Why does one player get off with a slap on the wrist (an undisclosed monetary fine), …
… while another player gets “suspended indefinitely” for essentially committing the same offense?
True, the second guy’s racial slur was directed toward a teammate (a highly-paid teammate, we might add), while the first guy’s slur (the same slur!) was directed toward an ordinary (i.e. lowly-paid) private citizen. But from a moral or ethical perspective, is third-party bullying somehow “less worse” than bullying among friends or co-workers?
prior probability 
I believe most people would say that bullying from a third party might be “less worse” than from a friend, classmate, or co-worker. These people are people you interact with on a day-to-day basis, and therefore the average person would probably think it would be harder to be bullied by someone who is close to you, than otherwise. Also, this type of bullying is likely to be more direct than third party bullying. Furthermore, when being bullied by a friend, or co-worker, one is more likely to have more information on that party to defend oneself. When being bullied by a third party, an individual is likely to think “who is this guy?” It might not have as big of an impact coming from a third party because, I think, most people probably would not care.
I on the other I think morally and ethically, it might be worse to be bullied by a third party. i believe it makes it a little harder to defend yourself when you are bullied, and left to think “Why is this person even in my business?”
Bullying whether from a third party or not should be viewed the same way. I don’t think you can categorize bullying from a scale of 1-10 . Individuals take offense to different things in different ways, and therefore a comment considered to be bullying should disregard the parties and just view the offense as a whole.
Great comments. I agree that there are arguments on both sides of this question (i.e. whether bullying from a stranger is worse, or not, than bullying from a friend) — this is one reason why debates about morals or ethics tend to go in circles and be inconclusive — nevertheless, I am prepared to say that some forms of bullying are “qualitatively” and even “quantitatively” worse than others on some scale (e.g., saying an ethnic slur twice is worse than saying it only once, but is it twice as bad? — not sure) — as my parenthetical remark indicates, however, I concede that identifying what factors make some forms of bullying or harassment worse than others is a difficult (impossible?) undertaking