ESPN wanted to pull Jemele Hill off the air for Wednesday night’s edition of SC6, but since her co-host Michael Smith refused to do the show without her and the network was unable to convince other African-American talent to replace the duo, it relented and moved forward as usual, ThinkProgress.org reports (via Awful Announcing).
ESPN denies that’s how it went down.
As controversy around Hill’s assessment of President Trump as a white supremacist percolated, ESPN thought it best for her not do the show, according to ThinkProgress. When Smith told network brass he wouldn’t go on the air without his partner, executives reached out to Michael Eaves and Elle Duncan, both of whom declined to step in for their colleagues.
Exactly 90 minutes before the show was to air, Eaves implied in a tweet that it had been a frustrating day for him.
“Yesterday was a hard and unusual day, with a number of people interpreting the day without a full picture that happened,” Rob King, senior vice president for news and information at SportsCenter, told ThinkProgress. “In the end, ultimately, Michael and Jemele appearing on the show last night and doing the show the way they did is the outcome we always desired.”
While King’s statements leaves a bit of interpretive wiggle room, the ESPN PR team issued a more emphatic denial.
The network’s official statement: “We never asked any other anchors to do last night’s show. Period.”
