ESPN scolds Colin Cowherd...Kind of

By now you're probably heard about the attack ESPN personality Colin Cowherd launched on the blog The Big Lead. Upset with their content, Cowherd encouraged readers to flood the site, effectively crashing its server and rendering the site down for 48 hours.

The way Deadspin described what happened is this: However: Today, upset with something The Big Lead had written about him (or someone, or something, imagined or otherwise), Cowherd told his listeners to unleash a DNS attack on the site. One of the tech people here at Gawker Media tells us: "When someone floods a website with so many fake hits that the servers get overloaded, the site, essentially, goes down. A programmer could write a script to load the website once a second."

Pretty childish behavior, but not all that unheard of for Cowherd. Last year he unabashedly stole content from The M-Zone, a well read Michigan blog.

In what has turned out to be her second column as the new Ombudsman for ESPN, Le Anne Schreiber, addressed Cowherd's antics. And while she does chastise the act, she all but applauds him for coming up with new and unusual douchebag-like behavior. AND if anyone does this sort of this, they will be punished. But since Cowherd's antics were the first of their kind, he's getting away with it.

From Schreiber's column:

The official response from ESPN's communication department was: "Our airwaves should not be used for this purpose. We apologize." It is the kind of bland public statement that does little to assuage the anger and distrust of ESPN's audience over an episode like this. I could not tell from that statement how seriously ESPN regarded the offense, so I contacted Traug Keller, senior vice president, ESPN Radio, to get a clearer idea of ESPN's reaction.

Keller responded immediately to my request for an on-the-record statement. "We talked to Colin Cowherd, and we talked to all our radio talent, making it clear that you cannot do this," Keller said Friday. "Our airwaves are a trust, and not to be used to hurt anyone's business. Such attacks are off limits. Zero tolerance. I can't say it any stronger."

Keller said that he had not formulated a policy about such attacks on Internet sites until now because he had never imagined the possibility of them.
...
Now that ESPN Radio has such a policy, I presume such attacks will be treated as an offense that warrants suspension.


So there you go. Come up with heretofor unthought of mean things and you won't get in trouble. Good thing the law doesn't work like that, hmmm?