‘SportsCenter’ exit frees Hill to speak mind
Ex-anchor’s tweets ran afoul of ESPN’s social media policy.
Critics who think Jemele Hill’s move from ESPN’s “SportsCenter” to its website, The Undefeated, will mute her opinions are in for a surprise.
If anything, it liberates Hill from the constraints placed on an anchor at the Disney-owned media outlet and likely will embolden her.
Hill now has the latitude afforded a commentator as senior columnist and chief correspondent for TheUndefeated. com, which focuses on the intersection of sports and race, and in appearances on ESPN programs.
That should have been made clear when Hill referred to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union condemnation of those who kneel during the national anthem — an allusion to NFL players and others protesting injustice and racism — as “a very easy dog whistle” and “racial pornography” during an appearance Sunday with the Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation.”
She said Trump was “weirdly brilliant” in his ability “to hijack” the protests and make it about patriotism.
“Because there’s a lot of misinformation, a lot of people frankly just aren’t interested enough or care enough about the things that are important to Colin Kaepernick and to the players protesting,” Hill said. “It’s easy ... for them to latch on to (the) ceremony as opposed to understanding what this cause is really about.”
In Hill’s first interview since leaving “SportsCenter” after Friday night’s show, Sharpton noted the NFL’s players are mostly African-American while ownership is almost all white and cited what he called “the problem of ownership of business contracts, of the race question in terms of equity in sports itself.”
Hill said this tension dates to when players of African-American descent first began to integrate white-dominated sports.
“I think a lot of people that watch players, a lot of people that employ players, they don’t understand the duality that most people of color live in this nation ... (that) duality of what you do vs. who you are, and what it means to be black in America,” Hill said.
What players are trying to express, Hill said, is that no matter how much they may have achieved and earned in their life, “When they get in their cars, they’re still subjected to much of the racism and institutional abuses, as if they didn’t have the other trappings of success.”
Hill said she loves this country, “being an American” and “being a black American, and if I didn’t love it as much, I wouldn’t care about what it stood for or be disappointed by it. And, I think, that’s kind of where Colin Kaepernick, and I, where we’re deeply aligned.
“He cares about this country, he cares about it living up to its ideals, and that’s why it means a lot for him to continue to try to better it in the way that he can. And, I know that a lot of people look at the money that he’s made in his career, and for that matter, if they look at me and say, ‘Oh, you’re on ESPN, what do you have to be concerned about?’ I’m still a black woman in America — that’s not going to change — and, still subjected to a lot of things.”
Hill, who has been with ESPN since 2006 but only a year ago launched the 6 p.m. weekday edition of “SportsCenter” with co-host Michael Smith, ran afoul of her company’s social media policy last September after tweeting that President Donald Trump is “a white supremacist,” “a bigot” and “unqualified and unfit to be president.”
She later was suspended after suggesting fans consider sponsoring boycotts if they were upset with NFL owners’ responses to player protests during the national anthem.
The anti-Trump tweets had ESPN scrambling to declare they didn’t represent its views and were met by calls for her dismissal from White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and others.
ESPN, heavily invested in the NFL as a TV rightsholder, took action after the sponsor boycott tweet, saying it had just warned Hill about its social media policy, which since has been updated to make its restrictions on employees even clearer.
Hill has maintained she left “SportsCenter” of her own volition, which she emphasized with Sharpton, calling it “not a fit for me because ultimately I had a lot of things that I really wanted to say.”
The Undefeated, she believes, should afford her that opportunity and she demonstrated as much on Sharpton’s program.
Look for Hill to speak out more, not less.