ESPN Rebukes On-Air Personality for Disparaging Trump Remarks
Sports broadcasting giant ESPN has disavowed the comments of one of its on-air personalities, Jemele Hill, who recently tweeted that President Donald Trump is “a white supremacist,” “a bigot” and “unqualified and unfit to be president.”
A statement released by the Disney-owned network’s media relations department read, “The comments on Twitter from Jemele Hill regarding the president do not represent the position of ESPN. We have addressed this with Jemele and she recognizes her actions were inappropriate.”
Gopusa.com reported that Hill’s tweets “spun out of Hill’s link to a report about performer Kid Rock (aka Robert Ritchie). Flirting with a U.S. Senate run in Michigan, Rock wrote on Facebook ‘he loves black people” and accused the ‘extreme left of ‘trying to use the old confederate flag BS’ to label him a racist.
“He loves black people so much that he pandered to racists by using a flag that unquestionably stands for dehumanizing black people,” Hill tweeted.
Gopusa.com reports that led to a Twitter stream that saw Hill tweet that Trump was “a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists” and that he “is the most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime. The height of white privilege is being able to ignore his white supremacy, because it’s of no threat to you. Well, it’s a threat to me.”
Hill’s Twitter account also sports a photo of Hill smiling and posing with former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.
Last year, ESPN fired Curt Schilling, a former Cy Young Award-winning Major League Baseball pitcher, for what management deemed insensitive social media posts targeting, not a politician, but transgender people. ESPN stressed then it was “an inclusive company.” Schilling now contributes to right-aligned Breitbart.com, which was among those calling for Hill’s dismissal Monday.
Breitbart reported of Hill’s tweets that they “most certainly would result in her firing, if she was a conservative. Since she’s basically the opposite of that, we’ll have to wait and see how ESPN handles it.”
