A Fall from Grace
A Slip into Stereotype, and a Writer Learns the Fragility of Reputation
Gregg Easterbrook was feeling pretty steamed. It was early morning on Monday, October 13, and Easterbrook, a senior editor at The New Republic, was sitting at his computer preparing to write the latest entry for "Easterblogg", a Weblog he'd launched on TNR's Web site five weeks earlier. Easterbrook had begun the blog at the request of Peter Beinart, TNR's thirty-two-year-old editor, who was eager to get the magazine into the burgeoning blogosphere and thought that Easterbrook, a polymath who seemingly could write with authority on everything from global warming to football, was perfect for the job.
One of Easterbrook's recurring interests is the impact on teenagers of violence in Hollywood films. In a 1999 feature story for The New Republic in the wake of the Columbine killings, he condemned violent movies like Scream, in which twisted teenagers kill their friends. More recently, Easterbrook had used his new blog to chide Mel Gibson, wondering if his new film about the crucifixion of Christ, The Passion, would be "a crass attempt to commercialize Jesus's death via exaggerated gore", given Gibson's record of violent films.
That Monday morning Easterbrook had another movie in his sights: Quentin Tarantino's just-released revenge flick Kill Bill -- Vol. 1. Easterbrook, who had seen the movie over the weekend, was disgusted by its graphic violence and said so in his blog piece. Particularly galling to him was that the movie was being released by Miramax, a division of the Walt Disney Company, ostensibly a family-oriented corporation. As he reached the end of the piece Easterbrook wanted to expand upon the themes of religious values and movie violence that he had raised in the Gibson piece the week before. He wrote:
Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice.
The piece went straight from Easterbrook to the Web site and was posted at 9:24 a.m.
A day or two later, Easterbrook got a phone call from Beinart expressing serious reservations about the language he had used, especially his reference to Jewish executives who worship money above all else, words that brought to mind a durable stereotype. Looking at his piece again Easterbrook agreed it could be seen as offensive. The two discussed whether Easterbrook should edit the language, but agreed it would be a bit Orwellian to change the article after the fact. Also, Easterbrook recalls thinking, the article was just an unnoticed blog piece; why cause a fuss? They decided to leave it alone, but Beinart cautioned Easterbrook to run future articles 'like that' past the editors.
Later, after he'd been pilloried in the pages of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and in dozens of other newspapers, magazines, and Web sites; after he'd been denounced by the Anti-Defamation League as a bigot and fired from a lucrative job writing for ESPN.com; and when it seemed possible, briefly, that Michael Eisner, one of the most powerful men in media, might be out to destroy his career, Easterbrook had a simple thought about that Wednesday-afternoon conversation with Beinart: "If we'd just pressed the delete key, all this never would have happened."
The way Easterbrook almost destroyed in a matter of minutes a career built on twenty years of excellence is a strange and sad tale of the Internet age, in which writers can broadcast ideas to the world almost as fast as they can type. An early graduate of Charlie Peters's writing academy at The Washington Monthly, Easterbrook has long stood out for what Jack Shafer, media critic at Slate, termed his "hyper-logical" journalism. While writing for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Wired, Slate, The New Republic, and other top magazines and newspapers, Easterbrook has shown a unique ability to master arcane subjects and transform them into page-turning stories. In 1980, for example, he wrote a feature story for The Washington Monthly labeling the nascent space shuttle a "death trap," almost six years before Challenger blew up. He has published six books, including the contrarian A Moment On The Earth, which sounded an optimistic note on the environment that enraged environmental activists. Oddly, however, Easterbrooks widest readership was achieved not through writing on religion, science, or social policy, but through his goofy and often brilliant sports column, "Tuesday Morning Quarterback," which began on Slate, and which Easterbrook moved to ESPN.com in 2002. TMQ, as readers call it, is a weekly tour-de-force in which Easterbrook contemplates the mysteries of NFL football through the lens of quantum physics, Japanese haiku, federal antitrust policy, and the light-bending properties of cheerleading megababes.
So how exactly did a writer known for his intellectual rigor and spiritual tolerance stray into a bout of anti-Semitic rambling? That was still a puzzle to the writer himself when I sat down with him at TNR in November. His office overlooks the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, where President Lincoln worshiped and where an early draft of the Emancipation Proclamation is displayed in the Lincoln parlor. Easterbrook said he considers it one of the most historically significant buildings in Washington.
Religion has long been an important subject in Easterbrook's writing, particularly the attempt to reconcile the competing traditions of skeptical inquiry and spiritual faith. His 1998 book, Beside Still Waters, argued that neither science nor religion is fully equipped to answer fundamental ontological questions, and attempted to synthesize the best elements of both. Easterbrook is also a founding staff member and frequent contributor to Beliefnet, a Web site dedicated to multi-faith religious writing. From the beginning, Easterbrook envisioned the TNR blog as giving him space and freedom to write more about religion.
That interest contributed directly to the Kill Bill controversy. Easterbrook believes that everyone, Hollywood stars and media moguls included, should at least consider whether their religious values ought to apply to their professional lives. It's a potentially troubling argument, he admits, and one that he badly mangled in his references to Eisner and Weinstein (and perhaps irrelevant, given that Jewish ethnicity is not necessarily an indicator of faith). But it is undeniably an Easterbrookian idea, one that recurs in his writing. So it is not surprising that Easterbrook felt that raising Eisner's and Weinstein's religious orientation was fair game.
From that starting point Easterbrook's argument essentially was that Eisner and Weinstein should be more sensitive to the glorification of casual violence given the history of violence against Jews. Easterbrook now says that holding the executives to a higher standard than others because of their Jewishness was "simply wrong." But at the time he wrote it, he says, he thought he was merely expanding on the point he had made in the piece about Christians. "I felt that, because I had acknowledged that Christians are guilty of the same thing, I had counterweighted the argument properly," Easterbrook says. He adds: "But when you criticize a Christian, you don't invoke a thousand years of persecution."
The day after Easterbrook's post appeared, the blogosphere picked up on the issue -- in particular, Roger L. Simon, the mystery novelist and screenwriter whose blog is widely read in Hollywood power circles. The exact breakout moment is elusive, but a key juncture came on Thursday, October 16, when Nikki Finke, a writer at LA Weekly, wrote a letter to Jim Romeneskos media Web site calling Easterbrook's argument disgusting. The story hopscotched over to Bernard Weinraub, who covers Hollywood for The New York Times. Weinraub phoned Easterbrook and Beinart for comment after reading the Kill Bill piece on TNR's site. Easterbrook realized that a major controversy was under way.
That day, he set to work with Beinart and Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic's literary editor (Easterbrook called Wieseltier a "total rock" during the controversy, and visibly choked up when discussing his support), to craft Easterbrook's apology to readers. He still viewed the matter as more of a misunderstanding, a matter of some poorly chosen words. But Wieseltier pushed him to see a larger context. Where Easterbrook thought he was criticizing some Hollywood big shots, Wieseltier counseled that the stereotype Easterbrook invoked, with its connotation of greedy executives and a Hollywood cabal, touched upon deep fears about ethnic scapegoating in the Jewish community. Through conversations with Wieseltier, and others at the magazine, particularly Roger Hertog, one of the co-owners, Easterbrook began to better understand how heavily freighted his words had been. The New Republic, ironically, "has spent a generation writing about Jews, Israel, and the elimination of prejudice," as the magazine would later put it. That Thursday night Easterbrook posted an apology.
When he read Weinraub's story in the Times the next day he found it embarrassing but fair. And that, Easterbrook supposed, would be the end of the controversy. "I thought this was fitting punishment for what I did," Easterbrook says. I've had to apologize. I've now been humiliated by an article in the Times. In terms of the cosmic wheel, this is fitting punishment. This wraps it up."
It did not wrap it up. Some found Easterbrook's apology less than abject. "It was basically 'if what I said bothered anyone, then I'm sorry.' That's not an apology," says Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, which issued a statement condemning Easterbrook. That also was the reaction of John Skipper, executive vice-president of ESPN. "It was like what a lot of athletes say: 'I was misunderstood. That's not what I meant.' It was clumsy." Easterbrook politely disagrees with his critics on that point. "If you read carefully, I admitted that bringing up their Jewish identity was simply wrong," Easterbrook says. "I did unilaterally retract that aspect of it."
But Skipper says he felt he had to act. He first learned of the controversy reading Weinraub's story Friday morning while on a flight from New York to St. Louis. When he landed, he called his office in New York and asked that a copy of the Kill Bill story and Easterbrook's apology be sent to his BlackBerry, and asked Neal Scarbrough, editor in chief at ESPN.com, to call Easterbrook and see if there were any mitigating circumstances. Finding none, Skipper decided that afternoon to fire Easterbrook. "I looked at the article and I thought it was anti-Semitic," says Skipper, who retains the slow drawl of his North Carolina roots. Skipper insists the networks recent problem with Rush Limbaugh was not a significant factor in the Easterbrook decision. Some had criticized ESPN for not firing Limbaugh more quickly from the network's Sunday pre-game football show after his odd observation that the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated by the liberal press because he was African-American.
Since ESPN is owned by Disney, the question arose: Did Eisner have anything to do with Skipper's decision to fire Easterbrook? Skipper denies it emphatically. "I still have had no discussion with anyone from the Walt Disney Company on this," he said. "It was my strong intent that this not be elevated; that I make the decision." (Eisner did not respond to calls.)
Back in Washington things weren't looking much better for Easterbrook. At The New Republic, Peter Beinart asked some staff people to spend the weekend combing through Easterbrook's past work to make sure he hadn't written anything similarly offensive. (They gave him a clean bill.) He and Beinart also began personally responding to New Republic readers who, by this time, were phoning in to complain. Easterbrook estimates he apologized to a couple of dozen readers personally. All but one of the conversations ended amicably. At the Los Angeles Times, the writer Tim Rutten was preparing a column attacking Easterbrook as anti-Semitic.
Most ominous of all to Easterbrook, he got word from a source that Michael Eisner was livid about the piece and was personally going to use his influence to punish him. The prospect filled Easterbrook with dread. He'd already lost about half his annual income when ESPN canned him (and expunged all his columns from its archives). The rumor about Eisner also concerned Eric Dezenhall, a Washington media consultant who was helping Easterbrook manage the crisis. Dezenhall, along with Easterbrook, belongs to one of the few joint Christian-Jewish congregations in the nation. He is Jewish, and says he was as surprised as anyone when he read the Kill Bill piece, but still thought the controversy was quickly growing into a witch-hunt. He offered his services pro bono.
The first thing Dezenhall told Easterbrook was that it would be difficult to mount a self-defense: "The problem is anytime you try to explain prejudice you get into a 'some of my best friends are' . . . type thing." Instead, Dezenhall advised Easterbrook to rally others to his defense. On October 18, Easterbrook did just that, sending out an all-points e-mail to a network of media contacts asking them to come to his aid. It recounted the hits he had taken in the media and expressed concern that Eisner was out to destroy his forthcoming book, The Progress Paradox, by keeping him off talk shows, blocking a serialization deal, or even prevailing upon Random House to kill the book outright. (The e-mail also made clear that Easterbrook suspected Eisner was behind the push to fire him from ESPN.com.)
But Easterbrook says that by later that same day he heard -- from the same source at Disney -- that the earlier warnings about Eisner's wrath had been a false alarm. Still, by Sunday Easterbrook was working with Dezenhall and Roger Hertog on letters to Eisner and Harvey Weinstein apologizing for his column. That weekend he also contacted Roger Simon and other influential bloggers who had ripped him earlier in the week to ask their advice about responding to the controversy. They responded favorably. He became a twenty-four-hour crisis management unit, says Dezenhall. A lot of damage control comes down to moral equity -- what do we think of you? Do we like you? The greatest asset Gregg had going for him is that people like him.
By Monday, Easterbrook's frantic efforts seemed to be paying off. In a follow-up e-mail thanking those who had supported him, Easterbrook reported that he thought the crisis had largely passed. The New Republic issued a separate apology to its readers, which the Anti-Defamation League accepted in a follow-up press release. Pieces by Jack Shafer and Mickey Kaus on Slate scolded Easterbrook for his faulty logic, but defended his character. The crisis probably officially ended on Friday, October 24, when Charles Krauthammer, a stalwart champion of Israel and Jewish affairs, wrote a piece in The Washington Post, calling Easterbrook's Kill Bill blog clumsy and stupid, but saying enough was enough: the idea of destroying someones reputation and career over a single slip of this type is not just ridiculous, but vindictive.
By early December, when I last spoke to Easterbrook for this story, he was cautiously optimistic that he might emerge from the incident relatively unscathed, though he still was worried about how it would affect sales of his new book. After a brief hiatus, "Easterblogg" was back and going strong, though it was now inspected by TNR editors before being posted. TMQ had also returned, though on a new Web site, NFL.com, the leagues official site. Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax, had written to accept Easterbrook's apology. Eisner, though, had yet to respond, which clearly troubles Easterbrook. "If he wants me to engage in a public discussion of the dangers of stereotyping and how I learned about them I would be willing to do that," Easterbrook told me. "If it happened, that would be a Disney happy ending, I suppose. Since it is Disney there should be a happy ending, right?"
We'll have to wait and see. Kill Bill -- Vol. 2 should be out soon.
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