According to sources, if it wasn’t for the support Jemele Hill had at ESPN from her black co-workers, she would’ve lost her job for her comments against Donald Trump.
Think Progress is reporting that ESPN tried to remove Jemele from her SportsCenter anchor position, replacing her with another black co-host for Michael Smith.
However, Michael Smith and the potential replacements stood with Jemele in solidarity and refused to shoot the show without Jemele involved.
Think Progress writes:
At 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday evening, just three hours after the White House encouraged ESPN to fire her, Jemele Hill sat next to her co-host Michael Smith on the set of their daily SportsCenter show and, after a warm welcome to her live broadcast audience, began discussing the Cleveland Indians’ historic 21-game winning streak.
Hill — who was caught in the middle of a firestorm of controversy that began on Monday night when she tweeted that President Donald Trump was a white supremacist, which escalated when ESPN issued a statement on Tuesday reprimanding her comments and which exploded when White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Hill’s tweets were a “fireable offense” — was calm and composed throughout the hour, and the show went on as usual.
However, two sources familiar with the situation told ThinkProgress that this was not the original plan.
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.
At 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, Eaves expressed his frustration with that day.
Faced with the possibility of having to replace Hill and Smith with white co-hosts, the sources said, ESPN then called Hill and asked her to come back on her show.
ESPN refutes this account.
Interestingly enough, Trump hopped on Twitter earlier and demanded an apology:
ESPN is paying a really big price for its politics (and bad programming). People are dumping it in RECORD numbers. Apologize for untruth!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2017
Jemele better not apologize to that piece of trash.
If only more of us stuck together.
Yessssssss!!!
✊?✊?✊?✊?✊?
Awesome.
Love it when we stick together.