Goodell’s comments hard to believe
Back in the 1990s, talk show host Phil Donahue went to court in an effort to broadcast the live execution of a convicted murdered in North Carolina.
Donahue lost his case in the North Carolina Supreme Court. He merely wanted to televise how states methodically snuff-out the lives of death row inmates.
Donahue admits he’s against the death penalty. He undoubtedly believes that executions are a form of murder, but by another means. All of the grim written accounts of a person being paid for their ruthless indiscretions, cannot mask the brutality of the act.
This is not about the death penalty. It’s more about the dispassionate feelings we may have about some things, until we experience them visually. The world became aware of the Nazi atrocities during WWII. The world didn’t fully react to them until after the tragic pictures of Auschwitz and Dachau were shown worldwide.
The abuses at the detention center at Abu Ghraib were first documented during the summer of 2003. The American public reacted with disgust, but not before articles about them were accompanied by pictures of American soldiers dehumanizing prisoners were revealed in April of 2004. Since Abu Ghraib, the state of modern technology has accelerated dramatically.
It seems there are cameras everywhere, and those cameras can beam their pictures to devices that are at everybody’s fingertips – with immediacy. For good or bad, we’re all wired.
Yet, when the earliest reports that a popular running back for the Baltimore Ravens had physically abused his fianc茅 at an Atlantic City casino hit cell phones, tablets and TV screens, the full weight of the event had not been fully realized.
There was more speculation than outrage. Ray Rice may have been vilified in the media, but it was still, mainly, a sports story. The outrage over a serious social ill, was yet to come.
When NFL commissioner Roger Goodell slapped a two-game suspension on and a $530,000 fine on Rice, there was there was more of an uproar, but still no outrage. Somebody must’ve told Goodell that a two-game suspension and a fine that wouldn’t put a tiny dent in the savings account of a man making many more times that, just wasn’t enough.
There became a growing chorus, and not just from the sports media, that violence against any woman should be treated with utmost sincerity. So Goodell hatched a new “domestic violence” policy (one that wouldn’t affect Rice’s punishment), and he admitted he hadn’t handled the Rice affair properly.
“I didn’t get it right,” he sheepishly claimed.
Well, that was that – until last Monday morning.
That’s when people all over the world awakened to the devastating visual聽 proof that Ray Rice had deserved more than a slap on the wrist by the authorities in New Jersey and a wink and a nod from the NFL.
Within hours, the NFL and the Baltimore Ravens distanced themselves from Rice. Non-stop coverage of the new video followed – with assorted calls for Goodell’s head.
Instead of its annual gloat about, yet, another wildly successful Week I of NFL action, the NFL was circling the wagons – and denying it had the ability to have seen the additional video.
That’s a head-scratcher. The National Football League is highly dependent on video. That’s how it delivers its product to the tens of millions of fans who will never sit in a stadium on Sundays.
Without video, there is no NFL. Yet, Goodell and his staff have claimed that a three and a half minute video containing a highly controversial subject, and with serious social repercussions, was beyond their grasp?
That’s hard to swallow. Despite the NFL’s swift, indefinite suspension of Rice, and the Raven’s termination of his contract, the NFL has still not quite learned its lesson.
That instead of there being new “codes of conduct,” for the 1,696 NFL players, there should be a code that says owners and their governing body should聽 never sweep this sort of thing under the rug. They’ve simply run out of rugs!
Edward A. Owens is a three time Emmy Award winner and 20 year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net
Copyright 2014 Al Owens