I Will Now Blog About Jemele Hill Crying In Meeting With ESPN Head John Skipper
Everybody ready? I am going to blog about Jemele Hill now.
Does everyone understand?
I will say it again.
I am going to blog about Jemele Hill now.
… drum roll ….
… it’s blog time …
… drum roll …
So Jemele Hill pinned an essay about all the shit that’s gone down over the past couple weeks. You might’ve heard about it. The internet addressed it. The White House addressed it. Barstool Riggs addressed it.
I wrote this after the White House called her remarks a fireable offense.
Was it the savviest career move to tweet out super aggressive political takes to your big ass following that you gained via your employer, ESPN, who’s got a history of firing people for political takes? Nope, I do not believe it was. But any internet warrior out there screaming for her job is just as soft as the outrage mongers screaming back.
Jemele herself wrote the following in her essay.
I had not felt that way [like she had let the people she cares about down] since … until two weeks ago when I was sitting in ESPN president John Skipper’s office having the most difficult conversation of my career.
It was the first time I had ever cried in a meeting. I didn’t cry because Skipper was mean or rude to me. I cried because I felt I had let him and my colleagues down.
Since my tweets criticizing President Donald Trump exploded into a national story, the most difficult part for me has been watching ESPN become a punching bag and seeing a dumb narrative kept alive about the company’s political leanings.
She continued.
Still, Twitter wasn’t the place to vent my frustrations because, fair or not, people can’t or won’t separate who I am on Twitter from the person who co-hosts the 6 p.m. SportsCenter. Twitter also isn’t a great place to have nuanced, complicated discussions, especially when it involves race. Warriors player Kevin Durant and I probably need to take some classes about how to exercise better self-control on Twitter. Lesson learned.
This idea of separating Twitter Jemele versus ESPN Jemele is precisely wherein lies the problem. Her twitter presence is a direct result of her ESPN gig. It is woven in with ESPN Jemele.
When she’s got 700K+ twitter followers and her bio is this…
…she is ESPN Jemele on twitter. She didn’t garner three-quarters of a million followers with her hot political takes; she garnered them via her ESPN job.
That’s all fine. There’s nothing wrong with that, except when she believes one will not reflect upon the other.
This is why she cried. This is what she regrets. These relentless attacks on ESPN’s image are the last things she wanted.
Add in the fact that ESPN has fired folks for political takes in the past, and those political takes happened to be right-leaning, and all they did was slap Jemele on the wrist here, and you’re going to have yourself a pretty convincing narrative that ESPN politically leans one way.
Anyway, that’s what happened. That was blogging Jemele Hill.
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