Quick commentary: ESPN suspends Simmons

You have to be freaking kidding me.  That was my reaction upon hearing the news of Bill Simmons' suspension from ESPN, and it is still my reaction now, really.  Just disbelief.  Bafflement.  And a complete certainty that Simmons' army of fans is going to absolutely flay ESPN for this. And the NFL too, because all Simmons was saying about Goodell was absolutely spot on.

Goodell was and is insulting, and if he says he didn't see the tape, or didn't factor in the evidence in question upon initially hearing of it, he lies.  He had to have seen it, or grasped enough of it that he would have felt comfortable making a ruling in the first place.  He certainly couldn't have done what he says he did, which was under-estimate the severity of the thing.  No: it was Goodell's actions which undervalued domestic violence, not the evidence to which those actions were a response.

Which gets to the greater point: Goodell also lies in the sense that it shouldn't even matter whether he saw it or not anyway.  The whole question of whether he saw it is really moot and beside the point, a way of taking us away from the issue, or saying one thing is an issue when it is the opposite that is the case.  What matters is that Goodell didn't handle this right, that no one should have confidence in a commissioner who acts this way.  Everything called not for leniency but for the opposite, even if the tape wasn't seen.  And Goodell clearly tried to do as little as possible.  Bringing up the question of when he exactly should have been responsible is a smokescreen which hides the fundamental irresponsibility.

And so it is just as Simmons says: Goodell treats an incident which has many fans questioning their loyalty to the sport with all the tact of BP cleaning up its oil spills and suing its victims. At a time when those fans need guidance and reassurance, he makes them doubt themselves and the sport even more.

And meanwhile Simmons gets punished for doing the one responsible thing: he calls people out as liars and frauds and incompetent hacks when they do in fact lie and cheat and try to skirt the issue and get away with bungling things.  Somehow ESPN thinks this oversteps its journalistic standards.  But muckraking has always been a cornerstone of journalism.  And if the muck can't be dug up through reportage, then flat out accusation, in a piece of (what is clearly labeled) commentary, is just exactly what needs to happen if anyone is going to be rallied around the cause of finding out the truth and not believing lies.

After all, calling someone a liar and saying they lied in a piece of commentary isn't necessarily a factual claim about whether they lied, as some people commenting on the story are saying.  It can be more of an assertion about how we should understand their language and actions. "He lied" means, "I think he was lying," which is partly what Simmons said.  But it also means, "What Goodell did and said, and the way he stood up there, trying to say that he only saw the tape afterwards, that amounts to a lie, a distortion of reality, a gross attempt to deceive and make us interested in stuff that is beside the point."  And that is the essential bit: that is what helps call us back to the question of the fundamental honesty of the person we are dealing with.  Accusations aren't pretty, but they are infinitely worse than tolerating evil and not speaking out.

We damn well sure could have used someone talking in Simmons' accusatory tone when baseball players were juicing up into freakish hulks right before our eyes.  But no, all we heard each night from ESPN especially was inane tribalistic war-whoops and celebratory grunting, urging the record-breaking to continue.  Journalists, saying nothing, unwilling to accuse, were then not only letting the problem develop, but were in fact actively helping to perpetuate the culture of PED use.

Simmons was, ironically, very much behind ESPN's article about the Ravens precisely for this reason: he thought it was saying a version of what he said, which was that all sorts of people involved here were lying about how early they grasped the magnitude of what Rice had done, and about how innocent their mistake was in punishing him so leniently.

And now these vermin are on the offensive, because they can see that they are nearly, nearly out of it scot-free. The thing is so twisted, actually, that one begins to wonder.  Is ESPN, after coming under fire by the Ravens for its less-than-air-tight journalistic case against their handling of the Ray Rice scandal, trying to make itself look like it is in truth pro-NFL? And that it isn't trying, really, like Simmons is, to rant forcefully and truthfully about the issue but is "maintaining journalistic integrity?"  Is it trying to make sure, yet again, "journalistic standards" always conveniently align with the standards of the professional sports' advertising departments, managers, owners, commisioners?  Trying to make sure what counts as journalism is never something that questions or confronts or is "insensitive" towards the institutions and beats that it covers?

What's clear is that right now same claim to "journalistic" standards ESPN invokes to shut up Simmons are just more amenable to the production of hours and hours of meaningless controversy and often frankly offensive pseudocommentary through shows like "First-Take," than for genuine commentary that actually cares about sports so much that it would call them out when they are wrong.

All I know is, this can't end well for ESPN or the NFL. The one columnist who was, just when it looked as if sports writing would be subject to the demise of print journalism generally, right at the forefront of making sports writing relevant to a media-savvy generation of readers, sports fans, and the wider culture in general--this columnist can't be treated so harshly and brutally over words so essentially uncontroversial because so essentially true.