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NBC Sports, NY Times, TVWeek

ESPN Fires Curt Schilling

Apr 21, 2016  •  Post A Comment

ESPN has fired former Major League pitcher Curt Schilling, with the last straw coming when Schilling “shared a disgusting anti-transgender meme on Facebook and followed it up with supportive comments which took a distinct, inflammatory side in the ongoing debate about access to public facilities for transgender people,” NBC Sports reports.

ESPN released a statement Wednesday night, saying: “ESPN is an inclusive company. Curt Schilling has been advised that his conduct was unacceptable and his employment with ESPN has been terminated.”

Schilling had been working with ESPN since 2010 in various baseball analyst roles, including doing analysis on “Sunday Night Baseball.” His tenure included a number of controversies, including his removal from “Sunday Night Baseball” and from coverage of the Little League World Series in 2015 after Schilling allegedly posted a Twitter meme likening Muslim Jihadism to Nazi Germany.

Schilling had most recently been seen on ESPN’s “Monday Night Baseball.”

“In the past he had also gotten into controversies regarding the teaching of evolution and, last month, was on a radio show when he said that Hillary Clinton should ‘be buried under a jail somewhere.'” NBC Sports notes. “By some counts, Schilling has had no less than seven separate instances in which he came under scrutiny for his social media habits.”

The New York Times reports that Schilling’s Facebook post this week “appeared to respond to the North Carolina law that bars transgender people from using bathrooms and locker rooms that do not correspond with their birth genders. The post showed an overweight man wearing a wig and women’s clothing with parts of the T-shirt cut out to expose his breasts. It says: ‘LET HIM IN! to the restroom with your daughter or else you’re a narrow-minded, judgmental, unloving racist bigot who needs to die.’”

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2 Comments

  1. Outraged conservatives, and the generally uninformed, will call ESPN’s firing of Schilling a violation of free speech. But whether or not you agree with what Schilling posted, it has to be acknowledged that when a PUBLIC figure posts on his PUBLIC social media account, he is representing the company he works for, and a major media outlet like ESPN has the right to terminate any employee who goes public with views that contradict those of the company, particularly those that cause potential harm to their business. The fact that Schilling was warned multiple times about the same issue and continued to cross the line shows that he didn’t take his job too seriously anyway, so we need not feel bad for him.

  2. Schilling’s an asshole and deserves to be fired. ESPN has a transgender reporter, Christina Karl (may have botched the last name spelling) who works baseball coverage. I can’t believe she was about to put up wih this guy’s shit. I’m sure FOX News will be happy to hire Schilling to cover baseball and mouth off on how the game’s been ruined since they let in the darkies or whatever racist bullshit he’ll happily spew on screen.

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