Here's a pretty interesting article about the comments that got Rush Limbaugh fired from ESPN. (Yeah, I know. He resigned. In TV, when someone quits a good-paying job and doesn't fill the void immediately with a more lucrative one, they were fired or about to be fired.)
I don't know from football but it seems to me that Rush got a bit of a raw deal here. He may have been wrong in his thesis but it sounds to me like ESPN was more worried about future comments and the reaction to them. My guess is that when they hired Limbaugh, they figured he would draw in a certain additional audience without alienating their base, and this controversy made them decide they were wrong; that if he said something more controversial, even if he said it over on his radio show, it would upset the core ESPN audience. In other words, it wasn't that they were shocked that he acted like Rush Limbaugh but that they found out that had a downside.
A number of articles have compared the controversy to what happened with Al Campanis, and I don't think that's fair, either. In case you don't remember, Al Campanis was an executive within the Dodgers organization who went on Nightline back in '87 and suggested there was perhaps some genetic reason why blacks weren't fit for leadership positions in sports. It was an odd interview because Ted Koppel tried to help the man out of the hole he was digging for himself but Mr. Campanis, exhibiting a certain cluelessness, took it deeper. There was an outcry there too but the situation was quite different from the one with Limbaugh. Campanis was in the Dodgers front office. He had apparently had a say in selecting which of the team's two coaches had succeeded Walt Alston as manager, and they'd picked Tommy Lasorda (Caucasian) over Jim Gilliam (Afro-American). The choice was ostensibly on the grounds that Lasorda was a tad more qualified…and Campanis's remarks suggested the difference may have been skin color. That's a big difference from the matter with Limbaugh, who was and is completely outside any team's decision-making process. Even if the statement was racist — and I'm not saying it was — it's one thing just to be racist, quite another to hire with race as a criterion.
That said, every time I've heard Rush, I thought he was misquoting and distorting the positions of others, so I'm not too worked up over this. Besides, I have to go vote.