Dan leone’s television tour begins

BasX · Mar 10, 2009

It’s a story that has struck a chord with Eagles fans still miffed about the unexpected departure of safety Brian Dawkins from the team.

And it’s starting to take on a life of its own.

But should it?

Former Eagles game-day employee Dan Leone, fired after posting a message critical of the franchise on his Facebook page, has become a media darling. A grossly one-sided item in Monday’s edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer started the fire, sites like ours helped to spread it, and now Leone has begun his Kramer-style tour of the talk shows.

Leone’s first stop came on FOX 29’s morning show in Philly, earlier today. Wearing one of those dreadful Brazilian soccer team throwback jerseys (bearing, obviously, Brian Dawkins’ number) and equally dreadful matching hat, Leone talked about the situation — and continued to publicly pressure the team to re-hire him.

“I’m begging for my . . . not begging but I really want the job back,” Leone said.

Leone, in our view, is either naive or stupid if he thinks that the best way to get his job back is to wage in a media war against the team. At this point, they can’t bring him back, even if they were to have second thoughts about dumping the guy for his misguided Facebook posting.

Of course, whether they should have second thoughts is another issue. He publicly called out his employer; what the hell did he expect?

Several readers mentioned in comments to our initial item on this matter that the team shouldn’t be permitted to fire Leone for exercising his Constitutional right to free speech. However, in most if not all U.S. jurisdictions (even here in West Virginia, the state so often called a “judicial hellhole” by those who directly benefit from creating and nurturing that perception), the First Amendment has no application to private employment.

Basically, an employer can legally and properly choose to sever ties with someone who posts on an inherently public forum an assertion that the entity signing the employee’s checks is “retarted.”

(We might feel differently about the application of the First Amendment if Lincoln Financial Field had been fully bought and paid for by taxpayers, like Paul Brown Stadium in Cincinnati. But the Linc was overwhelming financed with private funds.)

So before the media gets too enamored with this guy, let’s at least consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the better message to the audience is that, at times, we need to accept responsibility for our actions.

In this age of Facebook and MySpace and Twitter and various other messages boards and communications tools, Leone’s blunder provides a good example of the dangers of putting one’s hands on a keyboard while one’s head is residing inside a different part of his or her anatomy.

It’s an example that I plan to share with Florio Jr., and the rest of the fathers (and handful of mothers) who read this site would be wise to consider doing the same thing with their own children.
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http://www.profootballtalk.com/2009/03/10/dan-leones-television-tour-begins/

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Dan leone’s television tour begins

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