A fireable offense?

The White House press secretary crossed a line earlier this week when she implicitly recommended that ESPN fire anchorperson Jemele Hill for having called the President a "white supremacist" in a tweet. The network only went so far as to dissociate itself from her statement, and to publicize her acknowledgment that the tweet was inappropriate. Needless to say, this hasn't satisfied some people who, as usual, see a double standard at work. They recall that ESPN fired baseball analyst Curt Schilling for posting "anti-transgender" content on his Facebook page, and feel that Hill's comment about the President was at least as offensive as Schilling's post. On the other side of the debate, no doubt, distinctions will be drawn between Schilling's presumptive "hate speech" and Hill's personal political commentary. More so than in the Schilling case, the Hill case has been controversial because, as an anchor, she is presumed to speak in some way for ESPN. My call would be that unless her Twitter account has "ESPN" in the name anywhere, it should be seen as representing no other opinion than her own. That would be true for Schilling's Facebook page, too, but there, apparently, whatever he said or shared about trans people was deemed beyond the pale for a public figure. Should we feel likewise when someone makes a charge against the President in the face of his explicit repudiations, however little believed, of white supremacism? Trump himself, who appears to have only just joined the discussion today, seems to demand no more than an apology while claiming, as he always does, that his critics in the media are and have been losing popularity. Is he entitled to even that? Those who recall his unapologetic dabbling in birtherism think not,while many others, rationally or not, find his statements against racism grudging at best and probably insincere.

Is there any formula for moral equivalence between Hill's anti-Trump tweet and Schilling's anti-transgender whatever? It's hard to see the former as "hate speech" in the usual sense of that term, since Hill was criticizing an individual, albeit on subjective suspicion, while Schilling presumably disrespected an entire group of people. Trump supporters may feel disrespected by Hill's tweet, but it's hard to believe that their sense of identity is offended in any similar way -- presuming, of course, that any transgender person took offense upon actually reading Curt Schilling's Facebook page. It could be argued, however, that these social-media smears are approximately equivalent in their slanderousness -- that there could be a moral equivalence between disrespecting a group of people and maliciously lying about an individual. Is it slanderous to call Trump a white supremacist? Some would say it's self-evidently so in light of Trump's statements post-Charlottesville, but can they forbid anyone from thinking that the President was practicing white-man's taqiyya on this explosive subject? It won't be hard to find people ready to argue that this or that action of the President, including even his reiteration yesterday that both white supremacists and their antagonists had shares in the blame for the Charlottesville violence. In the 21st century, can a public official (or anyone) compel people to take him at his word by treating the refusal to do so as slander? Can Donald Trump -- or, some might ask despairingly, any white person -- prove a negative on this point so conclusively that no one would have a right to question his stance? It seems impossible, especially when the proof demanded by many is conflated with ideological tests by those who see Republican economic policies as racist in some way. This may seem unfair, but it explains why many people see the press secretary's statement as an un-American attempt at intimidation, and not as a defense of the President's honor. Nor is this anything new in our history. The difficulty of establishing the truth of certain points of controversy probably was a big reason why calling someone a liar 200 years ago was effectively to challenge him to a duel, or to invite a beating in the street. You might not be able to make someone believe you, but you might have a better chance at simply shutting him up. Back then, of course, dueling was a gentlemen's game, and it was a gentleman's prerogative to cane an inferior in the street for calumny. We probably don't want to go back to those rules in our more egalitarian age, but we still need to work out a new etiquette for the social-media age, as it becomes increasingly easy for people, whether presidents or reporters, to speak their minds without thinking.