ESPN anchor and writer Jemele Hill has agreed to a contract buyout with the network, and plans to exit in early September, according to James Miller.
Hill had been with the network since 2006. Yet, remained largely an unknown outside the sports world until September of 2017, when she tweeted that President Trump was a “white supremacist:”
Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 11, 2017
That tweet touched off a firestorm of controversy that — at one point — resulted in Sarah Huckabee Sanders blasting ESPN for their handling of the issue.
For Hill’s part, she never backed-off her comments. At one point, the former SportsCenter host told Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch that she had no regrets over calling the president a racist.
“I don’t regret what I said or even the language that I used.”
Though Hill was never disciplined by ESPN for her comments about the president, she did find herself suspended after an incident involving Cowboys Owner Jerry Jones. After Jones said that any Cowboys player who protested the anthem would not play, Hill began using her Twitter account to advise fans on how to boycott the Dallas Cowboys.
That suspension arguably served as the beginning of the end for Hill at ESPN. The show she co-anchored, SC6, never fulfilled the ratings expectations that ESPN had for it. In early 2018, Hill asked to be removed from the show and to instead focus her efforts on writing for the Undefeated.
However, as FS1’s Jason Whitlock explained on Twitter, the unraveling of Hill and SC6 actually began with her tweet calling Trump a racist:
It was widely known throughout media industry that after Sept Trump tweets ESPN execs were moving on from The Six around Super Bowl time. Hill was given 6 months to figure out what to do. Why you think SAS took public shots in SN interview? Hill's internal support gone.
— Jason Whitlock (@WhitlockJason) January 27, 2018
Whitlock’s point about Hill’s support at ESPN brings up a broader question about the general direction of the network. Former ESPN President John Skipper — the executive who both hired Hill and gave her a television show — left the network last year. The loss of Skipper, is likely the loss of support that Whitlock is referencing. Skipper’s replacement, Jimmy Pitaro, has since gone in a much different direction since taking over five months ago.
Not only did Pitaro recently announce that the network plans to not broadcast the playing of the national anthem during NFL games, a clear attempt to repair the relationship with the league that many felt suffered under Skipper’s leadership. But buying out Hill’s contract also strongly suggests that Pitaro is serious about reversing Skipper’s legacy and changing the image of the network from that of a political network which occasionally covers sports, to a sports network that delves into politics only when appropriate.
Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter @themightygwinn
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