The problem is that ESPN doesn’t want us to be sitting here wondering if their journalists are racially insensitive or just very clueless. I’ve said it’s not impossible that the guy wasn’t trying to make a pun, although you can see that was definitely my first impulse and I’m a little reluctant to take him at his word.
The problem is that regardless of his intent, the text of the headline is the same, and it still reflects a glaring lapse in judgment.
Oh, I’ll give you lapse in judgement. I’ll even grant that the rampant racist or stupid puns and other comments floating around might have had something to do with it. I just happen to think, from what bits I’ve seen, that it’s one more instance of major repercussions over a minor event. I know that’s how things are done these days, but some of them look to me like letting the ‘general stupid’ win out over rational response. I doubt it’s going to change any time soon.
I don’t get this at all.
It was the most rational response possible for the people at ESPN.
Was the public outcry totally rational? Maybe or maybe not.
But given the public outcry, ESPN made the perfectly rational choice - they fired the guy.
It would only be irrational if he didn’t write the headline at all. But he admitted he did, admitted it was a mistake, and had to take the bullet for it.
Maybe you are arguing that society should be more rational (and I’d agree with that), but claiming that ESPN should take it upon itself to make some kind of symbolic stand for rationality is unreasonable.
Clearly more than one of us believes this idea that it involves “identifying” a flaw. But more than one of us has seen it differently (and I posted a link to bolster my definition), that it simply refers to someone not being as invincible as it once appeared.
And “invincible” means “undefeatable”, not “perfect” or “without any apparent flaw”. Was even Wilt Chamberlain in his 100 point game perfect? I bet he missed a shot or two, perhaps didn’t gather in every rebound he could have. If nothing else, he didn’t steal the ball every time down the floor.
So with that in mind, let’s recall the context: Lin had not previously lost a single game he started in his career. And this is especially significant at his position, since a point guard is the quarterback of his team. He runs the offense and usually plays the most minutes of any player. Thus any “weaknesses” (like committing turnovers) that are on display during a period in which his team had a perfect winning record are debatable in how much they really *are *weaknesses. Stats lines may be the goal for selfish players, but we’ve all known players that post up gaudy stats on losing teams and why is that an achievement? Analysts of the game have gotten more wise to this, which is why they have in recent years begun to change the way players are evaluated to more accurately assess how they help or hurt the bottom line of winning games.
Yes, seriously.
I have no doubt you’re right–but that would also be unfortunate and unfair. Not to mention highly ironic, since that phrase has to do with calling something by its actual, direct name (using a garden implement as an example) rather than something else. Thus it is the exact opposite of using a slur or any other kind of alternate name for someone or a group of people! The etymology and usage are clear on that point.
Indeed! I’d say it qualifies as a “tortured” interpretation.
Same here. I don’t know Federico’s family or educational background. But I do know his age: 28. It’s not hard for me to imagine that someone that age who grew up in an educated, liberal family and went to schools with other such people would literally never hear “chink” being used as a slur. Think about it: it’s banished from TV and even movies (except perhaps the rare film about a crusty old racist, but such films are few and far between and easy to miss). This is a relatively obscure slur, and it’s not like its profile is raised by Chinese-American musicians courting controversy by “co-opting” it for themselves.
When would a liberal, educated person encounter this usage? When I imagine someone who might actually say this word, it’s a toothless redneck, covered in axle grease, with a Confederate flag hat. And there are a great many people in this country, especially those who go to college and work in white collar positions, who would just never cross paths with such people.
“Spade” is a similar case, btw. Has anyone ever heard it said as a slur IRL? I haven’t. I’m not sure how I even know that it is a slur, but I have a lot of obscure trivial knowledge rattling around in my head (while I can’t remember where I put my keys) that the vast majority of people don’t have.
To use homonyms of offensive words? Assuming you understand what a homonym is, *I *find it troubling that you would presumably banish all mention of the words “broad”, “twist”, and “poof”; or (consulting Wikipedia) “chug”, “dink”, “flip”, “frog”, “gable”, “gin”, “jock”, “nip”, “pancake”, “slant”, “slope”, “spook”, “tan”, “yellow”, or “zip”.
This is I think a fairly important point, though one I’ve hesitated to raise. I have to wonder about the mindset of people who find it “obvious” that the word “chink” in the context of “chink in the armor” screams out “racist epithet”. It strikes me as similar to people who snigger at alternate “that’s what she said” interpretations of innocent phrases that only Beavis and Butthead would twist that way. I find it disturbing that “competence” as a writer or editor is being defined as the racial equivalent of having a “dirty mind”.
There are two camps opposing my POV here: those who say Federico obviously had malice (or mischief) aforethought, and those who think he was just stupid. Those are two different lines of debate, so for a moment I want to pose your question just to those who think this was an intentional use of a double entendre. Doesn’t everyone who is aware at all of the racial connotation of “chink” know that it is a crude, dirty, low down slur that has no element of whimsy bound up with it at all? Maybe all I will do here is convert you to the “okay, he was just stupid then” camp, but I’m nevertheless still wondering!
Precisely!
Word.
Agreed. In the future, then, anyone using the phrase will be using it in a different context, in the post-Lin improglio era. In the near future, anyone would have to be insane to use it because it is so freshly associated with this controversy. In the further future, this kerfuffle may be forgotten, but the phrase will have lost its currency from disuse. Either way, yup: dustbin.
Wow. I just want to be clear that I utterly dissociate myself from your position, a position that I find ugly and surprising to encounter in this day and age! Yikes.
Really? So you’re *still *making a distinction between the on-air comment that “didn’t sound like he was making a joke”, and Federico’s headline which you continue to imply that he is “acknowledging” was a joke, even though the NY Daily News article I posted quotes him as saying just the opposite? You can doubt his honesty, but you can’t keep saying he’s “acknowledging” what he is flatly denying!
Yes, it does prove that my interpretation was correct–because my interpretation was not that “this article proves what was in Federico’s heart (or mind) when he wrote the headline”. What article could prove that? My interpretation was that the article indicated that Federico’s version of events was that he used the phrase without making the connection to Lin’s race. Yours was that the original article indicated that Federico was admitting that he was trying to be cute or punny or whatever. My interpretation was correct, yours was not, and this should, I believe, matter when we are debating an issue of how well someone should be able to parse meaning with minimal sufficiency to *keep his job *(no one is talking about giving Federico a Pulitzer or a promotion).
I find it interesting that you (and several others here) have no trouble applying your 20/20 hindsight to evaluating his judgment (and thus competence as a copy editor) negatively, but I cannot reasonably have a more positive opinion of his copy editing performance because I do not actually work professionally as a copy editor. Why does that stricture not apply to you in your negative judgement?
Why don’t we say that this distinction is a canard, and that you are entitled to the opinion that such an oversight is so egregious that it is a firing offence; while I’m entitled to take all the comments about “extreme incompetence”, “poor judgement”, “moronic”, or as you yourself called it: “very clueless” and a “dumb screwup”, as indirect but nevertheless actual slights against my intelligence or perceptiveness?
ETA: I actually completely agree with the post **Antibob **wrote (just above mine) that I didn’t see until after I posted. ESPN’s response was coldly rational, and it is the general public that overreacted. I still think though that they could have made a PR move like suspending Federico and sending him to a sensitivity training seminar, not ruining his life and still satisfying the outraged parties.
I don’t think ESPN really even waited to see what the public outcry would be. They yanked the headline in a big hurry and made the firings and suspensions pretty quickly.
I don’t know what you are going on about. Based on the link in your OP, I said in my first post that he’d acknowledged making a pun because it appeared to me that he had done that. You posted a fuller link later. Since then I’ve neither said nor implied that he has owned up to making a pun.
Because you’re the only one making assertions about your exceptional discernment as a reader. In any event there really is not positive interpretation here. There’s “he made a pun on a racial slur” and “he didn’t notice his headline could be read as a pun on a racial slur.”
I have never said you are not entitled to your opinion and I’ve gone out of my way to tell you I am not calling you stupid. I am talking about the performance of the professionals here. You’re applying your judgment after the fact. You are not paid to write and edit this stuff, they are. That’s why I am saying it’s a stupid and obvious failure. I don’t think it’s stupid to fail to see it as a casual reader.
I don’t think they had to fire him, but I can’t say it was an overreaction and they didn’t ruin his life. He lost a good job because he made an error that reflected very badly on him and his employer.
I don’t know why everyone keeps saying he shouldn’t have been fired because it was a “honest” mistake.
Surely any employer will fire their employees for making major mistakes. For instance, my job is to prepare a telephone book-sized report that goes out to the Feds and to the public. There are important figures in this report, representing critical pieces of information, some related to public health. If I accidently wrote “90%” instead of “9%” when talking about the percentage of impaired waters in the state and didn’t catch the error before it went to press? Hell YES I would be fired! It would be an innocent mistake–it certainly wouldn’t be my intention for angry citizens to fire off letters to the governor or for the press to run negative commentary after commentary. But that’s what would surely happen. Shit, I wouldn’t even wait for my boss to knock on my office door. I’d be a runaway slave as soon as I found out what I did.
(I’ve just made myself nervous. I need to go to work right now and quadraple-proofread my report!)
Now if I mistakenly print a map with inconsistent symbology or I misspell the agency director’s name in the acknowledgements, I wouldn’t expecting firing. I wouldn’t even expect anyone to tell me about it.
When you’re relaying information to the public, you just can’t fuck up on this scale and expect a pitty-pat slap on the hand. I think people are identifying way too much with the writer and forgetting that he is employed to represent a brand. He made the brand look bad, period. If you were embarrassed by one of your employees, you wouldn’t want to keep him around either.
Yeah, it’s a little bizarre. If you work for an investment bank and do something that causes a $100 million loss, you’re fired - they won’t care if you did honestly or not. Whatever Federico’s intent and reasoning in picking that headline, it’s a botch job that reflects poorly on him as a journalist and ESPN as a journalistic outlet. It’s harmful to their reputation and credibility, and that’s something ESPN has to be very zealous in protecting. [Insert 7 million “The Decision” jokes here.] They can’t expect people to take them seriously and get their sports news from ESPN if ESPN doesn’t take this kind of thing seriously. The guy is not just being judged for what’s in his heart, which is the stuff people always worry about when someone gets accused of racism. He’s being judged for what he wrote, how it makes him look, and how it makes the place that publishes his work look.
He was either too stupid to realize he was using a racial slur and should be fired, or too stupid to realize using a racial slur was unacceptable, and should be fired. It is not the job of any organization to employ incompetents or racists, and this man is clearly one or the other.
Honestly, SlackerInc, I cannot see how this has anything to do with you, or your abilities (or lack thereof) as a copy editor. You seem to believe that he could not have been too stupid to realize he was using a slur, because you too would then be stupid. And he cannot be a racist, because, again, this somehow makes you stupid (and perhaps a racist), and you feel you are neither.
But let me pose this to you: It is very difficult to self-diagnose stupid. The condition itself tends not to allow it. Perhaps this is where your problem lies.
Monstro, if you would get fired for a single typo that is ridiculous and unjust as well.
Miss elizabeth, it may surprise you to learn that I embrace your approach. You’re only slightly slyly* declaring stupidity being as applicable IYO to me as it is to Federico. I of course dispute this claim, and wonder how all those standardised tests (and a psychologist-administered Stanford-Binet IQ test) could have been so terribly wrong; but I appreciate your owning that opinion and not trying to evade its implications.
I think miss elizabeth was talking about Federico’s purported stupidity, because commenting on your intelligence wouldn’t be appropriate for this forum. This thread is supposed to be about the issue, and we are not going to have a debate about your intelligence. (Nor are we going to make special rules for this one thread.) This is about the headline and the issues surrounding it, not the people posting here.
That really shuts down the debate then (except maybe for whether he knew what he was doing, but that’s not really provable either way). I’m trying to be like a judge applying a “reasonable person” standard in a negligence case. If my “reasonable person” standard isn’t reasonable, it has to be because *I’m *not reasonable. But since that can’t be debated, we’re at a dead end–or at least I am, because people can keep calling Federico a moron, I can continue to take umbrage, but not be allowed to do so. Feh.
ETA: I hope for your sake that you don’t really interpret miss elizabeth’s last paragraph as referring to Federico rather than me, because that once again strikes me as a curious interpretation of a fairly straightforward text. Perhaps your saying this is a polite and transparent fiction to shield her from punishment? Hope so.
I’m wondering what mistake you would consider worthy of firing. Because unnecessarily alarming the public and making the government look bad seem like firable offenses to me.
Professional writers must know there is power in his or her pen. That is presumably why they do what they do. If they can get kudos for writing a killer story–whether by stroke of fortune or just plain hard work–then they should catch crap when they cause a shitstorm–whether by bad luck or just stupidity. That’s just how the real world works. Unfairnesss and justice have nothing to do with this.
This whole world is an “at will” state. The tears this guy sheds over this will join the billions of others that flow into the oceans every day.
No, it doesn’t shut the debate down. (It shouldn’t, anyway.) It means we’re not going to have an argument over whether or not you’re stupid and unreasonable because that’s not what this forum is about. We can discuss the standards you are applying to Federico and how reasonable those things are. We can discuss Federico’s actions, ESPN’s response, and plenty of other things. But this really isn’t supposed to be a debate about you. Like I said earlier, this is not something you need to take personally.
That would be inappropriate on her part, and she should know better. That being said, further comments about the way the thread is being moderated belong in the ATMB forum.
“People typically get fired for making serious mistakes” does not imply that “people should be fired for making serious mistakes.” So pointing out that people do get fired in these situations, however typical this may be, does not make a point relevant to the question whether this guy should have been fired.
I think it’s a bad idea, other things being equal, to fire someone over a single mistake. A single mistake is something that can happen to anyone. The size of the consequences have nothing to do with how well that person is likely to perform in the future. What makes sense (other things being equal) is for someone to be fired for a pattern of mistakes.
For those who were curious, The Poynter Institute has published an explanatory timeline.
The mistakes you make can affect your ability to do your job, though. That is essentially why this guy was fired. And it’s very interesting to get the Poynter version- I’d been waiting for that.
You presume incorrectly. Deliberately, I presume.
Hell, I don’t know why the OP thinks that getting fired from one job means that someone’s career is over.
And my $.02: I find it hard to believe that anyone born and raised in America in the late 20th century would never have heard the word chink used as a slur on Asians. Really hard to believe. How hard to believe? This hard to believe.
Anyway, does the OP have a cite for how he came to believe that this writer/editor’s career is “over”? Or is this all some bizarre attempt to drum up sympathy for a guy who is either stupid or ignorant or just has poor decision making skills and now won’t be able to indulge his inner frat boy professionally for a little while?
The only person who knows whether he should be fired or not is the person who made the decision to hire him.
The same rules that got him the job are the same rules that kicked him out. “He will make us look good. Hire him!” “Now he makes us look bad. Fire him.” If you have no problem with the first, why the problem with the second?
If you are saying he is entitled to his job just by virtue of not having screwed up in the past, I just can’t agree with you there. I don’t think employers should fire employers just because they can. But if I’m signing your paycheck and your mess is causing my phone to ring off the hook? Yeah, the same reasoning that compelled me to ever sign your paycheck in the first place is the same reasoning I’m going to use to fire you.
Fairness has nothing to do with this. If we’re going to play the fairness game, we might as well say that it’s not fair this guy got his job over someone who would have been more intelligent than to link an Asian guy with the word “chink”. Which I’m willing to bet would have been a lot of people. And it’s not fair that “chink” has both an offensive meaning and an innocent one–making it hard to distinguish a person ignorant of its offensiveness from an ignorant person. We can play the unfairness game all day and it will take us nowhere.
He’s 28 and managed to swing an internship into a fulltime job at ESPN. He’ll have to start lower down the ladder, but if he was able to do something like that, I think he’ll be able to work his way back up in time.
