A Lesson in the Confluence of Politics, Religion, and Sport

Appearing on the Mike and Mike morning show on ESPN radio, Bonnie Bernstein recently made some comments that have been taken as inappropriate by some—enough so that she even issued an apology, stating that she had learned a lesson by the reactions to the comment. As Bernstein explained it in her apology, “Lesson learned: Religion and politics have no place on public airwaves at a sports network. That's definitely a credo I will live by from this point forward.” While some have defended this as a good example of making a mistake, learning a lesson, apologizing, and moving on, this was entirely the wrong lesson to learn. I won’t go into too much detail about how horribly wrong of a lesson to learn this is; writing for AOL’s “fanhouse,” Michael David Smith does a good job of explaining why that lesson is so wrong. On that point, I agree with Smith adamantly. As I see it, if we stop talking about politics and religion and how they connect with sports, we may as well just give up any hope of democracy. Go see numerous posts on The Agon for some excellent discussions of some of the ramifications of not talking about how religion and politics intersect with sports.

Still, I disagree with Smith’s ultimate assessment as well. As Smith put it, “what's wrong is that Bernstein took such a serious matter as Palestinian suicide bombers and applied it so flippantly. And what's even worse is that she suggested that all Palestinians are taught that being a suicide bomber is something to aspire to, which is patently false. For that, she did not apologize. She should.” As I read what Bernstein was saying, I think there is the attempt to be sensitive to these issues; I really don’t read this as flippant at all, particularly as Bernstein said things like “I'm not making the comparison or the analogy.” To some degree, her attempts at this in the initial comments end up falling into a similar trap as her apology. She says, for instance, “I'm prefacing this by saying this is in no way an analogy to sports because I know we live in a hypersensitive society,” which suggests the reason to be cautious is not to make sure that the analogy is contextualized appropriately, but simply to make sure “sensitive” people don’t get offended by it. This just says not to say anything that might be controversial so as not to lose audiences (and, thus, customers, since this is a capitalist structure we’re talking about). To follow Smith’s advice, though, I think, would damn the comment to a problem that would be similar to that of proceeding with the idea that politics or religion and sport do not mix. It seems like Bernstein was making a connection that contained some potential insight. Much of the study of history, literature, sociology, and other fields in the humanities and social sciences ask us to see and articulate connections among various phenomena. Bernstein seemed to be doing just that in a way that had potential to point out the degrees to which individuals are raised in environments in which so many of the messages that they receive tell them something that they come to believe those messages—even if those messages convey something that’s not in their best interests or something that might not be a very good thing to believe. Thus, we need to recognize the role of these kinds of repeated messages when we look at why things are the way they are, whether it’s a lack of focus on education in lieu of false senses of the promise of sports or it’s a willingness to become a suicide bomber for religious convictions. Frankly, recognizing those kinds of connections seems to be a fundamental part of the study of things like culture, communication, and the structures of societies. To suggest that people not articulate these kinds of connections when they make them seems to stifle what can be productive discourse.

Rather, I would suggest that the lesson to be learned is to be more effective in articulating these points. Be more nuanced in the statements that one makes, articulating them in a way that more fully recognizes the complexities, as well as both the advantages and limitations, of one’s analogies. And when you add disclaimers, do so in a way that illustrates recognition of nuance, complexity and limitation. Otherwise, we have what so much of discourse today seems to be: a war between arguments that one shouldn’t have to be sensitive and arguments that one shouldn’t articulate connections that are potentially controversial because they might alienate people. Neither of these seems to be particularly useful for democratic dialogue. I tend to think that when people (usually from a conservative perspective, but not always) scream about “political correctness,” it’s a lazy excuse for not wanting to have to think about things and do the work to articulate oneself more effectively. They don’t want to have to deal with nuance. A case in point is that I’ve literally heard Rush Limbaugh explicitly suggest on his radio show that nuance is bad. Yet, if these folks have a legitimate point, it’s that the responses to them are usually overwhelmingly lacking. Responses tend to be reactionary, calling for people to be fired, to be censored, or to be in some other way made to feel like they should come to the same conclusion and take the same approach as Bernstein—i.e., just not talk about certain things anymore. When people feel like they just have to “shut up,” then I’d think democracy is definitely not being served. I think Don Imus is a good example. When, for instance, he made his comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, he lost his job when the media organizations for which he worked felt pressure to do something. Yet, this galvanized a whole group of people to yell about political correctness, it provided little forum to engage Imus’s comments publicly toward greater insight that might serve democracy, and it just allowed MSNBC and CBS Radio to steer away from any significant social issues this might bring up and, basically, stick their capitalist feet in the way of productive dialogue. A better course might have been to force Imus to devote an hour of his show to co-hosting with someone who is more sensitive to issues of race; the entire hour would be devoted to productive discourse about issues of race.

I suppose, though, that that course of action might not be seen as “good television” or “good radio.” Productive discourse doesn’t provide the drama of combatants holding to their black and white positions and duking it out like boxers to see who wins. To borrow a phrase from ABC’s Wide World of Sports and the late Jim McKay, nuance tends to lack “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” Drama and nuance tend to work as opposites and since so much of our media culture works on drama, nuance tends to be what goes by the wayside. And, so, we get dramatic declarations like Bernstein’s that politics or religion and sports don’t mix.

As Smith’s article reported, the National Arab American Journalists Association, which was among those who publicly criticized Bernstein’s remarks, responded to Bernstein’s apology. In their response, they “called Bernstein's statement ‘a genuine apology that expressed ESPN's and Dr. Bernstein's embrace of diversity and fairness’ and added Bernstein to its Honor List.” Oh, great. How, according to this response, does one embrace diversity and fairness and attain honor? By declaring oneself closed to looking at the politics of practices in places like sport. Hmmm … that sounds like the opposite of working toward diversity and fairness to me.