ESPN Is Very Sorry That Jemele Hill Publicly Shared Her Opinion of Donald Trump

As cord-cutters flee the sports network, ESPN cravenly shores up the MAGA audience.
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Earlier this week, ESPN's Jemele Hill elected to spend some time between SportsCenter shows engaging in a lively Twitter exchange regarding former musician Kid Rock's enthusiastic embrace of the Confederate flag, a symbol he holds dear to his heart despite the fact that the man is a lifelong Michigander. The debate quickly devolved, as discussions about such topics are wont to do on the Internet, into one about the Republican Party's decades-long embrace of white identity politics and, later, to the manifestation of this strategy in the policies espoused by Donald Trump. Hill's tweets on the subject—she's, uh, not a fan—generated so many predictably indignant calls for her job that Twitter can't even load all the replies anymore.

That said: Come, let's play a captivating game of "Spot the Lie":

What we have here is a woman of color asserting that President Trump is an uncurious, unqualified bigot who has trafficked his whole life in racist conspiracy theories, and whose election as president of the United States has sent an unambiguous message to white supremacists everywhere that the beliefs they espouse are once again fashionable. Her conclusion arguably includes some statements of opinion, I guess, but it is a well-reasoned, succinctly stated, non-partisan one that falls comfortably within the bounds of mainstream political discourse, and for which she readily produced receipts when asked. As it is wont to do when nudged outside its comfort zone of baseball highlights and PTI, the Worldwide Leader in Sports lost its damn mind anyway.

This is...bafflingly incoherent. Of course a single employee's tweets do not represent ESPN as a whole. We are talking about a corporate behemoth that operates a cable channel, not a person. Suggesting that the company is somehow capable of holding careful, nuanced political positions—and insinuating that its real problem with Hill's tweets is that they don't comport with the official company position on the fitness of our commander-in-chief—is an embarrassingly weak attempt to craft an excuse for why she deserved to be publicly scolded like this.

The network's response did not improve from there. "She recognizes that her actions were inappropriate"? I ask you again to read Hill's critique and point out any point at which she departs, in substance or in tone, from a view shared by the millions of Americans who have grown dismayed at the president's full-throated endorsement of a barely disguised nativist agenda, and/or at his astonishing inability to disavow the support of actual murderous neo-Nazis when given the opportunity to do so. You can disagree with her viewpoint, if you're so inclined. But characterizing the act of sharing it in a public forum as "inappropriate"? This is some shameful, cowardly nonsense.

ESPN is a private employer that can condition employment on pretty much whatever speech- or conduct-related rules that it pleases. But the much-ballyhooed changes to its famously stick-to-sports social-media policy that it unveiled in the spring relaxed restrictions that had discouraged on-air personalities from straying too far from the network's core competencies. Under the new guidelines, "commentary related to political or social issues, candidates or office holders" is permitted "on ESPN platforms"—provided that those who offer it make some kind of nebulous effort to connect everything back to sports, too.

This policy is riddled with maddening ambiguities that allow ESPN to punish Hill as a matter of convenience, not as one of principle. Does Hill's Twitter handle count as an "ESPN platform," since it is the network's gigantic footprint that amplifies whatever she decides to say? If so, are her tweets objectionable because calling him a "white supremacist" is not "thoughtful and respectful," and qualifies as a "personal attack" that makes use of "inflammatory rhetoric"? Or is it because they aren't sufficiently connected to sports? How connected to sports do the things she says have to be, particularly when the conversation's original subject matter wasn't related to sports in the first place? If Hill talks in public and someone mentions politics, should she clam up until she can share her drafts folder with an editor, or at least cook up a Lakers-related angle before saying anything more?

The reason ESPN traffics in inane, mealy-mouthed, vagary-laden banalities like this is because it lives in mortal fear of doing anything that might alienate some mission-critical slice of its incredible shrinking audience. The company is still perpetually adjusting to the idea of having to—[gasp]—compete for an audience, and although the occasional intersection of sports and politics probably isn't why ESPN is losing viewers, the idea that that might be to blame—that individual expressions of values are draining the network's strength—is scary as hell. It's much easier to nervously ask employees to cut down on all that pesky social activism than it is to grapple with the wildly complex threat that cord-cutting poses to ESPN's business model.

Meanwhile, outlets like Fox Sports are exacerbating ESPN's existential crisis by gleefully buying into this version of events. Handing oversize megaphones to halfwit provocateurs like Colin Cowherd and Clay Travis and Jason Whitlock is a naked play for the loyalties of anyone who might decide that the jokes on SportsCenter are veering just a little too far to the left, and who might be thrilled to discover that a bajillion ready-made, MAGA-friendlier alternatives are available for their viewing pleasure. (Travis immediately jumped all over Hill, shamelessly virtue-signaling to ESPN devotees that they might find his show to be a safe space for disingenuous, bleating outrage if any of them elect to give him a chance.)

While breathlessly claiming to care about allowing on-air talent to express opinions like real humans, ESPN spinelessly rolled over at the first and faintest whiff of "controversy" that might imperil its bottom line. It revealed as little as possible about its reasoning, because it knows that it would have no good answer if asked, for example, why Hill's cherry-picked snippet of commentary merits a reprimand, but Will Cain screaming on First Take about the "divisiveness" of Kevin Durant's refusal to meet President Trump did not. Reactively meting out discipline like this has one purpose: to reassure customers who might change the channel, or even those who might consider canceling their cable subscriptions for entirely unrelated reasons, that ESPN is committed to keeping programming as bland as it'll take in order to keep them tuned in.

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