No One Cares That You're Right
The Washington Commanders fired their VP of Content after he was entrapped making statements the NFL disapproved of, and that contained shades of truth. Why firing someone who speaks truth says more about those doing the firing than it does about the person, and why sports are not for "everyone."
Earlier this year, an employee from internet provocateur and undercover investigator James O’Keefe's media company matched on Hinge with an NFL team executive. The employee went on two dates with this executive.
The employee leveraged the intimacy of the setting to lure the executive into divulging a wide-ranging mix of opinion and fact – apparently honest, much of it plausible or correct, some of it outlandish or characterized by the very criticisms he leveled at others – about the NFL.
The employee secretly filmed the executive's comments during their dates.
O’Keefe’s company then leaked the footage of the executive's remarks, embarrassing both the executive, the manifold subjects of the remarks, and themselves.
Just hours after O’Keefe released the footage, the Commanders suspended the executive, pursuant to an internal investigation. Said investigation must have wrapped up even faster than the one about the Shohei Ohtani betting scandal, because the executive, Washington Commanders Vice President of Content Rael Enteen, was fired by lunchtime the following day.
And oh, what content he provided.
The "team" fired Enteen, but let's be clear: the NFL insisted he be fired immediately.
“The language used in the video runs counter to our values at the Commanders organization,” the Commanders said in a statement. The Commanders and their image and "values' are a component part of the league's overall image and its values. What this statement really means is that Enteen's language ran counter to the NFL's image and values.
We examine Enteen's language in detail below. He didn't use it to discuss his own values, other than to say he was not racist or homophobic. Displaying such is standard fare - surely he did not get in trouble for doing so. He used language instead to characterize other people's values. This is bad enough to get you in trouble when those other people are powerful.
That the league invokes the morally charged term "values" is a good reminder that it doesn't – it cannot – have values, that it believes above all else in the unwinnable aspect of public perception, that certain societally popular movements and ideas underpin the right perception while others underpin the wrong perception.
It reminds us that sports aren't for everybody, even if everybody consumes them.
It tells us that what matters is whoever delivers a message, and the methods by which that message is delivered, not the accuracy of the message itself.
And it illustrates that no one – not even those whose multimedia supposedly empowers brave citizens – cares whether you're right.
The Commissioner
I. Rael Talk: What Did He Say?
In spite of his lack of tact, I hold in a sort of romantic, chagrined esteem those who do what Enteen did.
Perhaps it's attributable to years of working in the corporate arena. Perhaps it's attributable to frequently witnessing the causes that Big Business and Popular Culture self-consciously gravitate toward (shaping the winners and losers or society's morality battle misnomered as "good" and "evil"). Perhaps it is reflective of a fear of relationships that never give voice to honesty, and instead linger in the darkness of affectation.
Whatever the reason, I find these people both irresponsible and insightful, doomed and daring. They are in increasingly small supply, because their very nature mandates they'll be expunged by more powerful forces, like someone who points a gun at a cop.
They're this mix of Dostoyevsky's archetype of the Holy Fool, the Dead Boeing Whistleblower Duo, and a walking HR violation. They're devoted to a consistent belief system and not to what society values from minute to minute, they believe that they're divulging truth whose revelation is inconvenient for people trying to take or hold onto money and power, and they usually lack tact or polish in how they present what they believe to be true.
