ESPN’s latest round of layoffs included the bush-league decision to fire Ryan Clark while he was on the air. Apparently, ESPN felt compelled to pull the plug during a break in NFL Live because Outkick was poised to report that Clark would be among those whose time with the four-letter network was ending.
In a recent interview with Craig Melvin’s Glass Half Full podcast, Clark addressed ESPN’s decision to choose to tell Clark he was being let go during a live show over letting the Outkick report emerge before Clark was informed of his termination.
Ultimately, Clark was happy that it happened in a way that vindicated him.
“If they’re patient and they’re evil, it never comes to light,” Clark told Melvin. “If you’re smart enough to say, ‘We have these massive layoffs on Tuesday. If we’re doing this for the right reasons — if it’s about budget, if it’s about merging two companies, Ryan gets to find out that he’s laid off the day everybody else is.’
“But the evil — right? — the ‘want’ and will to try to humiliate me, to try to garner favor for doing something you know is foul, backfired, because you give it to mean and evil and hateful people, right? Who you learn a snake gonna do snake shit, right?
“And you may think while you have it in this cage and you feeding it rats, it loves you, but it’ll eat you too, right? And so now they see me on TV, they start getting antsy, and because you leaked it to them so they can write a great article about it, they can be so damn happy that Ryan Clark is gone, they’re about to out you. That’s how it happened. So now these things that were happening to me behind the scenes for an extended period of time, the world got to see it. And because the world got to see it, now I’m not so stupid. Now I’m not so whatever you want to make me. Like these things were really happening.”
The threshold problem with ESPN’s approach is that one or more people who had the information about who would be laid off couldn’t be trusted to keep their mouths shut. While Clark was the only one who was fired while on air, others found out about their fates from media reports and/or reporters before being told by ESPN.
The through line for all of this is that companies either care about their employees or they don’t. The best proof as to whether they truly care is if they continue to care once they’ve decided an employee’s services are no longer needed.
ESPN has made its position on that matter obvious. And all current and future employees of ESPN should be taking notes.