporter pointed out, Clinton tweeted "Delete your account" to Donald Trump when the Republican nominee wrote that President Obama's endorsement of "Crooked Hillary" would lead to "four more years of Obama."
TBS’s response was predictably craven. Shortly after Bee's tweet, both the original post and Bee's response were deleted. Tuesday morning, TBS stated: “This post was obviously a poor attempt at humor and has been taken down. Moving forward, we'll leave political satire to professionals like Samantha Bee.”
What the network really meant was that they'd remember to focus on poking Hillary’s opponent. That, of course, is what they already do. @TBSNetwork has had no qualms over retweeting posts – including one from Bee – that ridicule Trump. An analysis of the network's July tweets revealed three that derided Trump, and – you guessed it – none about Hillary. @TheHecklerTBS was worse, with nearly fifteen anti-Trump posts and zero anti-Hillary posts.
For TBS, and it’s boss, Samantha Bee, some jokes about Hillary are just off limits.
