In the Matter of Hill v. Schilling ... v. ESPN?

In a week mostly dominated by one hurricane and the aftermath of another, and an 8.1 magnitude earthquake not far away that we never heard about, there was another story which, unfortunately, involved the media doing what the media do.

In this case, it was the formerly-popular sports network ESPN, which was the name in cable sports at one point, but which has suffered severe losses in viewership ratings and subscriptions to its magazine the past few years, to the point that the Disney people, who own it along with ABC and the other Disney properties, are pretty much floating the network.

A year or so ago, Curt Schilling, the now-retired pitcher for several pennant and World Series-winning teams, was fired from his job as a baseball analyst for ESPN.  His sin was to have retweeted someone else's tweet that was satirically critical of the transgender-bathroom law in North Carolina and could be interpreted as mocking transgender people, adding notes of his own as to opinions as to who should use which bathroom.

For that "offense", Schilling was abruptly terminated by ESPN, whose terse statement was that "ESPN is an inclusive company."  I am not sure what "inclusive" meant at the time; certainly it did not include being inclusive of people whose beliefs contradicted the dogma of ESPN management, or Disney management, or whomever it was who pulled the trigger on Schilling.

Either way, Schilling was gone.  He is still not employed by ESPN and has not been brought back even after cooler heads' heads cooled.

That was actually April 2016.  Now in September 2017, you would still expect, only 17 months later, the same ESPN would feel itself to be just as "inclusive" as it was in April 2016.

It had a chance to demonstrate that, when one of its staff, Jemele Hill (a black female, which is probably very relevant), tweeted an original message of her own, not a "retweet."  It stated that Donald Trump, who is the President of the United States now, "is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself with other white supremacists."

Miss Hill is still employed by ESPN, and undoubtedly will still be when you read this.  Sadly, that is actually a good thing, or at least an OK thing.

That is because the proper thing for ESPN to have done would have been to deal with her internally in accordance with the applicable HR rules for such behavior.  Had those rules specified firing or suspension for political tweets, then she should have been fired or suspended.  People have the freedom of speech, here in the country she thinks is ruled by a "white supremacist", and the rest of us have the right to take out their displeasure on ESPN, as I will do by terminating my subscription to their magazine and website.

The problem is less about what Miss Hill did and what ESPN did, or did not do, to her, and far more about the fact that what they did, or did not do, to her in no way resembled what they did to Curt Schilling in what has to be considered an identical act.

Take it this way.  ESPN's defense of firing Schilling was based, per their own statement, on their claims to be an "inclusive company."  Presumably we are to infer that they were trying to "include" the few thousand transgender sports fans out there, and offending them was a fire-worthy offense.

Then how inclusive was it to allow one of its employees in a very comparable job to offend 63 million people, many of them frequent ESPN watchers, at least until now, who voted for Donald Trump last November?  Because I certainly see no other interpretation of Miss Hill's tweet than that we 63 million people are white supremacists or sympathizers.

I know I was offended, as a Trump voter, by Jemele Hill, offended as all Hades, and I was mad about it when I read the story.  I was certainly as ticked off about what she said in the tweet as any transgender sports fan was about what Schilling wrote.

The problem is that clearly in the minds of the suits at ESPN, a white male can be fired for tweeting and offending some people, but a black female gets off without even a warning for doing exactly the same thing -- I mean, how much more similar could the actions have been on Twitter?

I am incredibly offended by the assumption that my feelings, my values and my vote are not worth ESPN's concern.  I guess their notion of "inclusive" doesn't follow mine.  There will be a whole lot less ESPN watched here in this house.  My subscription is being cancelled, and on those rare occasions when I am forced by fandom to watch, I will take pains to remind their advertisers of my views.

I hope you will consider the same.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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