ESPN has issued a mild rebuke–if it can even be called that–of SportsCenter co-host Jemele Hill after she called President Trump and essentially everyone who voted for him white supremacists in a series of tweets. Here is what the network had to say:
ESPN Statement on Jemele Hill: pic.twitter.com/3kfexjx9zQ
— ESPN PR (@ESPNPR) September 12, 2017
USA Today has a summary of Hill’s tired liberal Twitter tantrum, but here is what kicked it off:
Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 11, 2017
This isn’t going to help the perception that ESPN tilts way left and is deliberately offensive to conservatives.
ESPN stalwart Linda Cohn lamented the network’s non-sports wander into politics in an interview last spring, noting that the “core group” of viewers who made ESPN so successful were being ignored.
The network also published a poem by a convicted cop killer on one of its vertical websites, ESPNW. That was done in the name of celebrating feminism, and the ensuing outrage from sane people prompted the network to remove the poem.
A year before the cop-murdering feminist was being feted by ESPN, they fired Curt Schilling for pretty much doing what Jemele Hill just did.
The difference, of course, is that Schilling is conservative so he was offending the wrong people in the eyes of ESPN’s Connecticut-based brass.
Given the tepid nature of the statement regarding Hill, and the lack of any real public remorse on her part, it’s obvious that ESPN views offending a huge chunk of America as a mere public relations nuisance.
The none-too-subtle message here is that liberal hosts can be as offensive as they want and will probably be given little more than an exasperated eye-roll but conservative hosts better keep their mouths shut if they want to remain employed.
At the rate that ESPN is hemorrhaging viewers and laying off employees, they may soon not have much of an audience to worry about.
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