The late Tuesday Morning Quarterback.

I liked Tuesday Morning Quarterback, a weekly football/entertainment column written by Gregg Easterbrook, and published originally on Slate and starting last season, on ESPN.com. A good mix of decent football analysis and humor, the column would draw me onto the site every week to read it. He was such a good writer in this column that I started noticing his articles on other, non-football topics: NASA, the military, politics. And I found that I agreed with about a third of what he said, disagreed with about a third, and the remaining third got me jumping up-and-down frothing at the mouth. (All things considered, about what a columnist wants if he expects readers to come back.) And about a month and a half ago, he started a blog on The New Republic's website.

A week ago, he had an entry in his blog excoriating the movie Kill Bill and the Hollywood mentality that appears to glorify mindless violence in the desire to make profitable movies. And if he'd said it that way, he'd have been fine. But he made some unfortunate remarks that link the profit desire that overrides any conscience in exhibiting violence with the Jewish heritage of the production companies, Disney and Miramax. Within minutes of the column's posting, people had zoomed in on the offending sentences and labeled him an anti-Semite.

I think he's done the right thing since: he's apologized for his remarks, he's explained the circumstances and what he meant to say (which I think is supported by the remainder of his original column and other posts he's made), he's explalined what he's learned from the situation (among other things, to have an editor read his material before it's posted), and he's done the correct thing of leaving the offending column in his blog archives, where people can read it in its proper context, instead of deleting it and pretending that it never existed.

I think The New Republic has acted appropriately, too. They have distanced themselves from his remarks, but came to his defense as a person they've known for a number of years. And they have put links on their front web page to his apology and to their editorial discussing the situation.

ESPN, on the other hand, has failed to act reasonably. In classic overkill, they terminated the Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, deleted all the old TMQ columns and any mention of Easterbrook's name from their website, and they did it all without contacting Easterbrook or making any public announcement of what they were doing or why. (By Tuesday, a few days later, they finally put this language onto the interior page where TMQ appeared: "To our readers: Tuesday Morning Quarterback will no longer be available on ESPN.com.") A pretty cowardly action, done in secret (as such actions often are). If they think were doing this out of principle, they could at least tell us what principle that was - and how the newly-found principle didn't prevent them from hiring Rush Limbaugh and trying to keep him around for days after his far more offensive remarks (for which Rush has not apologized, by the way).

I hope Easterbrook finds a new home for his TMQ column.

Update: edited to get Easterbrook's blog onto the correct website - The New Republic just isn't The National Review, even if they have similar initials.

Update 2: Easterbrook hopes to bring TMQ back on another website. Soon, I hope.