Curt Schilling, Victim Of Terrible Reporting, Fires Back At Media Tormentors

Last week we were treated to the spectacle of former Boston Red Sox pitching great and TV baseball analyst Curt Schilling being removed from ESPN’s Little League World Series broadcasts because he shared an infographic on Twitter making the comparison between Nazism and radical Islam.

The stupidity of the controversy, and ESPN’s overreaction to it, was enough to generate outrage across the conservative spectrum, but in left-wing media the narrative was a bit different. In fact, at a leftist site masquerading as a sports blog called Awful Announcing, someone named Dan Levy ripped into Schilling for the awful sin of tweeting A PICTURE OF HITLER in the infographic making the comparison between radical Islam and Nazism.

Schilling, who apparently has had enough of his media treatment, sent Levy an e-mail, which the latter immediately posted to his blog…

I have zero issues, ever, with anyone that wants to disagree, call me on something, yell at me for something else or just MF me because I am a Conservative American who loves the soldiers and the flag and everything they stand for and am incapable of answering any question yes/no. I made mistakes, and given what the Bible has told me I’ll do so every day for the rest of my life. Certainly not intentional, never racial and I have tried to never be malicious. I hate bullies.

All I ever ask is honesty and an attempt at integrity.

But if you want to rip me, or talk shit about me, please do it with more than an ounce of pride in your job. Nowhere, ever, before during or after, have I ever compared “Muslims” to “Nazis”, ever. Normal every day peace loving Muslims have as much to do with “radical” as I do with “fleet afoot”.

However it appears, like many, you ‘made me say it’ anyway.

Here’s a cut and paste of what you wrote

heinous as Schilling’s tweet comparing Muslims to World War II-era Nazis

And here’s what was actually tweeted

..”only 5-10% of Muslims are Extremists”

Why would you omit the one word in that entire tweet that provides the only important piece of context other than WWII era Nazism?

I bet I know. Because without rigging your comment to be something it wasn’t, you would have had to search for an article and work to create content. You chose to make it up, ‘misremember’ as best you can, and create something that didn’t exist because it was the ‘flavor of the day”. Even if it wasn’t true> Very Chris Mortensen of you.

I don’t have a racist bone in my body, never have. Anyone that knows me even a little knows that.

Yet you, like so many others, continue to destroy what’s left of the publics trust and confidence in media by creating a story of your own design and liking when you didn’t need to, and smearing someone’s reputation ato do it. Any thought at all as to my children and their thoughts if they read the lie you created? That’s an honest question. I dealt with it in my home, but I always wonder when people of your ilk give ruining someone a shot, if you ever do think about the family you impact. Especially when you are creating a story that never happened to do it.

And for what it is worth I apologized for tweeting. The forum was about as poor a choice as I could have made in trying to elicit a potential discussion on that topic. I did not, and will not apologize for the content of the tweet. If you, or anyone else, can’t wrap your head around your native language enough to understand that omitting words, or adding them, is plain and simple lying when it comes to journalism. Oh and it changes the content of a quote when you do that too. But you already knew that. But to paraphrase, when a radical minority is opposed by a silent and weak majority, really really bad stuff can, and has, and likely will again, happen.

Levy then fired back at Schilling with some of the worst liberal drivel imaginable. A sample…

To your points, if you want to question a fact, or even my general writing ability, I can handle that. If you want to question my integrity, when it’s clear this is the first thing you have ever read with my name attached, I think you’re jumping into a pool your current employer would find disheartening. You have no idea how hurtful your messages are to people, so you can hide behind your love of soldiers, the flag and the bible all you want, but what you publish is vile and racist, no matter what Sarah Palin says in your defense. That has nothing to do with my integrity. In fact, while I have written several times about your situation, I did not write the article you linked to. That was another one of our writers.

Curt, you used an image with Hitler doing a Seig Heil. You don’t think that’s going to light a flame under people? You do know that graphic you posted on Twitter and Facebook is framed to suggest that Americans need to be vigilant when it comes to Muslims, that we never know “which” 5-10% are extremists, so we should suspect all of them before they take over the world and enslave and murder us. You can hide behind the numbers, though you’ve already admitted how off-base the notion is that there were only 4% of Germans who were Nazis when Hitler and the Nazi party were elected into office before murdering millions of people (mostly my people, for what that’s worth to you), but that’s what the message you posted really says to people. To suggest I omitted words to shift the narrative is paranoid. We’ve written several times on you in the last week, including posting the original tweet in full, with links back to it every time for reference. I chose not to use the imagery in my most recent article because I find the use of Hitler to be appalling, and would prefer it never be used in public forums.

Curt, you used an image with Hitler! You work for ESPN! Keith Olbermann was suspended for calling Penn State people dumb one time. How is this your reaction to an article about your suspension?

You can suggest you don’t have a racist bone in your body. That’s fine, and I genuinely hope it’s true. But I’ve read your Facebook page. I’ve seen the messages you post. I disagree.

You recently posted a graphic on Facebook with this joke: “A friend of mine just started his own business in Afghanistan. He’s making land-mines that look like prayer mats. It’s doing well. He says prophets are going through the roof!”

Do you want to dissect the racism in that? Because at this point I do. This joke suggests that anyone in Afghanistan deserves to be blown up. That it would be funny if someone who would buy a prayer mat—a Muslim, most likely—would be killed by a land-mine. The punchline is about murdering people because of their beliefs, Curt. Murdering them.

That joke doesn’t say anything about extremists. Or ISIS. Or jihadists. It says Afghanistan, prayer mat and prophets. What if someone had posted that joke about an American church? How would you feel?

Schilling’s fight with Levy probably brings to an end any chance of returning to ESPN, as that network’s increasing politically-correct bent won’t allow for an outspoken conservative willing to defend his point of view. But as Andrew Mark Miller noted, so be it

Curt is absolutely correct that the media covered the story in a dishonest way in order to paint him as a racist. “Islamophobic” is the new made up term that the left uses to describe anyone who speaks out against the rampant atrocities being carried about by Muslim extremists in the Middle East on a daily basis.

The media has no problem attacking conservatives and labeling them as racists without any evidence whatsoever and the point he made about his family was an important one.

This email figures to rub ESPN the wrong way and it is very possible we have seen the last of Schilling on the network.

However, Schilling will leave ESPN with absolutely nothing to be ashamed of and likely won’t have any trouble finding a new job doing what he does best, analyzing baseball for those of us who will never win a World Series MVP award.

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