Terry Frei of the Denver Post fired for tweet about Japanese Indy 500 winner

Another example of the old guard of sports journalists likely forced to get on Twitter without the safety net of editors. But if you don't know how a tweet like that would be received in 2017, it goes to show just how out of touch you are.

 

Yeah, how much training do you need to know that it was an incredibly dumb thing to tweet?

I'm just guessing, obviously, but I think he might have saved his job with a follow up more like "I apologize for my earlier tweet. It was stupid and insensitive. I'm sorry, and I'll try to do better." Instead he was a turd about it and tried to sell his book.

 

I'm surprised we haven't had some of our "see, this is why Twitter sucks" crowd come out yet, ignoring that most journalists manage to tweet without being idiots.

 

A lot of journalists do manage to do so.

And then there's the sportswriters who act like idiots but tend to show their ass politically, which is OK by most, so long as their politics are liberal enough.

Frei should not and does not have a job today.

But there are others who are embarrassing on Twitter. Completely embarrassing.

 

This wasn't a training issue. There is no training for "don't shit on a Japanese Race car driver because of your father's experiences in WWII."

*edited from original, which was grandpa.

 

On a scale of 1 to Sean Hannity, how warped do you have to be to give a shit about the nationality of an Indy 500 winner?

 

That's a good point. Do you think he was really that bothered by the home country of the Indy winner, or that he thought it would make for a topical Tweet on Memorial Day weekend and have everyone talking about him?

 

Way past Hannity level all the way to Glenn Beck.

 

Twitter sucks for many reasons other than just this one.

 

I thought that Dater had been suspended before and admitted to substance abuse issues so there was a history there. This appears to be a first offense. I personally feel badly about this because I was reading Frei in 1975 when he was a CU bear writer for one of the Denver papers. And I am pretty sure he will never get another full-time job in journalism. This is a guy who I believe was a lead columnist at the Oregonian and worked nationally so he had a pretty good career. Recently he seemed to be on holding on. He was on the CSU beat after Natalie Meisler left and did a lot of hockey. One bad day and there goes a forty year plus career.

 

Mile High

I thought that the union at the Post was very strong and that Dater had been the first Denver sportswriter fired in something like 30 years. Could the union have saved Frei?