Politics & Power Quote by Gregg Easterbrook

Easterbrook’s line is a neat piece of workplace judo: it reframes a personal conflict as an institutional critique, and in doing so tries to drain it of insubordination. By insisting he wasn’t “attacking the boss,” he swaps the intimate hierarchy of manager-versus-employee for a cooler, corporate diagram: publisher and president, not supervisor and subordinate. That’s not just semantics. It’s a bid for legitimacy, the kind writers make when they want their speech treated as commentary rather than misconduct.

The subtext is older than ESPN: if the boss is the “publisher,” then the writer’s obligation is to the audience and the integrity of the product, not to managerial comfort. Calling ESPN’s leadership “publisher and president” also tugs the company closer to a newsroom model, where editorial independence is a virtue, even when it’s messy. That’s a useful move for an author, because it implies he’s playing by the norms of journalism, not the norms of HR.

Context matters because ESPN is both media outlet and brand machine, a place where “talent” is marketed, voices are monetized, and dissent can be reclassified as a threat to the product. Easterbrook’s phrasing tries to force the dispute into the public arena: if leadership is executive and editorial, then criticism of it becomes part of the work, not a breach of loyalty. It’s also self-protective, a rhetorical shield that says: don’t punish me for disagreeing; treat this as a conversation about power.