Thursday, August 24, 2017

ESPN Shows Why Corporations Should Not Be Our Moral Arbiters



By Elliot Kaufman
Thursday, August 24, 2017

‘Amid this turbulence,” the New York Times breathlessly reported, “a surprising group of Americans is testing its moral voice more forcefully than ever: C.E.O.s.”

Vox upped the ante, explaining: “After Charlottesville, CEOs have become our public conscience.” The piece’s original title, “Corporations are replacing churches as America’s conscience,” was even more arresting.

But the real face of corporate morality was not in the wind of herd-mentality withdrawals from useless presidential advisory boards, and it was not in the earthquake of boring condemnations of “hatred.” No, it was revealed in the dumpster fire that was ESPN’s decision to pull an Asian-American sportscaster named Robert Lee from the coverage of a University of Virginia football game, on the sole basis that he shares two names with Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general.

— Tim Alberta (@TimAlberta) August 23, 2017

ESPN explained in a statement: “We collectively made the decision with Robert to switch games as the tragic events in Charlottesville were unfolding simply because of the coincidence of his name. In that moment it felt right to all parties. It’s a shame that this is even a topic of conversation and we regret that who calls play by play for a football game has become an issue.”

This is, on its face, absurd. Nobody was making an issue out of the name of Asian sportscaster Robert Lee (who, just in case college-football fans might have been confused, is not a general or a Confederate defender of slavery). ESPN did that itself.

In fact, that’s the crucial point: ESPN was not just ready to accede to nonsensical, hypersensitive left-wing orthodoxies, but willing to create new orthodoxies that didn’t even exist yet. It self-censored even when it did not have to, acting to narrow its own boundaries of acceptable speech. As Vox put it, “It’s not just virtue-signaling, but virtue creating.” Big corporations are now enforcers, not victims, of political correctness.

The New York Times was right, in a sense. “The C.E.O.s had found their voice,” concluded their fawning article. But top-flight executives are not pre-teen girls who have finally mustered up the confidence to speak; they are savvy representatives of their shareholders’ interests. ESPN, like all the Fortune 500 companies that leapt to boycott or threaten Indiana and North Carolina over their religious-liberty and transgender-bathroom laws, knew that the safest thing they could do was to get out ahead of a left-wing mob.

As National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty put it, “they chose the enmity they know how to handle.” American Airlines, the NCAA, and Bank of America knew they could side with the Left and withstand whatever opposition right-wingers could muster over North Carolina. Accordingly, they solidified a new orthodoxy, making clear that allowing men and women to use bathrooms without the company of confused members of the opposite sex, and not forcing bakers to participate in gay weddings, were now beyond the pale. ESPN did the same: It probably figured it could take in stride any fallout from conservative mockery. Far more dangerous would be to risk upsetting the delicate mores of the Left. That’s how ESPN out-policed the PC police.

Corporate appeasement of the Left is necessary because the Left takes scalps. Mozilla pushed out its CEO and co-founder, Brandon Eich, because he donated to an anti-gay-marriage referendum campaign. Just a mere “senior software engineer” at Google, James Damore never had a chance with his violation of orthodoxy in a memo exploring male-female differences. By contrast, conservative boycotts, whether against Disney or Ben & Jerry’s, inevitably seem to fail. However, in response to Chick-fil-A’s COO’s opposition to gay marriage, the mayors of Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco — wielding substantial market power between them — threatened to exclude the restaurant from their cities.

Corporations want to avoid that at all costs. However, here they run into a difficulty: The Left’s social-media mobs are unpredictable. CEOs never know when their corporation will be attacked, even if it’s just for not condemning the latest outrage, not opposing Donald Trump, or not boycotting an entire state. The only way to not get left behind is to get ahead.

Freddie deBoer, a far-left writer, summarizes the problem on the Left well:

The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now  —  the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad.

Some companies struggle in vain. Walmart, for example, has invested $100 million in economic-mobility programs. The world’s biggest oil companies joined together to urge President Trump to stay in the Paris Agreement on climate change. Corporations tripped over themselves to put out gay-pride-themed brands and advertisements.

As perhaps they should — contra Vox, “America’s conscience” does not reside in corporate boardrooms. CEOs have legal responsibilities to put their shareholders first, even before the common good, in some cases. Our “moral voice” must put the people first.

As ESPN and many previous examples have shown us, this often means that corporations will be risk-averse and choose to side with the Left on contentious social issues. Bandwagoning onto the right side of History and advancing the frontiers of political correctness and social coercion, these powerful companies have found that the safest way to avoid the mob is to lead it.

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