Fired by ESPN: First Rush, now TMQ?
Evidently Gregg Easterbrook has been fired by ESPN, not for words he wrote in his excellent TMQ column for Page 2, but for an over-the-top pan of Kill Bill (which I saw tonight, review later) he wrote for his New Republic blog. You can read his apology here. I can see why people freaked out, characterizing Jews as money grubbing is a nasty and dangerous thing, but I don’t see this as a firing offense for a completely other publication.
It took me a bit, but I just realized that one of the people he criticized in the column was Michael Eisner, the CEO of Disney, which of course owns ESPN. Perhaps this wasn’t about racism at all, but about a boss that doesn’t like to be criticized? Seems more likely to me.
Hopefully TMQ moves back to Slate, where I prefered it anyway.
(Story and link via Isaac)
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Wow… I didn’t realize he was such a big christian. I have to agree with his apology though, it was just bad wording. He brought up that they were Jewish, and then sorta didn’t go anywhere with it for a sentence or two, then brought back the point of why he mentioned their Judaism. Unfortunately, in that sentence or two he talked about money grubbing, and POOF! There goes your job…
Oh, I knew he was really religious. He printed a haiku onetime from a guy questioning if he was human: Brookings Institute, New Republic, The Atlantic, Christian, married, published books on economics, religion, and the environment, writes about football, watches all the games, and ogles cheerbabes. It seemed like too much for someone not from planet Zarqon.
The worst part of all of this, in my opinion, is that ESPN have gone all Orwellian on TMQ’s ass, and airbrushed him out of the historical record.
But don’t take my word for it. Check this out:
Link: ESPN search page.
If you search on ‘TMQ’ or ‘Easterbrook’ at ESPN.com, you’ll find not nothing, not null, not zero results in their database of archived ESPN.com content. You will instead be kicked out of the ESPN.com search engine, and delivered back to the front page of their site.
Meanwhile, if you search on ‘Rush’ or ‘Rush Limbaugh’ — or, for that matter, if you search on ‘pussy‘ or ‘cockwalloper‘ or even ‘kjshfkjdshfkshdf‘ — you’ll find what you expect to find on ESPN.com in this situation, i.e. no matching results.
I hate this. This is illiberal censorship — not of the man, but of the historical record. It’s bad enough that ESPN have fired Gregg Easterbrook, though he’s made a serious mistake and owes the world a better explanation of his fundamental perspective of Jewishness than the mealy-mouthed weaselling linked above, well… I can well understand why they’ve done it (fired him), given his foot-in-mouth episode comes so soon after the Rush Limbaugh debacle. It’s bad enough that they’ve fired him, and not explained why; even a transparently insincere blurb about Easterbrook has “moved on to pursue other opportunities” etc might suffice to reveal the crux of their pinky-slippy objections. Don’t they owe us that? If whatever they’re firing him for is important enough to fire him, they can damn well explain it to the public.
It’s bad enough that they’ve fired him, and not explained why ( b/c yes it could well be Eisner taking exception to Easterbrook’s review of Tarantino’s — of Disney’s — Kill Bill, and not at all a response to his bizarre concatenation of moral outrage and bigoted sectarian stereotypes…) but I find it horrifying and outrageous that they would purge all instances of Easterbrook (and also: ‘TMQ’) from ESPN.com.
ESPN.com are behaving badly, and what they’ve done here threatens to establish a dangerous precedent — the presence of which we should not tolerate silently.
This whole thing makes me sick to my arse. Shame on you ESPN.
soapboxingly yours,
That fucking emoticon shit shouldn’t be in that last comment. It’s misunderstanding adjacent punctuation, with the result that it’s RADICALLY misunderstanding — and miscommunicating — the tone of my voice. Emotifuckers.
Matt, does any whom you respect actually like icon-style emoticons; as opposed to the ol’ fashioned and reliable semi-colons & parentheses, et cetera?
Wow… that’s kinda cool that ESPN has gone all Lenin on Easterbrook’s ass… But I think you’re wrong. ESPN doesn’t owe us anything… Yes, it would be nice if they paid at least SOME mouthservice to his leaving, but they don’t OWE it to us. This is a service that they were providing to us free of charge (the TMQ column), and they took it away. In reality, the only people ESPN.com answer to are the shareholders… those of us who enjoy their programming DESERVE respect, but we aren’t OWED respect.
Hmmm, I’m not even sure… oh, I see how it made that smilie, I’ll see if I can fix.
But it wasn’t a free service. I’m sure TMQ had thousands and thousands of weekly readers, and ESPN made at least a bit of money from ad sales. It’s ridiculous that now they are pretending that TMQ never happened, and we should make sure that ESPN knows we’re disappointed.
Shrug… it was free for us. And now it’s gone. I believe Lisa Simpson made a comment along the same lines in an episode referring to Itchy and Scratchy, that they provided lots of entertainment for me free of charge (free for me), so frankly I don’t feel like they owe me anything. If they were smart and wanted to keep me as a reader, they would do something to appease my displeasure, but that’s purely a business decision.
As far as I’m concerned, they provided me entertainment at no personal cost to myself, and I provided an audience from which they made money in advertising. If I felt that was an unfair balance, THEN I might feel that I was owed something. I feel it was a pretty fair balance though.
Well, your points are good, but I still consider it a paid service since I looked at all those ads.
I’ve made my way well into the “ad ignorance” stage… they’re about as prevalent as background images are now… so perhaps subconsciously I’m seeing them, but I take no notice of ads anymore.
Having finally read Easterbrook’s offending graf, it’s awkwardly phrased, but I think the sentiment isn’t even slightly offensive. If he had written the following, he would still have his job:
“We can’t expect movie executives to do anything but sell out, regardless of creed. However, given modern European history, one would hold out hope that Eisner and Weinstein, as Jews, would be particularly sensitive to killing people by the score as a public distraction.”
I still think some would find the idea that Jews should be more sensitive offensive.
Really? Which group do you think would be offended, out of curiosity? Because it would seem to me that the idea of Jews being more sensitive to wholesale slaughter is one that gets bandied about quite a bit. I don’t know if I agree with it or not, but it’s definitely one that I see relatively often, and I haven’t seen any moral outrage with respect to those ones.
It gets bandied about a lot but that doesn’t make it ok. As Mickey Kaus said, why whould Anti-Semitism or the Holocaust impose special burdens or morality on its victims?
Your statement, “I can see why people freaked out, characterizing Jews as money grubbing is a nasty and dangerous thing” is inaccurate. He actually characterized Christian movie execs as money-grubbing, then questioned whether Jewish execs would want to be viewed in the same light. I think Easterbrook was using history as evidence for his experience, which seems to be that Jewish people generally hold themselves to higher moral standard. If he had just said that he was astonished that people of any faith would promote such violence for money, he would have been much better off.
“Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence?”
He says that Jews shouldn’t worship money above all else. Sure, he’s comparing them to Christians that do the same thing, but he’s still saying Jews are money crazy. Saying Christians are just doesn’t have the awful historical implications.
Oh, and you’re absolutely correct that if he’d just said, “Movie executives shouldn’t worship money above all else”, with no mention of faith, he’d still have a job. Unless Eisner is really sensitive about criticism of his movies by underlings.