It looks like Gregg Easterbrook’s recent blog column (“Tuesday Morning Quarterback”) that singled out the executives behind Kill Bill as Jews, holding them to a higher moral standard than Christian executives has resulted in him losing his job.
Atrios is covering the story from the political angle:
It appears that Easterbrook’s TMQ column has been disappeared from ESPN’s website. Not sure why – perhaps for criticizing the boss (Eisner). But, in any case, I was never advocating that the guy lose his writing gigs over this incident – there are plenty of other reasons he should lose his writing gigs. I just am pretty disturbed that he didn’t confront the main issue – or that he even embraced it – and his defenders gave him a pass.
…yep, he was fired. This likely had more to do with the fact that he criticized Eisner specifically than anything else, so if any good can come of this it’ll be Easterbrook writing a column on the dangers of big media consolidation.
[Eschaton]
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Dave Winer is covering it from the blogging-as-journalism p.o.v.:
There’s trouble brewing, or maybe it’s already…
There’s trouble brewing, or maybe it’s already brewed and I’m tuning in late. A columnist for New Republic (and ESPN), Gregg Easterbrook, said something anti-semitic in a blog post, Roger L Simon, a novelist and screen writer with a weblog blasted him for it, he’s been fired from ESPN, and Simon expresses his regrets, as does Easterbrook (although half-heartedly). This all appears to have happened in the last 24 hours. Even weirder, all the posts on ESPN’s site from Easterbrook are 404, but they’re in the Google cache. [Scripting News]
UPDATE: Calpundit notes that ESPN has entirely purged Easterbrook’s name from the site’s search results.