Face it, white men: you’re at the bottom of the hiring totem pole in this crazy age of social engineering, political correctness run amok and affirmative action. Somebody had to pay the price for past prejudices and, according to would-be social engineers, you drew the shortest straw. Poor white guy Ed Werder, laid off in 2017 after 19 years as an award-winning reporter at ESPN, is now the poster boy for the odd-gender out. He's getting royally harpooned on the internet for suggesting Sports Illustrated hire the best candidate for an open writing job rather than rejecting male applicants.
Werder’s Twitter response to Charlotte Wilder, senior writer and host for Sports Illustrated, who encouraged women to apply for a writing job at SI, is now the male chauvinist tweet heard round the world wide web. Knuckle-dragging Neanderthal Ed is suffering verbal beat-downs all over the internet for questioning why he or any other male should not be considered for the SI job. Poor Ed is getting little if any sympathy for suggesting males could be the victims of reverse discrimination.
Here’s the tweet that started the controversy:
Ed’s response:
Wilder immediately dropped the gloves and came out swinging at the challenge: "Oh WOW you're right, Ed, sorry for attempting to make sports media more than 10% female, my bad."
As responses to the Wilder-Werder feud came pouring in, many men and women supported the position that women are entitled for this and other sports media jobs. What's next? Reparations for women who have historically suffered discrimination? No one seems to be bothered by the inequality in sideline reporting, now dominated by women.
Mina Kimes, a senior writer at ESPN The Magazine, jumped in on Wilder’s side: "Encouraging women to apply for a position isn't the same thing as 'excluding' men. it's helping female applicants network, which can be a challenge given the massive gender imbalance in our industry (which I'm sure you know exists)."
Werder defended himself, saying: “My intention was to advocate for an inclusive process. I didn’t mean to offend anyone. Quite the opposite. … I just always associated SI with hiring the best regardless of race, sex and other factors. … Because next week I’m going to be standing in front of a broadcasting class of young people and some will be males and I have to tell them they have the same chance at jobs like those one as all others."
Do an internet search for “Ed Werder” and you’ll see this neanderthal getting pummeled pretty good. Here are a few examples:
“Sports Illustrated is looking to hire an entry-level news writer—an hourly position for 40 hours a week—but Ed Werder is explicitly not allowed to apply for the job, and if he does he’ll be chemically sterilized and thrown into a lion pit, as per company policy.”
“Werder, an NFL reporter who was laid off by ESPN in 2017, could not fathom the idea of encouraging women to apply for a job.”
“Werder urged his critics to think of the children (who are white, male, and have a disproportionately higher likelihood of getting an interview and/or a job than non-white, non-male candidates, which is the entire reason to encourage women and people of color to apply for jobs, so that sports media doesn’t reach its inevitable conclusion and morph into a homogenized Bruce Springsteen fan forum populated by people who believe that the enjoyment of middle-shelf whiskey is interesting enough to be a personality trait).”
“Some of those males do not have the same chance as anyone else, Ed. They have a much better chance.”
Awful Announcing’s Alex Putterman
"If Kimes and Wilder haven’t been able to get through to Werder, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to, but let’s try anyway.
"Women, by all estimates, make up a disproportionately small share of the sports-media industry. They are underrepresented in the ranks of reporters, columnists, editors and nearly every other role in the industry. Despite what people like Werder might say, this is not merely a matter of women lacking interest in these jobs or having lesser qualifications for them. It’s often a result of either explicit or implicit bias against female candidates, of sexual harassment and sexual assault that drives women away and of preconceptions about which roles are appropriate for women and which ones aren’t. In a world where just about every female sports reporter, anchor or analyst has stories of overt sexism, objectification or even harassment, there’s no possible argument that sports media currently represents a true meritocracy."
"So when Wilder tweets that she wants to help female candidates specifically, she’s not trying to bar the door to keep men out. She’s simply hoping to make the industry a bit more hospitable toward women who might otherwise be tempted to run away from people who secretly (or not-so-secretly) wonder whether they belong."
(Fact check note: The source cited by Putterman--Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports--did not cite or substantiate any evidence that women lack interest in sports media employment. Nor did that source include any data on the number of women applying for sports media work and getting rejected by employers. ESPN and the NFL Network are both being sued for sexual harassment. If the allegations of their accusers are true, then women are well advised to avoid working in such unhealthy environments that put themselves at risk.)
The Root’s Stephen A. Crockett Jr.
Headline: "Ex-ESPN Reporter Ed Werder Cries the Whitest Male Tears Over Sports Illustrated Job Posting"
"Somehow, Werder got his knickers (I assume that Werder wears knickers, but admittedly, I don’t know this as a fact) all in a bunch."
"Someone asked Werder why he was so white-man upset, considering that white men dominate sports journalism."
A final word: The people so incensed over Werder's remarks seem to forget that ESPN hired Jessica Mendoza, a former women's college softball player, to broadcast Major League Baseball with no previous experience. Considering the number of more qualified veteran baseball broadcasters, passed over for that job, is there any doubt that the Mendoza hiring was not merit-based? What's next: Rhonda Rousey calling NBA games? That would make as much sense as Kirk Herbstreit calling women's MMA matches.
