I don't keep up with the world of network TV, so while aware of what happened, I didn't really know the details.
After looking into it, it appears to me ABC was in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" jam. Roseanne, as a comedienne, should know that tweeting something which could be seen as insensitive or racist, in jest, is far different from speaking it in front of a live audience. Body language, facial expression, inflection, and all the other cues we use to parse out the context of a statement are completely absent in a text-only medium.
Was the comment in poor taste? Sure. Was it deliberately racist? I've no idea...not a mind reader, so I've no idea what she was thinking at the time. The problem is that some humor can cut too close to invoking real past perceptions. We've had issues in our culture in the past portraying people of non-white ethnicities with ape- or monkey-like traits. Such a thing may have been played for laughs in the 50's, but it's viewed (rightfully, in my mind) as insulting and insensitive. It's something we, as a society, should want to move past for that very reason. South Park can get away with a lot of things, but Parker and Stone are smart enough to understand there's a huge difference in naming the only Black student in the school "Token" (which is easily understood as a dig at mainstream portrayal of persons of color in popular culture) and running a plot where Chef is beaten with whips and forced to pick cotton, or Kyle's family is threatened with being shoved into a giant oven.
Good comedy punches up (or at least limits itself to sideways blows which exposes its own hypocrisy). It's why Chris Rock can run a bit entitled, "How Not To Get Your Ass Kicked By the Police" and we all laugh at it, but when Michael Richards threw out racial slurs as part of an impromptu tirade, people cringed. Roseanne's tweet made the mistake of punching down instead of sideways or up, and she got called on it.
Back to ABC--the star of your hottest show makes a fairly serious cock-up in public, and not for the first time (that national anthem performance, anyone?). What do you do?
Choice A: You pretend like nothing happened, let her apologize, give her a verbal slap on the wrist, and come off looking like you couldn't care less what kind of behavior your star engages in as long as she's pulling in the bucks. You risk a backlash among a portion of your viewers and a withdraw of sponsors, not to mention a public pillorying on social media for ignoring the changing social and cultural tides of today.
Choice B: You make the difficult decision to serve up a consequence which shows you take the cultural and social tides of the day seriously, even though this consequence is liable to cost you viewership and will almost certainly affect the jobs of a multitude of actors, directors, editors, stage crew, producers, and writers all involved with the show who did nothing wrong but are now being punished anyway for someone else's behavior.
Either way, Roseanne's behavior has put you in a position where there is no way to win. You're playing out the opening scene of The Wrath of Khan in real-time, and there's no James T. Kirk around to reprogram the simulation to make it possible to save the ship. What choice do you make?
Ultimately, ABC went with the choice to appeal to the larger demographic of their audience, which was to fire Roseanne and attempt to keep the show going without her on the hopes John Goodman, Sara Gilbert, and the rest would still be a draw.
I don't see it as a problem with "PC culture" so much as I see it as a problem with insensitivity. If this was the first time Roseanne had done or said something offensive when she wasn't delivering a stand-up routine or speaking as a character on a show written for her by someone else, I think the situation could have been handled through an apology and some act of contrition. This wasn't the case, and her attempts to double down and blame it on medication she was taking instead of owning up to saying something dumb and apologizing for it did her no favors. Unfortunately, a whole slew of people paid a price for her poor judgement because, like the banks which were "too big to fail" in 2008, she was the cornerstone propping up a particular television show and she was impossible to replace without the whole thing falling apart.
There were no right answers here. Apologies for the wall of text...it certainly wasn't my intention from the start of this comment. :)
I love your walls of text, don't ever apologize for them :) That was very well thought out and concise. You are 100% correct about a lot of things particularly the part about text getting people in trouble. I have had some bad arguments with people via text message that would have been avoided face to face or even on the phone.
However, I do believe that the world is becoming overly PC and not just about racism, but about anything. "just for men" hair products will have to change their name to "just for people" or something and that wont be enough.
Oh, and it was lame for Roseanne to try to blame her tweet on Ambien although, have you ever taken an Ambien and tried to stay awake? Crazy stuff happens. :)