As the White House calls for her firing, ESPN’s Jemele Hill addresses the ‘elephant in the room’
ANALYSIS | Hill knows exactly who she is and what she stands for
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Cindy Boren.
ESPN host Jemele Hill has had quite the week.
After calling President Trump a “white supremacist” on Twitter, the “SportsCenter” host was rebuked by her employer and told by the White House that she committed a “fireable offense.”
She has not apologized for her statement on Twitter, though she did regret painting ESPN in “an unfair light.” Hill’s colleagues have stood by her.
A timeline of events
Hill’s tweet about Trump came just before 8 p.m. Monday as a reply to three others who had joined a conversation sparked by an earlier tweet about musician Kid Rock, who has spent much of the summer teasing about a Republican run for the U.S. Senate.
Hill originally commented on an article tweeted by the Hill about Kid Rock’s rejection of being labeled a racist because he favors the Confederate flag. Hill’s tweet about Kid Rock spurred hundreds of responses, which eventually resulted in a discussion of the White House.
On Tuesday, ESPN released a statement addressing Hill’s tweet and the growing controversy surrounding it.
On Wednesday, a reporter read Hill’s tweet to White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and asked if the president was aware of it. Huckabee Sanders responded:
“I’m not sure he’s aware but I think that’s one of the more outrageous comments that anyone could make and certainly something that I think is a fireable offense by ESPN,” Huckabee Sanders said.
ThinkProgress also reported that ESPN tried to keep Hill off the air on Wednesday night. (The network denies this.) According to the report, ESPN asked two other black hosts, Michael Eaves and Elle Duncan, to fill in for Hill on “SportsCenter.” Both declined.
The president later took to Twitter and criticized ESPN’s “bad programming.”
Why people are criticizing ESPN
Some have accused ESPN of pushing an increasingly liberal agenda.
In 2016, ESPN fired baseball analyst Curt Schilling after he shared a Facebook meme about transgender issues that many found offensive. Hill, meanwhile, remained on the air.
But the meme that led to Schilling’s firing was not his first controversy. Schilling was briefly taken off the air when he compared extremism in today’s Muslim world to Nazi Germany in 1940.
On Wednesday night, Schilling fired away at Hill, telling Sean Hannity:
“Jemele Hill has always been a racist — the things that she says, the things that she does — I don’t have a problem with the fact that Jemele Hill is racist, that [ESPN’s] Bomani Jones is racist, and Colin Kaepernick knelt for a lie, and that Disney and ESPN, who they own, supports liberal racism.”
As ESPN adapts to cord cutting and has laid off employees, it has moved from rehashing sports news to analysis and commentary, encouraging its employees to express opinions and push the conversation forward. For many of its stars, that includes moving from merely sports into culture and, often, into black culture. That can put ESPN’s TV faces, increasingly personalities rather than reporters, in dangerous territory and has created a debate over whether the network’s identity is inherently liberal or conservative.
Last winter, the network removed Sage Steele from its “NBA Countdown” show, prompting cries that it was because of her presence at the center of social-media flaps involving NFL national anthem protests and airport immigration protests.
There were suggestions that she move to Fox News, with the Daily Beast calling her “a right-wing favorite,” and with Clay Travis describing her as “a prominent conservative voice.”
Hill’s voice
Steele now appears on “SportsCenter: AM,” and she described how she feels to The Washington Post’s Dan Steinberg last May:
“I don’t care,” she said. “Along with gray hair and all the other awesomeness about aging, I am just so comfortable in my own skin. And it took years to get to this point. So no, I’m good. If anything it has motivated me to continue to be me, and I feel blessed that I just have the right family and friends around me to encourage me to still be me.”
That’s just what Hill was doing, too, and found support in the sports community and beyond. Hill is a smart, confident woman who knows exactly who she is and what she stands for, even as her network is trying to find its way.
