ESPN Is Pathetic

Gunfighter 09

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I think it is interesting that ESPN apparently thinks that calling the commissioner of the NFL a liar is a worse sin requiring greater punishment than calling the President of the United States a moron, both direct quotes. They suspended one of their biggest talents for two weeks for the Goodell hit in 2014, and are letting a fairly midling talent off with what apparently is a twitter suspension three years later for the second act. Point to sheriff Roger in this case, didn't think he would catch many Ws this year.
 

Reverend

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Not as much as the Schilling teams. Anyone who supports 45 needs to have their heads checked. I will never acknowledge him as my president. Period. He's a racist pig. HRC is the rightful president.

I understand and respect your opinion but at the same time can you root for a team knowing it's representing your city and has people like Schilling? In good conscience? It's why I stopped watching the NFL this season and won't until Kap is unblackballed. I'm actually disappointed the Pats didn't at least look at him as a possible Brady successor. I get it but I'm not surprised since all 32 owners are on the same page.
38.
 

richgedman'sghost

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Marty Glickman & Sam Stoller can attest that Avery Brundage was no saint so I guess we'll root for laundry...
I thought about him but Tyrone and I were talking strictly athletes. Avery Brundage was a chairmen of the IOC correct? So he would be be considered management. So my point on the 1936 Olympic athletes is correct.
 

B H Kim

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I think it is interesting that ESPN apparently thinks that calling the commissioner of the NFL a liar is a worse sin requiring greater punishment than calling the President of the United States a moron, both direct quotes. They suspended one of their biggest talents for two weeks for the Goodell hit in 2014, and are letting a fairly midling talent off with what apparently is a twitter suspension three years later for the second act. Point to sheriff Roger in this case, didn't think he would catch many Ws this year.
ESPN's employee discipline policies have always seemed rather arbitrary, but I find it entirely logical that they would dispense harsher penalties for making an unsubstantiated allegation like Simmons did against the network's biggest business partner than they would against someone expressing a very partisan, but legitimate, political criticism of the president.
 

johnmd20

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Trump loudly declared for years that Obama, the President of the United States, wasn't a US Citizen. It was extremely low. But that was fine, yet Jemele says Trump is a white supremacist, something he has implicitly and explicitly courted, and now they want her fired?

The hypocrisy is stunning.
 

dcmissle

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I think it is interesting that ESPN apparently thinks that calling the commissioner of the NFL a liar is a worse sin requiring greater punishment than calling the President of the United States a moron, both direct quotes. They suspended one of their biggest talents for two weeks for the Goodell hit in 2014, and are letting a fairly midling talent off with what apparently is a twitter suspension three years later for the second act. Point to sheriff Roger in this case, didn't think he would catch many Ws this year.
If Cohn was suspended, it may have flowed as much from her true claim that the network paid too much for broadcasting properties as anything else. ESPN, if not in a death spiral, is up against it. Everyone there is fragile.
 

Sportsbstn

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If Cohn was suspended, it may have flowed as much from her true claim that the network paid too much for broadcasting properties as anything else. ESPN, if not in a death spiral, is up against it. Everyone there is fragile.
Sadly, ESPN is in a death spiral because the network cares more about hot takes than reporting on and showing sports. It has completely misread the majority of its audience.
 

kenneycb

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I would argue it still cares very much about showing sports, more so now than ever. The only sport they don't have rights to is the NHL and they've been able to wrest some of college hockey from NBCSN (BC, for example, will be on ESPN3 all year).
 

JCizzle

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I don't know why this isn't brought up more. 10 players protested in one way or another last year. 9 of them are playing this season. The one guy that isn't also:

1. Wore the police pig socks.
2. Sent a tweet comparing modern day police to slave catchers.
3. Praised Castro and told Cuban Americans (paraphrasing), "Sure Castro broke up families but hey, the police and justice system do the same in the US." Try making that argument to older Cubans in this country.
4. Has a girlfriend who compared Ray Lewis to a house slave and Steve Bisciotti to a slave owner.
5. Refused to vote because it would be showing support for a "system of oppression".
6. Kinda stinks at his job.

Personally, I don't give a shit if he stands for the anthem or not. But let's not pretend that his protest is the same as safety Eric Reid or some other player who has also been kneeling. Whether you're pro or anti Kaepernick, everyone should acknowledge that his actions have been far more polarizing than what other players have done.

Edit - For the record, I love what the Bennett brothers and Doug Baldwin have been doing to raise awareness about an important cause. But I gotta say, I'm not a big fan of how CK has done things.
This is all accurate, but at the same time he was the one who started the movement and is more clearly identified with it than the other athletes you mentioned. All you could hear about for months was Kaepernick, those other players never received the same attention he did from the media. I'm also not sure why comments from his girlfriend should be held against him. This is a league that regularly employs people who commit actual crimes, it's telling that taking a knee and saying stupid shit carries more weight than killing someone while drunk driving or beating up a woman. The whole thing is very ugly and I find it hard to paint Kap as the villain in this situation, even if he is 100% wrong with some of his comments. He really doesn't stink at his job relative to players like Hoyer, Tolzien, Savage, etc. His stats last year were more than respectable with his best weapon being Jeremy Kerley...
 

Buck Showalter

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Trump loudly declared for years that Obama, the President of the United States, wasn't a US Citizen. It was extremely low. But that was fine, yet Jemele says Trump is a white supremacist, something he has implicitly and explicitly courted, and now they want her fired?

The hypocrisy is stunning.
Well Trump wasn't an ESPN employee when he publicly declared that --- otherwise, he'd have been fired.

Try to keep up.

As for Jemele....fire hire, keep her, who cares? She sucks at her job and is irrelevant.

And the defense of Colin K is laughable.

Someone in this thread actually used him in the same sentence as Muhammad Ali and Senator Bradley (!!!).

If this is the logic / composition of the counter-culture in today's U.S. --- there's very little hope for their spark to create flames.
 

B H Kim

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Sadly, ESPN is in a death spiral because the network cares more about hot takes than reporting on and showing sports. It has completely misread the majority of its audience.
Not really. The reason that they are in a death spiral is because they are paying billions of dollars for content and rely on huge fees from a rapidly shrinking pool of cable customers to pay for it.
 

Sportsbstn

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Not really. The reason that they are in a death spiral is because they are paying billions of dollars for content and rely on huge fees from a rapidly shrinking pool of cable customers to pay for it.
The shrinking numbers are I am sure partially because people are going away from cable but also because people are going away from ESPN specifically. There are a lot more alternatives for sports now than there ever were and just looking at the internal screwed up culture of ESPN tells you things are blowing up from the inside and it's having an outside effect as well.
 

dcmissle

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Hopefully, this is a wrap. Until the next time:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/more-sports/jemele-hill-responds-to-controversy-over-trump-white-supremacist-comments/ar-AArU8Qw?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=DELLDHP17

I don't know what it will take for Jemele -- or Heath Evans, for that matter -- to understand that a good number of us want no part of this stuff in our sports and sports coverage. Sometimes, it is unavoidable, and we get that. Why isn't Kap on a roster, for example.

But when it is avoidable, and you try to jam it down our throats anyway, we punish it. Severely.

Twitter isn't "private" when your notoriety stems entirely from your sports media gig, when your employer encourages you to go all in on social media for marketing purposes, and when your twitter feed is an undifferentiated mass of sports & politics.
 

JCizzle

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Hopefully, this is a wrap. Until the next time:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/more-sports/jemele-hill-responds-to-controversy-over-trump-white-supremacist-comments/ar-AArU8Qw?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=DELLDHP17

I don't know what it will take for Jemele -- or Heath Evans, for that matter -- to understand that a good number of us want no part of this stuff in our sports and sports coverage. Sometimes, it is unavoidable, and we get that. Why isn't Kap on a roster, for example.

But when it is avoidable, and you try to jam it down our throats anyway, we punish it. Severely.

Twitter isn't "private" when your notoriety stems entirely from your sports media gig, when your employer encourages you to go all in on social media for marketing purposes, and when your twitter feed is an undifferentiated mass of sports & politics.
Is this a polite way of saying 'stick to sports'? ;)
 

Hendu for Kutch

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Give me a break.

If only there was some way to watch ESPN without following Jemele Hill's Twitter feed. Maybe they'll invent the technology to separate those two someday.
 

PC Drunken Friar

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Pretty much. And because we can vote with our feet, our dollars and our clicker, we're going to get what we want.
This is a very, very simplistic way to look at sports. It has NEVER been "just about sports". Maybe this should be its own thread, but sports have entered and remained in the political/cultural and social realm forever...and has been a catalyst for change in this country.

Babe Didrikison and women's rights, Jesse Owens and Hitler, Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Olympics, Muhammad Ali and Vietnam/Civil Rights, Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs (even if it may have been a thrown match), Magic Johnson and AIDS, Katherine Switzer, Jackie freaking Robinson, Pat Tillman, Michael Sam, Curt Flood...the list goes on and on. I mean, you could probably teach an American History course that tells the story of the US, strictly by using sports.

And she had the gal to comment that we have a bigot in the White House.
 

dcmissle

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Give me a break.

If only there was some way to watch ESPN without following Jemele Hill's Twitter feed. Maybe they'll invent the technology to separate those two someday.
I didn't make the connection. ESPN did. Jemele too, per the link I just posted.
 

OurF'ingCity

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If only there was some way to watch ESPN without following Jemele Hill's Twitter feed. Maybe they'll invent the technology to separate those two someday.
Well, ok, but then you have to apply this equally - unless I'm forgetting something all of Schilling's controversial statements were also on social media and, by the above reasoning, could also be ignored if someone wanted to.

For as much (deserved) criticism as ESPN gets I actually think they handled this correctly - Hill didn't deserve to be fired because her comments didn't approach Schilling-level but they obviously went beyond the bounds of what ESPN deems is acceptable political commentary. We can quibble about whether her comments should be deemed acceptable or not, but an employer has every right to police what its employees say on social media and the employee can leave the company if he or she disagrees with the employer's policies.
 

PC Drunken Friar

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Well, ok, but then you have to apply this equally - unless I'm forgetting something all of Schilling's controversial statements were also on social media and, by the above reasoning, could also be ignored if someone wanted to.

For as much (deserved) criticism as ESPN gets I actually think they handled this correctly - Hill didn't deserve to be fired because her comments didn't approach Schilling-level but they obviously went beyond the bounds of what ESPN deems is acceptable political commentary. We can quibble about whether her comments should be deemed acceptable or not, but an employer has every right to police what its employees say on social media and the employee can leave the company if he or she disagrees with the employer's policies.
If Hill has been reprimanded before for her political stuff on social media, it would more similar to the Schilling case. He was repeatedly told to cut the shit.
 

dcmissle

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If Hill has been reprimanded before for her political stuff on social media, it would more similar to the Schilling case. He was repeatedly told to cut the shit.
She received nothing more than a reprimand, which she has gracefully accepted. This upset you?

That's not the point of his post in any case. The point is you can't de-couple the Twitter traffic from the platform that is the only reason -- and I mean the ONLY reason, in her case -- that people are following you on Twitter.
 

dcmissle

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moly99

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I think it is interesting that ESPN apparently thinks that calling the commissioner of the NFL a liar is a worse sin requiring greater punishment than calling the President of the United States a moron
ESPN is a business partner of the NFL. They have a reasonable expectation that their employees will not make comments that jeopardize their business relationship. Conversely there is no reason to censor their employees for having political opinions.
 

Kliq

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You really think she was being serious there? She also compared rooting for the Soviets...as in...the Celtics are the ultimate enemy.

It was a bad joke to be taken in jest.
It's not something you joke about, and any writer with any sense of public perception would understand that you probably shouldn't compare a basketball team to Hitler; even if it's a joke. If we are going to compare it to Schilling getting canned; let's note that this isn't the first time Hill has caused controversy through something she wrote.
 

scott bankheadcase

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ESPN is a business partner of the NFL. They have a reasonable expectation that their employees will not make comments that jeopardize their business relationship. Conversely there is no reason to censor their employees for having political opinions.
There is if the employee publicly represents your brand and it's off brand to be overtly political. There is no such thing as personal twitter for public-facing employees (and there's a strong case that there's no such thing as it for anyone), especially media personalities. It's social media 101.
 

gingerbreadmann

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Jemele Hill was hand-picked for her current position at ESPN because of her personality. The culture has evolved to give rise to personality-driven media of all forms, but especially television. To say her Twitter following is inextricably linked to her ESPN profile is undeniably true, but to suggest that causality flows from the network having benevolently handed her an audience in exchange for service as a milquetoast brand representative is disingenuous and straight-up rude. If that was ever the status quo, it persists no longer, and ESPN has steered that ship as much as any other entity -- with pretty successful results.
 

Cesar Crespo

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People aren't going away from sports, per se, they are going away from non-live event programming.
But now they are streaming that too with PSvue, DirecTV, Stream TV, etc. They even have sports packages. PSVue is especially nice at $45 since they have a live stream of your local CBS. That means you can watch all 4 teams live for $45 a month while having access to all the sports channels. It should help offset some of these losses.

edit: I should probably mention that ESPN is heavily featured in these packages.
 

luckiestman

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You understand white guys telling a black woman "Stick to sports" is a bad look, right? You would understand why, right?

Can you outline the power hierarchy for when it is ok to speak? Can an asian woman tell white guys to stick to sports? Can a white female tell a white hispanic man anything? What if he is non white hispanic? Can you provide a decoder ring?

Can you actually first define your age, sexual preference, what gender you identify with, what race you identify with so I know if I can even ask you questions. I get that it's a bit paradoxical because I don't know if it is ok to speak to you without the decoder ring but I can't get the decoder ring without asking. I'll hang up and listen.
 
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Couperin47

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Can you outline the power hierarchy for when it is ok to speak? Can an asian woman tell white guys to stick to sports? Can a white female tell a white hispanic man anything? What if he is non white hispanic? Can you provide a decoder ring?

Can you actually first define your age, sexual preference, what gender you identify with, what race you identify with so I know if I can even ask you questions. I get that it's a bit paradoxical because I don't know if it is ok to speak to you without the decoder ring but I can't get the decoder ring without asking. I'll hang up and listen.
To quote your spiritual forefather, we understand you 'may not have some of the necessities' required to act intelligently in these situations.
 

dcmissle

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You understand white guys telling a black woman "Stick to sports" is a bad look, right? You would understand why, right?
Sure, though she appears to have accepted ESPN's modulation.

Do you understand my aversion to all of this, whether it be Jamele on the one hand or Callahan on the other?

Ultimately, I'm indifferent to what they do. Each of them. I can find what I want easily enough.
 

JayMags71

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Report: ESPN Tried To Sub Out Jemele Hill For Last Night's SportsCenter
ESPN originally tried to keep Hill off the air on Wednesday evening, but Smith refused to do the show without her, the sources said. Both sources also said that producers reached out to two other black ESPN hosts, Michael Eaves and Elle Duncan, to ask them to serve as fill-ins for the show — but Eaves and Duncan did not agree to take the place of Hill and Smith, either.
So, I'm thinking ESPN realized they screwed up.
 

Marciano490

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Hey, Michael, Elle, we need a black co-host tonight. You're both black. Either of you want to fill in?