Aug. 19, 2010
It’s common knowledge that it’s a mistake to take a knife to a gunfight. The same is true for reporters who wear a Gator hat to an Hog event.
Renee Gork made that mistake – and killed her job as a radio sports reporter –after she wore a Florida Gators hat to an Arkansas Razorback football media conference over the weekend of Aug. 14-15, according to reports from Arkansas sports blog The Slophouse and other news accounts.
Gork lasted less than a month as a host with KAKS, which calls itself Hog Sports Radio. She’s a University of Florida grad who says she wasn’t thinking when she grabbed the hat on Saturday morning.
After Arkansas coach Bobby Petrino replied to the substance of a question Gork asked, he concluded by saying: “And that will be the last question I answer with that hat on.”
The video of his answer hit the Internet and, as usual, caused a fight… Less than two days later, she tweeted that she had been fired before her next on-air shift, when she would have apologized. (Her Twitter account has since been removed, but Slophouse’s screenshot shows tweets offering her apologies.)
“It was just a dumb mistake,” Gork said in a radio interview. In that interview she noted that she spent years covering pro and college sports and “can watch a game without being a fan” – including Florida games.
While station manager Dan Storrs wouldn’t comment on personnel matters, he dropped a hint: “This radio station is Hog Sports Radio. We are very biased. We support the Razorbacks 100 percent.”
Arkansas’ sports media relations on Aug. 17 issued an statement saying it “did not request any employment action” to the station related to Gork, but athletic department officials “did communicate to the reporter that her attendance at Monday’s practice was not recommended to allow additional time to pass.”
It’s worth pointing out that we don’t know whether there were other job-related issues that contributed to her dismissal, or whether the hat was the sole reason for the firing. (Some talk says she posted some pro-Florida comments on her Facebook account, but I have not heard anyone ask her directly about that. She also noted that the radio station told her she couldn’t keep the job if she didn’t have access to the team and its officials.)
Even if that’s true, it may not matter in terms of public opinion, given that the firing happened directly after the hat incident.
Analysis:
This is neither a legal nor a First Amendment issue, but it has ethical implications that you can hang your hat on.
It’s not a First Amendment issue because the radio station has speech rights, too. Its hiring and firing decisions can be based on the message (audio or image) it wants to send to its audience.
As an aside, radio host Laura Schlesinger is wrong when she said she lost her First Amendment rights after receiving heavy criticism for using the N-word multiple times on a show. She said on Larry King Live: “I want to regain my First Amendment rights. I want to be able to say what’s on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, attack sponsors. I’m sort of done with that.” The First Amendment gives her the right to say what she wants – but it says nothing about her having a national network to do that. The amendment also gives others the right to criticize her and, to some degree, to pressure her advertisers. And, as said before, the First Amendment gives the station the right to make its decisions, too. Plenty of courts have ruled that employers have the right to limit the speech and other activities of their workers, and that may well apply in this case.
The radio station has the right to hire and fire at will, as long as obeys the law and meets its contractual obligations. (It is unclear whether she had a contract.) A lawsuit against the station would likely go nowhere, given that Arkansas is a “right-to-work” state that gives employers wide latitude when deciding when and whether to dismiss employees.
As far as ethics goes, AOL Fanhouse.com writer Clay Travis argues that Gork did nothing unethical. “All Gork did was wear a hat of another team and give an entire posse of Internet Colombos a chance to uncover that, in essence, she’s exactly like them, a fan of an SEC school. Indeed, by advocating for her firing, all one group of fans did was argue that fans are not to be trusted. Think about this, fans arguing that fans are not to be trusted is a peculiar form of self-loathing. The irony is mind-boggling.”
At face value, it can be argued that the incident does not involve a question of ethics. It could be considered a non-moral issue of performance—Gork worked for an acknowledged pro-Hogs organization, so she should have tossed all her Florida apparel once she took the job and be circumspect in her personal views. Moreover, she had lived in the state for seven years, so she should have known just how hog wild college enthusiasts can be. Her job essentially depended upon that fan enthusiasm, so carefulness was key.
While many media workers cover teams or universities that are athletic rivals of their alma maters, they should be able to (at best) perform their job with a level of professional objectivity – or, in her case, be the Hog junkie she was hired to be. Simply put, she had an assigned relationship (Black and Roberts, 2011, p. 18) that required her to show allegiance to Arkansas athletics. (Again, it’s unknown to us whether that allegiance was formally stated, or simply understood because of the nature of her job and employer.) In an ESPN interview, she said it would have been even more unprofessional to wear an Arkansas hat.
But it could be argued that the station acted unethically (but legally) if it fired her solely because of the hat incident. It’s hard to imagine any circumstance in which wearing the wrong hat rises to a firing offense, unless it’s a hard hat at a construction site.
W.D. Ross might argue that her mistake was non-maleficent, since it did no real harm beyond causing a second or two of embarrassment. Ross might also say that the employer was ethically wrong by not providing her an opportunity to provide reparation for her mistake (Black and Roberts, p. 184). It could further be argued that the radio station’s action helped create the environment that led to its quick trigger. It’s admittedly “very biased” approach to covering the Hogs leaves its employees little room for error as it caters to Hogsofile fans who may see conspiracy or anti-Arkansas motives in every action that does not (as the station manager says) “support the Razorbacks 100 percent.” It’s a capital mistake to ascribe to evil that which can be explained by stupidity.
What ethical obligation does Petrino have, if any? As of this writing, there has been no evidence that he has made any further statement about what happened—even to acknowledge that he might have been joking, or whether he would have answered another question if she had immediately taken off her hat. (Gork says an Arkansas sports information official told her it was no joke.)
At one level, Petrino has no obligation to say anything else about the issue, assuming the station made its decision with no input from Petrino or University of Arkansas officials. On the other hand, he may well have an ethical obligation to speak out if he feels he contributed to the unfair dismissal of someone who has less power than he has. He would be magnanimous about a mistake that seems innocuous too all except the most prickly.
An Aug. 20 update: Petrino answered a question about the incident, saying: “I don’t know much about the intention from the national media. When the incident happened here, there was never an intention to see it escalate the way that it did. But that kind of got out of our control.” His answer on Thursday — days after the event occurred — suggests that he was a bystander in the incident, as if he could not have said something sooner as it “got out of control.” Too bad the reporter asked about whether he was surprised by the national attention, not whether Petrino could have acted differently.