Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Thursday, September 25, 2014

I Find This Concerning

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/24/6841637/bill-simmons-suspended-espn

If he had called his boss a "liar" then I could see a suspension.

But how do you suspend an opinion writer for issuing opinions on his podcast?  And shouldn't ESPN - as putative sports journalists - be protecting their writers from any pressure from the NFL?

I can't imagine the NFL would be so stupid as to contact ESPN and tell them to silence Simmons.  Of course, the NFL has proven itself to be ham-handed and idiotic for a while now.

Instead, this is ABC/Disney/ESPN looking out for another powerful entity.  This is how the powerful ignore the voices from the street.

None of the Sunday morning shows dealt with the climate change protests that involved hundreds of thousands of people.  Much of the news just ignored it entirely, as they did the anti-war protests in March 2003.

It is time to understand that the Fourth Estate is looking more and more like the First.

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