As I Steelers fan, I admit that I have little sympathy for NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s recent troubles. Goodell’s crackdown on physical play hit the Steelers particularly hard and damaged a team whose identity was built around its physicality. Although Goodell undoubtedly bungled Ray Rice’s domestic violence case, calls for his resignation demonstrate the shrill way our media deals with controversy.
In February, Rice and his fiancee, Janay Palmer, were arrested on simple assault charges, stemming from a fight the couple had in Atlantic City. Later, footage of Rice dragging Palmer’s unconscious body from an elevator was released by TMZ. In May, Rice was accepted into a pretrial intervention program, allowing him to avoid jail time. Goodell suspended Rice for two games in July — a decision which attracted criticism for being too lenient. Goodell later acknowledged that he had been wrong and announced the implementation of a new, stricter domestic violence policy. On Sept. 8, TMZ published another video — this one showing Rice punching Palmer in the face with enough force to send her flying across the elevator. The graphic and sickening nature of the video produced an even stronger reaction from the media, leading the Baltimore Ravens to release Rice. Goodell suspended him indefinitely and claimed that no one in the league office had seen the tape before TMZ released it — a dubious claim that has been disputed.
“Mr. Goodell is an enabler of men who beat women,” according to ESPN personality Keith Olbermann, in comments that summed up the media’s response to the commissioner's handling of the case. Other pundits compared Goodell to Richard Nixon, including Maureen Dowd in the New York Times and Bill Simmons on Grantland.com.
Now, as he admitted himself, Goodell has handled the situation poorly. To go a little further, his current story, that no one in the NFL office saw the tape, is probably untenable. However, there are three elements of the calls for Goodell’s resignation that bother me because they establish a troubling pattern in the way the media deals with controversy.
1. The people who are calling for his resignation refuse to be satisfied by any change in policy that the commissioner might make. In fact, his various concessions to his critics have only intensified their focus on him. After his opponents won a change in the NFL's domestic violence policy and an extension of Ray Rice's suspension, they were not content. Instead, they moved on to calling for his resignation. The outrage caused by the original controversy has grown shriller and shriller with each new development, despite the NFL’s attempts to correct the problem.
The voices in the media who complained about Goodell’s original decision were undoubtedly right, and they helped correct an injustice. Rice certainly needed to be suspended for more than two games, and the NFL certainly needed to be stricter about domestic violence. However, the further demands they are making now are disproportionate and tangential to the injustice.
In order to be safe from the media's condemnation, it is not enough to be "right" in the present. You need to have always been "right." Goodell is not given any credit or mercy for his change of heart.
2. The calls for resignation amount to a demand that Goodell be punished for deviating from the views of the media. In general, I don't think that private institutions should be forced to conform to the media's standards. Amherst should be able to pick its own president, regardless of Fox News' opinions about politics. Obviously, there are limits on the freedom of private institutions, and the media should draw attention to serious offenses that they commit. However, in this case, attention has been drawn to the NFL’s negligence, and the league has taken steps to correct it. If Goodell resigns, it will be about symbolic change, rather than substantial change. In fact, if Goodell does manage to insulate himself from the media firestorm, it will likely be because someone else in the NFL office falls on his sword. There has already been speculation that the investigation will produce a scapegoat: someone at a lower level than Goodell to take the blame for his mishandling of the situation.
3. The media reaction in Goodell’s case, and in similar cases, is predictable, uniform and absolute. That is, regardless of what a person has done to offend the media’s sensibilities, he is always asked to resign. Social media in general, and Twitter in particular, plays a role in the monolithic nature of our public response to controversy.
Advocates of Twitter argue that it democratizes discourse, and in a literal sense that’s true. Never before have so many ordinary people had the chance to give broadcast opinions on the news. However, there are only so many positions you can take on any given issue, and it’s not much fun to tweet about your moderate position on an issue or how you would rather wait for some more facts before forming a judgment, making Twitter is entirely predictable, especially on controversial issues: the most extreme, attention-getting opinions will be disproportionately represented. In cases where a public figure might have done something wrong, this means calls for him to resign or be fired. Twitter is superficially democratic, but it really just places more power in the hands of people who actually publish stories, and in times of controversy, intensifies demands for heads to roll.
These characteristics of public and media discourse make it easy for powerful people to manipulate, basically by blackmailing someone with the threat of revealing some unflattering piece of information to the media. The case of Bruce Levenson, the Atlanta Hawks majority owner, provides a good example of how scary the threat of a media firestorm can be. On Sept. 7, Levenson announced that he was going to sell his stake in the team because of a racist email he wrote to general manager Danny Ferry in 2012. In the email, Levenson basically said that he thought black fans were scaring white fans away from Hawks' games. While he called the white fans’ biases “racist garbage,” he then proceeded to speculate on ways to replace black fans with white fans because he thought white fans had more money.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver claims that Levenson self-reported the email. However, an investigation of the dynamics of the Hawks ownership group tells a different story. In June, disgruntled minority owner Michael Gearon wrote a threatening letter to Levenson regarding racist comments made by Ferry. The letter anticipated that Ferry’s comments, if made public, could be “fatal to the franchise,” made a reference to the media “having a field day” with them, and demanded that Levenson fire Ferry. Considering the fact that Gearon resented being marginalized in the Hawks’ decision-making process, the subtext is clear: “Get rid of Ferry, or I’ll leak his comments.”
It’s not a big leap to imagine Gearon issuing a similar threat when he learned of Levenson’s email, and it certainly makes more sense than the idea that Levenson’s guilty conscience made him report the email to Silver. Rather than let Gearon leak the email and deal with the inevitable and vitriolic calls for him to sell the team, Levenson decided to report the email, apologize, and go away as quietly as possible.
This is a difficult situation, because it isn’t as though the public can just ignore the email, and its contents make Levenson’s continued ownership of the team unacceptable. However, Levenson’s comments weren’t meant to be public, and they weren’t nearly as offensive as the comments that forced Donald Sterling to sell the Clippers. If everything a person has ever said or written is fair game for judgment against the media’s standard of acceptable public discourse, no person is really safe from embarrassment. Yahoo! NBA columnist Adrian Wojnarowski discussed this reality in a recent column, writing that, in the aftermath of the Levenson story, NBA owners were worried about any number potentially recorded moments, “from race to gay rights to fears of camera phones getting turned on them half-cocked in bars well past midnight.”
No one should shed any tears for Levenson, but the fact that he was essentially blackmailed into selling the Hawks is a little chilling. Maybe the best lesson to take from the mess is that we should turn the rhetoric down a notch, and refrain from demanding the theater of Roger Goodell’s resignation.
