Quote:
Originally Posted by LSMF
I'm still trying to find out exactly what Stephen A said that was so offensive that he needed to be suspended.
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He didn't NEED to be suspended. That is stretching the truth by implying that there are PC police out there with truncheons. He pissed off some listeners and ESPN thought that that hurt their brand. Simple as that. SAS used his celebrity as an ESPN anchor to spread his off-topic views that angered a lot of people. There isn't a police bureau looking to censor people, but there are a dozen board rooms looking after their own brand. The more public you are as a face of a brand, the more scrutiny you get. If you are working in the mail room, you can probably tweet whatever you want. When you are one of the public faces of a major brand, not so much. Freedom of speech gives you the freedom TO say whatever you want, but it doesn't give you the freedom FROM people's reactions.
Also, mansplaining to women how not to get beaten up-- probably not the best topic for a sports writer to talk about using the public platform, celebrity status and twitter following gained by being an ESPN talking head. WaPo said it best, "still, this is a fallacy people fall into, when giving advice: to assume that you can control the way the world responds to you." Perhaps he meant no harm, but it's a minefield of a hundred years of men telling women not to get raped, kidnapped, beaten up, etc. instead of addressing the real problem.
When my mom was beaten by my birth dad when I was 6-7, you want to know what the case worker said the first time she reported it? The (male) case worker asked what she had done to provoke it. Seriously. Then he went on to say that she wouldn't need to find a woman's shelter if she just stopped provoking him. That's the kind of history that SAS (perhaps unintentionally) walked into and it's why people get their hackles up when people say insensitive things like that. Perhaps without an experience like that, it would be impossible to comprehend why saying that women shouldn't provoke men is insensitive. I can understand that you personally think it's okay having never been through that, but you also have to understand that there are also a huge number of people who have seen it (or at least empathize) and they are who ESPN was concerned with when they gave SAS a 7-day vacation.
And for the record, my mom demanded another case worker, we ended up staying in the shelter for about four weeks before moving to AZ to get away from my birth dad, who continued to harass us until we left the state.