Quoting: pharrow
wrong.
They put him on the air for commentary. They know he will speak his mind, that's why they put him on the air. Lets not pretend Sportsnet has not benefited from his lose cannon commentary before. It has.
He gave commentary, as he always does, as per his job, it was just commentary they didn't want to hear. It didn't fit the PC narrative they want to push down your throat that people like you happily swallow.
For that they fired him. Wrongly.
It would be one thing if he was treated equally for all his other commentary. But he wasn't and there lies the problem and why your narrative falls apart. He has always been given a position where he's free to comment. He has never been treated such ways before for any comments he has made. Lets not pretend none of them couldn't be taken as offensive.
When you hire for commentary you get commentary. And there in lies the problem for your argument. Ask yourself, would he have been fired for the exact opposite commentary. When you realize he wouldn't have, then you realize why it's business terror. Because if he's free to comment about a situation one way and nothing happens, but not the other, then it is indeed a violation of freedom of speech.
Your point on these platforms not being government owned is also false. All cable, radio etc.. requires an license. In the US it's the FCC. There is also a Canadian version. Simply stating it's not government owned does not account for how that really works. You would never be allowed to broadcast 24/7 isis recruitment simply because you are a business, you would be thrown off the air. It's why things like RT news are no longer allowed on TV.
The truth of the matter is it is an attack on free speech. When a person who is paid for commentary is somehow treated different because his commentary is only offensive in that it disagrees with a political view point. Such acts are what china, USSR, or nazi germany does. It is not what the free world does. To constantly have a "get them we disagree with them" attitude is the very opposite of the values that any free country holds.
The whole point about free speech is that even if it is offensive, you still have the right to do it. Much like players kneeling in the NFL doesn't mean they should be fired and kicked out their contracts and bared from the game for life.
Such actions would be wrong.
It is clearly a double standard in the way in which things are treated. It is terror. And it does in fact violate freedom of speech.
You may not pick and choose how you wish to apply things based on your personal narrative. Which is exactly what you want to do.
Alright, so your argument is (if I'm understanding this correctly)
1) Sportsnet is at fault for removing him after this specific monologue instead of his other racist monologues, which indicates that he was given an infinite editorial mandate. In essence, it's a labour issue: Sportsnet fired Cherry for something Cherry would have understood was part of his job.
Now, I have no inside information here, but I'd be surprised if Sportsnet hasn't talked to Cherry before about avoiding racial/political discussion on his segment before. With how much (predictable) backlash the Cherry firing brought, it doesn't make sense for Sportsnet to do it if there was a way to make him stop being racist without firing him. That's probably what happened after his other controversies, closed door meetings and requests to stop doing this. When he did it again, Sportsnet reacted like any sane employer would when an employee keeps causing problems by doing things that the employer has specifically told them not to do. There's not really much of a convenience argument here: all the blowback suggests this really wasn't a very convenient time to can Cherry.
2) He wouldn't have been fired for saying the exact opposite, in this case some form of "wow, it's great to see all these immigrants wearing poppies, cool to see the Canadian patriotism" except not sounding sarcastic, or possibly "why are none of these 8th-generation Canadians wearing poppies, come on guys". Thing is, the factor at issue here is how much Sportsnet wants to give these ideas a platform. While you're correct that there are limits to what ideas broadcasters are allowed to put on their platforms, there aren't requirements for what ideas broadcasters have to represent. Yestv (I think that's the channel with the Christian news program) doesn't have a mandated Muslim news program, for example. This is where the argument falls apart, the opposite (at least the first version, probably not the second one) viewpoint would fall into the category of stuff Sportsnet wants to broadcast, while the one he put forth didn't. It's like how Fox News doesn't break any rules despite muzzling interviewees and heavily weighting the viewpoints on their program in order to make right-wing views seem more appropriate.
3) This is more similar to the Third Reich or the USSR than to a democracy. First off, did you see what happened with Deadspin? The firing that led to the mass resignations was because Deputy Editor Barry Petchesky put out a viewpoint that Great Hill Partners didn't want on the site. And the CBA they were operating under even guaranteed editorial independence! This isn't super uncommon. Private broadcasters doing this is actually probably more common than it would be in the USSR, though that's mostly due to the USSR's lack of private broadcasters in general than anything else.
The thing you come back to is the double standard argument, but here's the thing: some speech is more deserving of an audience than others, and it's up to the broadcasters to determine what speech deserves an audience and what speech doesn't. That's why sportsnet doesn't give a show to any idiot with a Capfriendly account and time on their hands (like, say, me). The audience said "hey, we don't ant to watch Don Cherry anymore". Sportsnet, like any smart business, said, "ok, if you don't want to watch this guy then we won't give him a segment, because why would we give a segment to somebody nobody wants to watch".
This is the main difference between Cherry and an NFL player. The players' job is to play good football, and the protests are secondary. If a player is fired for their protests, they aren't being fired because of their job performance, they're being fired because of a political statement. Cherry's job, meanwhile, is to make an intermission segment that people want to watch. If he says something people find offensive, they won't want to watch his segment anymore, and he has therefore failed in his job. Getting fired for failing in your job is pretty much standard procedure, unless you're the GM of the Vancouver Canucks.
Cherry isn't being punished for his speech or his beliefs, he's being punished for saying things that got Sportsnet involved in a big cintroversy, and for jeopardizing the audience of not only Coach's Corner, but also Hockey Night in Canada. That's pretty much justified.
Put another way, if the government forced Sportsnet to make its intermission segment feature a 20-minute Trudeau ad, would that be ok? Then why would mandating a Cherry segment be different? That's ultimately what this comes down to: Sportsnet has the right to choose what it broadcasts. It doesn't want to broadcast Cherry anymore, so it doesn't. That's the long and the short of it. No freedom of speech violated, it's an otherwise standard programming change being blown up because culture war.