CBS just keeps compounding its ham-handedness coming out of the Ray Rice incident, and now, singer Rihanna is deservedly pissed. Last week, as the NFL reeled in response to video of Rice knocking his now-wife unconscious and Rice was dropped by the Baltimore Ravens, CBS pulled a song featuring Rihanna from its Thursday night broadcast of a Ravens game.
This week, CBS thought maybe it would just slide that song back into its lineup. Rihanna did not appreciate that thought:
CBS you pulled my song last week, now you wanna slide it back in this Thursday? NO, Fuck you! Y'all are sad for penalizing me for this.
— @rihanna
Now, CBS is saying it will
drop the song permanently.
To be sure, it would have been awkward playing a song sung by a famous domestic violence victim at a game played by the (suddenly former) team of a famous abuser. But the fact that CBS discovered that only with the release of the second Rice video, rather than months earlier when video came out of him dragging his unconscious fiancee out of an elevator, highlights the degree to which this is nothing but a public relations game for the network. For all of CBS's claims last week that it was making decisions "journalistically and from a tone standpoint," it was pretty clear that the network didn't want to remind viewers to think about domestic violence. If the Rice video hadn't come out, CBS would have been happy to have Rihanna's star power in the belief that relatively few people would make the connection. Once it did, she was disposable, at least until the furor died down a little bit and the Ravens weren't the team on the field. Rihanna was right on target: "Y'all are sad for penalizing me for this."