Food Network Reacts To Josh Denny's Comments About Women
On September 2, Food Network announced that it will remove all mention of Josh Denny, comedian and host of the now-defunct program "Ginormous Foods," from its website. As of thus writing, the show's page on the network's site is blank (though why the page has not been removed in its entirety in three days puzzles).
A different type of puzzlement, however, seems to have been directed towards the Food Network, as their Twitter announcement carefully addresses an unshared question: "For those asking: Our working relationship with Josh Denny ended years ago and we removed all episodes he hosted at that time. His views do not reflect our company values and we regret giving him a platform." All this has occurred within the context of the Supreme Court's recent decision to allow the Texas law banning abortions of pregnancies that have reached six weeks to stand unopposed, which you can read about in The Texas Tribune.
So, while the Food Network didn't elaborate on their values, Denny assumed they meant his pro-life stance. Moreover, he took time in an overly long Twitter meltdown to tweet back at the company that they knew his beliefs when they had originally hired him and that, in his estimate, half the country shares said beliefs. If you have the particular desire to delve into yet more social media noise, you can read the countless tweets Denny posted to his profile about the subject over the stretch of two days. Presumably, some people on Twitter pushed for his cancellation.
It probably wasn't Josh Denny's pro-life beliefs
While Josh Denny may flail at the Food Network's leftwing attitudes, the channel likely distanced itself from the former network star because of how Denny crowed over the upset women. More specifically, his choice of language. After all, if the network really cared about his abortion beliefs, they too would have used stronger language.
Rather, what prompted them was a tweet that George Takei dubbed with steeped irony, "Just charming." In this tweet, Denny tackled the point that many women are not aware of their pregnancy within the first six weeks. "Only [a slur for members of the sex work industry] wouldn't know for six weeks," he wrote with full confidence and without citation.
Discovery, which owns Food Network, does not seem to take kindly to such public displays. It's likely that Alton Brown's election night fever tweets about the probability of Trump ushering in a Holocaust had cost him his job, for instance. Had either men not crossed the line by expressing a political view to slurs or offensive comparisons with extreme online backlash, it seems probable that the Food Network would not have acted.