Pretty much. It’s only when you see over time who gets away with stuff and who gets the leash yanked hard.
If it’s working properly, then the process is mostly invisible because people with non-approved opinions will self-censor rather than flirt with termination or exile to a shitty position. When the only voices heard are the ones consistent with the approved narrative (anticipating the next question, the “approved narrative” is one where every human interaction is framed through the cultural Marxist binary of evil oppressors and virtuous oppressed with no middle ground between the two), it’s a tell, but it’s also the desired outcome. Note that two people covering Big Ten football^ got fired, while the person in charge of posting feminist poetry online^^ did not.
^ a sport
^^ not a sport
And as a bonus, where there’s no direct evidence such as a memo or an email, or maybe an ombudsman’s column, or another ombudsman’s column, there’s plenty of sweet, sweet deniability available for gaslighting. I get it, it’s fun to tell people that what they see isn’t there and watch them sputter. After all, management says, we aren’t suppressing opposing viewpoints, we are simply enforcing tolerance. And we define what tolerance entails and what must be tolerated.
I rarely watch any ESPN non-sports on TV, but I do listen to a couple hours of ESPN radio a week. It’s that and the classic rock station. ESPN radio in my area features Dan LeBatard and Bomani Jones for 6 hours a day. Neither hide from social news and “outrage”. For Lebatard it is actually a running joke that if you don’t want that you should change the channel. Jones (he is black) presents an interesting angle on things, he has even had a guy on there discussing “black privilege”.
But I don’t think their shows are the norm for most of ESPN radio.
Sling, Vue, and DirecTV Now all have packages with ESPN – amusingly enough (to me) the people who cut the cord to get away from sports carriage fees are still stuck with them.[/quote]
SlingTV has their ‘Blue’ package that drops the espn channels to add several others. So gives cord cutters one option who don’t want major sports.
Sage Steele, conservative, replaced by Michelle Beadle, liberal, who routinely tweets things that are anti-Trump/Trump-voters. ESPN would not tolerate someone tweeting anti-Obama/Obama voter stuff, they’d be fired. Do the opposite? Get a promotion.
What we can conclude is that Hill’s statement was nowhere even in the same ballpark as the offensive bile Schilling was spewing on repeated occasions even after being warned not to.
One snarky criticism is not anywhere near Schilling’s repeated transgressions,and it was nowhere near as offensive.
In other words, if you want to draw any sort of equivalence, you’re going to need to find multiple offensive images and posts, not just a single criticism quote which you don’t agree.
I read up on the Sage Steele and Michelle Beadle issue. Steele’s problems started with this Instagram blowup, the way she ended this interview, spouting off on a Tampa Bay Buccaneer about kneeling during the National Anthem, and getting into a spat with fellow ESPN folks regarding these incidents. Meanwhile, Michelle Beadle was a rising star at the network whose only Twitter drama seems to be getting into a tiff with Stephen A. Smith when Smith said females shouldn’t “provoke” men when he was talking about the Ray Rice domestic violence scandal.
It’s really not hard for me to connect the dots on that and see why any business would do what ESPN did. Granted, on a surface glance, it can look like ESPN favored the lefty over the righty, but when I really check into the issue, it’s difficult for me to agree.
There will never be enough, Pyp, and I wasn’t actually trying to convince you. I don’t know you. I put it out with the full knowledge that anything I put out would be denied by someone. That’s just the internet, you’re just the guy that stepped up and said “nuh-uh.”
So you think a sharing this out of the blue (after being warned not to be offensive on social media in the wake of being suspended for comparing Muslims to Nazis and admitting that it was a mistake he shouldn’t make again):
is less offensive than posting this after the attack in Orlando (without being warned previously):
So in a country where we have done everything possible to undermine the LGBTQ community, we are suddenly lecturing Islam on homophobia. Oh.
As the article I linked above said - if you can’t see the difference, it reveals more about your agenda than it does ESPN’s, especially when
An ESPN spokesperson said Hill’s tweet doesn’t violate the company’s edict, despite its political overtones
It’s not “just the internet and some random person saying nuh-uh”. It’s actually been vetted by the HR department vis a vis the official policy, as was Schilling’s (which he fully knew, and had been previously warned/suspended regarding).
There is a massive difference which you are willfully ignoring in favor of your uninformed, agendaed opinion.
To who? I wasn’t offended, I got his point. Men can’t be trusted in women’s restrooms. That wasn’t controversial at all until about 11 months ago. Was the meme crude and outrageous? Probably, but that’s how memes work and I’m tolerant of people’s styles of expression.
Regarding Hill’s claim that the US has no business or moral authority to challenge Islam’s position on homosexuality, yes that is indeed offensive. There is a difference between murdering people and not murdering people, and this country is on the right side of that divide. To suggest otherwise is slanderous. That’s not a “political overtone,” it’s a denial of state- and religion-sanctioned murder by Islamic nations.
Did the silly picture distract you and render you incapable of understanding Hill’s point?
Uh, one violates a policy he agreed to as a condition of employment and had been suspended for violating in the past, the other doesn’t. Both of our opinions regarding the offensiveness are irrelevant, as are the articles you linked (the quote regarding HR is directly lifted from your Forbes link - the author clearly has a reading/writing comprehension failure there, whether willful or not, the quote he quoted answered his question quite clearly).
I don’t think anyone is defending Schilling. The guy was warned, suspended, brought back and then fired when he did something stupid again. Using him as the standard is a pretty high bar. :)
Yeah, I think you are right that Schilling was too thick and crude-natured to play nice in corporate America. Perhaps that’s why ESPN is shifting towards non-player “personalities” rather than rough around the edges ex-jocks. Unfortunately, that makes for boring and doctrinaire TV.
I don’t remember her name ( I don’t know the names of anyone doing ESPN baseball except for the Boone guy) but it took me awhile to get used to having a woman in the booth doing the network game. But she has won me over. I do plead guilty in that the woman who does ESPN football (Big10 games I think) I still haven’t warmed to.
