To ESPN, co-anchor Jemele Hill's 9/11 Twitter caricature of President Trump and his supporters as "white supremacists" merited only a light tap on the wrist. But officials at the White House today were incensed by the outrageous claims and called for Hill to be terminated by ESPN. Hardcore media lefties went ballistic.
As reported yesterday by NewsBusters, Hill lit up social media and the blogosphere Monday with her incendiary comments attacking Trump and his backers. The White House reacted with a harsh rebuke to Hill, by press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders:
That is one of the more outrageous comments that anybody could make and certainly is something that is a fireable offense by ESPN.
On Tucker Carlson's Fox News program, Fox Radio's Clay Travis said ESPN's statement that it "addressed" Hill's comments with her means nothing and that Hill only got rapped on the knuckles, essentially a reward for pushing the leftist politics preferred by Disney's Bob Iger and ESPN's chief exec John Skipper. Travis said ESPN's ratings are collapsing and it's alienating its audience -- not a strong business strategy.
Writing today for The Hill, Jonathan Easley, said. "ESPN has reprimanded Jemele Hill, an African-American woman who co-hosts a show called 'SC6 with Michael and Jemele,' for a string of tweets sent out over the weekend calling Trump and his supporters white supremacists."
Easley's use of the word "reprimand" is an exaggeration. ESPN merely released a statement saying Hill's harsh words were "inappropriate." The only known action taken by the liberal sports media organization -- with a history of suspending and terminating others for lesser actions -- was to "address it with her." Here's the full statement by ESPN:
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.
Easley reported that "many on the right are fuming, believing that it is the latest in a string of incidents that reveal ESPN’s liberal bias."
High profile, Left-stream media not only defended Hill, but doubled down on her accusations that the president and his followers are racists.
Charles Pierce of Sports Illustrated responded to Sanders' remarks by claiming the White House is taking a trip to the "edges of crazytown." Pierce wrote that Hill's remarks are "damned near irrefutable" and insisted "the current president of the United States is a racist and a white supremacist. This drew the usual screams from the political flying monkeys of the American Right."
Pierce's contemptuous remarks went on at great length, but I'll spare you of most of it and post these:
Let us pause for a moment and consider how far we’ve drifted into the outer suburbs of Crazytown here. This is the official spokesperson of the President of the United States calling upon a television network to fire one of its highest profile employees because she was mean to the president online. As a taxpayer, this makes me wonder whether or not my money is being well-spent on things like Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s salary. As a journalist, this makes me wonder exactly how far these people will go in knuckling the media to protect their boss’s delicate fee-fee.
The President of the United States is a white supremacist and a racist, just like his odious father was before him.
Go ahead, Sarah.
Tell them to fire me.
The New York Times' Greg Howard was even nastier, tweeting: "espn threw jemele hill under the bus in order to appease the same pigs who bombard her with racism and sexism all day every single day."
If ESPN threw Hill under the bus it was a Tonka Toy.
Deadspin is an ultra-Left blog with a reputation for demonizing and mocking ESPN, but on this issue news editor Samer Kalaf chose conservatives as the greater evil:
And so the pile-on began, led by cynical hucksters and backed by the same disingenuous internet browbeating tactics that have served the right for years in campaigns against studiously apolitical corporations that want nothing more than for no one to be angry at them, whether or not what anyone claims to be angry about makes any sense. (How is it politicizing sports to describe a man who supported neo-Nazi protesters in a nationally televised press conference as a white supremacist?) It is a shame and a wonder that ESPN thinks it’s possible to appease people who don’t even want to be appeased.
ESPN felt that it had to grovel before the racist uncle demographic so as to not give off the impression that it leans left, even though the country singer fired for comparing Barack Obama to Hitler just reclaimed his ESPN gig wherein he yell-sings about being prepared for football, and even though “[Donald Trump] has empowered white supremacists” is not a partisan statement.
Grovel? Just more manipulation of the English language by the Left.
