The folks over at ThinkProgress dropped an exclusive last night about more of the controversy surrounding Jemele Hill, an ESPN host who tweeted Trump is a white supremacist. The situation got even bigger when the White House took the time to weigh in and recommend her firing—and it seems that ESPN may have considered it.
The day White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Jemele Hill should be fired from ESPN for her tweets, sources told ThinkProgress that the network was trying to replace her with a different black host. Yikes.
ESPN originally tried to keep Hill off the air on Wednesday evening, but Smith refused to do the show without her, the sources said. Both sources also said that producers reached out to two other black ESPN hosts, Michael Eaves and Elle Duncan, to ask them to serve as fill-ins for the show — but Eaves and Duncan did not agree to take the place of Hill and Smith, either.
Fortunately, her colleagues would not stand for her to get punished for telling the truth. And since ESPN is at least smart enough to know having two white anchors standing in for the regular black co-hosts is a problem, business continued as usual. The network, of course, denies the allegations.
I’m glad that her coworkers were powerful enough to stop Hill from being pushed off the air. It would have set a dangerous precedent if the White House even seemed to have had enough influence on a citizen’s employment status. It goes against the American value of free speech. Imagine if Trump knew he could get anyone in the media fired if they said something he didn’t like? That’s not what democracy looks like.