A sourced, exclusive report to Think Progress, alleges that multiple Black American hosts refused to go on the air when ESPN bosses attempted to sideline embattled SportsCenter host Jemele Hill.
ESPN had wanted to keep Hill of the air after Wednesday’s White House press briefing, when Press Secretary Sarah Sanders called Hill’s tweet accusing President trump of being a “white supremacist,” an “outrageous” comment, and a “fireable” offense.
Reportedly, Hill’s co-host, Michael Smith, refused to go on air without her on Wednesday after the controversy over her outrageous tweet made news, according to left-wing website Think Progress.
When the network approached two other black hosts about filling-in for Hill, they refused as well. According to the report, ESPN hosts, Michael Eaves and Elle Duncan , both of whom are black, told ESPN bosses that they wouldn’t take the fill-in for Hill.
Those refusals, left ESPN with the option of trying to replace Hill with a white host. However, ultimately, ESPN decided not to try and replace Hill with white personalities and just decided to let her go back on the air regardless of the media storm swirling around here.
Instead, ESPN simply released a statement accepting Hill’s apology to the network, and let it go at that.
For their part, ESPN denies that they tried to replace Hill on Wednesday with any other host, black or white:
Our statement: "We never asked any other anchors to do last night’s show. Period.” https://t.co/EJhnjbr7yq
— Chris LaPlaca (@espn_chris) September 14, 2017
Prior to the Robert Lee situation of a few weeks ago, a scenario that now seems relatively quaint, for a network that is clearly careening towards Hades in a rather fast-traveling hand basket. The idea of ESPN replacing a black host with other black hosts, only to be rebuffed by said black hosts, but being too afraid to replace her with a white host, might seem a bit far-fetched.
Yet, in light of recent events, we’re now conditioned to believe the most insane thing that we hear out of Bristol.
However, if the story is true, it’s a tangled web of ESPN’s own weaving. Because what it essentially means, is that ESPN essentially got bullied, cowed, and held hostage by the politically correct monster that they helped create. Instead of following through on what they wanted to do, which was bench Hill for the night. They were so paranoid of reaping the whirlwind from their fellow PC travelers, for putting a white host on television, that they had to reverse course and cave.
Imagine, being so obsessed with race, that you pull an Asian broadcaster because you think he might be a rebel general. Then, a couple weeks later, imagine being too scared to pull a hateful activist like Jemele Hill off the air, because you couldn’t find a black host to replace her.
No thanks.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
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