by WorldTribune Staff, March 11, 2024
The sports blogging site Deadspin was sold and its entire staff laid off just months after the publication was forced to apologize for wrongly accusing a young Kansas City Chiefs fan of wearing “blackface.”
The leftist sports media outlet was sold by parent company G/O Media to a European media company that will not keep any of the long-running sports news outlet’s current staff, the company’s CEO told employees in a memo on Monday.
“Recently we were approached by the European firm Lineup Publishing expressing interest in purchasing Deadspin to add to their growing media holdings,” read the staff-wide memo from CEO Jim Spanfeller to all G/O employees.
Among those was laid off was senior writer Carron Phillips, who wrote the incendiary column last November that accused 9-year-old Chiefs fan Holden Armenta of racism against Native Americans and black people for wearing “blackface” and headdress to a football game.
The site ran a photo of Holden showing just the right side of his face that was painted black under a headline that blared, “The NFL needs to speak out against the Kansas City Chiefs fan in Black face, Native Headdress.”
However, a photo of his full face showed it was painted both black and red.
Phillips also failed to mention that Holden is of Native American descent, and he was wearing war paint, with one color covering each side of his face.
Holden’s grandfather, Raul Armenta, sits on the board of the Chumash Tribe in Santa Ynez, California, according to the Post Millennial.
Deadspin quietly tweaked the article amid a firestorm of criticism, as well as legal threats from Holden’s parents, and added an editor’s note, saying the publication “regret[s] any suggestion that we were attacking” Holden.
Last month, the family filed a defamation lawsuit seeking unspecified damages.
“Journalism — and the country as a whole — is better today now that Carron Phillips no longer has a platform to target innocent kids with his agenda-driven writing,” Libby Locke, the lawyer representing he family, told the New York Post on Monday.
“We are also grateful to G/O Media for infusing the company with cash that can be used to pay the judgment the Armenta family is going to win against it.”
Sources at G/O Media told The Daily Beast that Deadspin staffers who were terminated were essentially only allowed to collect their possessions and leave.
“So we just got half an hour’s notice that Deadspin has been sold to a European startup and they’re not taking any staff,” Deadspin senior writer Julie DiCaro wrote on X. “Already locked out at company slack and our laptops.”
Deadspin is not the only leftist outlet to be unceremoniously dumped by G/O media over the past few months. G/O Media shuttered and eventually sold the feminist blog Jezebel to Paste magazine last November.
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