A&E put itself between a “Duck” and a hard place. And having backtracked from its temporary lack of quack, let the public-relations scrambling begin.

The network might have acted precipitously in suspending Phil Robertson for his inflammatory remarks regarding gays (and equally insensitive ones about African-Americans in the Jim Crow-era South), but it clearly didn’t have an end game in mind. And once the network demonstrated that it was displeased with Robertson’s statements, unless it was truly willing to strangle its golden goose, there was really nowhere to go from there.