The man at the helm of the NFL’s makeover into a social justice empire, Commissioner Roger Goodell is getting his four-year contract renewed. All is well with the billion-dollar sports giant, and it must be one big happy family.
Or is it?
Evidence strongly suggests otherwise. Occurring simultaneously with news of Goodell’s new contract comes word of NFL Media terminating its social justice bulldog, Jim Trotter. At Super Bowl press conferences, he gained notoriety for grilling the commissioner about his claim that the NFL still has a long way to go in achieving diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). And, after this week, he’ll be gone. Trotter said his questioning of the commissioner directly led to his firing.:
I've worked at NFL media for five years. During those five years we've never had a black person in senior management in our newsroom. That's a problem, because we cover a league who, according to league data, the player population is 60-70 percent black, which means that there's no one who looks like these players at the table when decisions are being made about how they're covered. More concerning is that, for a year-plus now, we haven't had a full-time black employee on the news desk.
It’s never a good idea to put your big boss on the hot seat under the bright lights of a Super Bowl press conference. Goodell denied having any control over the newsrooms, Trotter tried to interrupt and the agitated commish asked, "Can I answer your question?" Goodell also treated Trotter’s figures with skepticism.:
I'm not in charge of the newsroom. As you point out, this is the same question you asked last year. I do not know specifically about the media business -- we'll check in again with our people. But I'm comfortable that we made significant progress across the league. I can't answer the specific question -- some of the data you raised there may be accurate, maybe not. Last year, I was told some of it wasn't. We'll get to you on that.
Trotter most likely sealed his impending career doom by also quoting a famous black writer, saying: “As James Baldwin once said, 'I can't believe what you say because I see what you do.'”
On Monday, Trotter said: “The thing that I will say now is that journalism matters, and holding people who are in power accountable matters. And that’s part of our job, regardless of if it’s our own employer or someone else.”
Now that Goodell doesn’t have to worry about his NFL contract for another four years, this week was a safe time for him to can a black subordinate without incurring the wrath of the NAACP and Black Lives Matter.
Trotter is one of many media blacks complaining about the lack of off-the-field diversity throughout the NFL. Now that he’s talked himself out of a job over that topic, one can’t overlook the dust-up within the NFL’s social justice order. NFL media people are, after all, more expendable than NFL players, and are dismissed rather than bought off with a multi-million-dollar initiative.
Goodell and the team owners have invested tens of millions of dollars in the NFL’s Social Justice Initiative and the Players Coalition for the fight against so-called “systemic racism.” They’ve invested nothing to satisfy race-baiting media employees. That’s “justice” in the world of “social justice.”
This story goes to show that, if not for double standards, the Left would have no standards at all.
