RIP Tuesday Morning Quarterback

I’ve been bombarded by search engine referrals from people looking, desperately looking, for Tuesday Morning Quarterback.

Sadly, I have nowhere to direct you to. ESPN dropped TMQB, scrubbed it out of existence, after the Easterbrook anti-semitism/Michael Eisner insult flap. He’s had his defenders and explainers. I personally can’t believe anyone who works at TNR can be anti-semetic, so the scenarios put forth by Micky Kaus (on October 20) and Jack Shafer seem plausible to me. Easterbrook is basically a guy who needs an editor, or even a habit of pausing to put the keyboard down and later coming back to read his own writing later, so his flights of rhetorical fancy don’t blow up in his face. A blog may have been one of the worst things to give him.

Easterbrook apologized, but the wheels had been set in motion, and, as he notes, once the words had been posted to his blog they can not be retracted. His firing from ESPN surprised me, though in retrospect it shouldn’t have, especially given that Disney owns ESPN, and Eisner doesn’t take insults from subordinates lightly. The implications of this are larger than they appear at first glance: granted, he dissed his boss, but for words that appeared in TNR (where he was paid to write political commentary), not ESPN (where he was paid to write football commentary). Glenn Reynolds notes:

Easterbrook was fired � from ESPN � for something that he wrote � in The New Republic � that offended the head of Disney. And that�s the reason why media consolidation is an issue. If people who write for one outlet have to think about pleasing not just one boss, but a plethora of them, then people will write a lot fewer criticisms. And if most outlets are controlled by a small number of conglomerates, we�ll read fewer criticisms, as a result.

It’s not quite as indirect as Reynolds implies, since ESPN is a part of Disney, so Eisner is TMQB’s ultimate boss. Media ownership wasn’t consolidated in this case, as Disney doesn’t secretly own TNR. Nonetheless, Easterbrook was fired for words that were paid for by TNR, words that have no direct relationship to the words that were paid for by ESPN.

I’m also not sure that speech was restricted in any substantial way, at least in the long term. Easterbrook’s main job is to write for magazines like TNR; ESPN was a sideline where he could indulge in his passion for football, bad science fiction and cheerleaders. He’s lost income, but not in a crippling way. Further, there’s nothing to prevent him from continuing TMQB if he wants to. In fact, it looks like someone registered the tmqb.com domain and is offering it to Gregg Easterbrook. It’s trivial to self-publish on the Internet. The hard part is to make money off of it. Easterbrook may not care that much TMQB revenue, but there’s an enthusiastic user community desperately searching for TMQB, and there’s at least one site doing a TMQB homage. It’s likely people would be willing to hit the Amazon tip jar to pay for server costs, if he can be convinced to start writing the column again.

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