RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sure you are aware — you undoubtedly have heard about ESPN using a racial slur in two separate stories about the new basketball sensation Jeremy Lin of the New York Knicks. ESPN, on their website, early in the morning on Saturday put a headline or subheadline up. Lin had not had a good game, and they actually… Somebody at ESPN, who’s been fired for this now, wrote a headline. I don’t even think I should say the word in the headline, even though I’m quoting them. Well, actually no. Actually, I have used the word but not the way they did. I use it all the time.
Their headline said about Jeremy Lin, who is Asian-American: “Chink in the Armor.” (interruption) Who said he didn’t know it was offensive? (interruption) Oh, oh, come on! The reporter, the headline writer, said he didn’t know that was offensive? Oh… (interruption) What a crock! He said he didn’t know it was a racial slur. Anyway, what happened is they fired the guy who wrote the headline. An anchor on ESPN actually read the headline but because he didn’t write it he only got suspended for 30 days. So the headline writer at ESPN was canned. The anchor who read it is suspended for 30 days. Now, here’s where ESPN blew it. I’ll give you people at ESPN a little guidance here, a little lesson.
If you would have just mocked his Christianity, everything would have been fine, and the headline writer might have been promoted. If you would have come up with the word “devout” or “failing faith” or some such thing in your headline, you would have been celebrated as a hero inside ESPN! You took a shot at the wrong thing. You took a shot at the ethnicity, where you shoulda taken a shot is at his Christianity, if you’re gonna take a shot at the guy. I know these people at ESPN. I know how they think. But nobody would have blinked an eye if they woulda made fun of him for being a Christian and made some headline about how his Christian faith failed him during the game.
I hope you people at ESPN learned this. We want the best for everybody here at the EIB Network. I really hope you’ve learned a lesson here. It’s perfectly fine to make fun of anyone’s religious beliefs as long as they’re Christian, but you can never mock their ethnicity unless they’re white. Now, I also was reading… Most Mondays I read Peter King’s web column at SportsIllustrated.com called Monday Morning Quarterback. And Peter King has a hilarious entry about this, and it’s quite telling. What did I do with it? Oh, here it is. It’s on the second page. Here’s the entry by Peter King. It’s in the ten things he thinks, the very last page of his Web piece. “Great job with your cover story in SI this week, Pablo Torre, telling America lots it didn’t know about Lin …
“Amazing in this day and age that in college, in the Ivy League, for crying out loud, Lin got peppered with slurs like ‘chink’ and ‘sweet and sour pork!” on the road.” So Peter King says we would expect these kind of slurs in Hickville, but not in the Ivy League! Oh, my God, what is happening? He got slurred in the Ivy League? How can that be? (laughing) That’s funny to me. The Ivy League! He can’t believe that there would be this kind of political incorrectness in the Ivy League. This is the kind of stuff that happens, you know, in Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, what have you. So, anyway, Jeremy, I heard him asked (paraphrased), “What do you think about this?” He said, “No, I don’t care. I don’t worry about it. I’ve heard it before. The guy apologized. No big deal.” He’s not caught up in it.