Jemele Hill has become increasingly candid about ESPN’s “conservative culture,” which led to controversy after her infamous tweet about former President Donald Trump.
“I didn’t fit into the ‘SportsCenter’ culture. Definitely not for the management who oversaw ‘SportsCenter’ at the time. I was tired. I was really tired of trying to be myself every day,” Hill on Kenny Mayne’s podcast Thursday. explain, “Hey, Mayne.”
Hill, 46, joined ESPN in 2006 as a columnist. In 2011, she started co-hosting the “His & Hers” podcast with Michael Smith. In 2013, the popular podcast went on to become an ESPN2 show. Hill and Smith were promoted to anchors for the evening show “Sports Central” in February 2017.
“So far, ‘Sports Center’ was the most high-profile job I’ve ever done at ESPN,” recalls Hill. “It’s the highest paying job I’ve ever had at ESPN. But it’s also the worst job I’ve ever had at ESPN.”
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After landing the coveted role, Hill said many “seasoned ‘Sports Central’ anchors” including Mayne, Mike Greenberg and Scott Van Pelt gave her the same advice as Smith:” Don’t let them change you.”
“Give us this advice, and there’s an implicit warning in it as well. It quickly became very obvious,” Hill said. “So before Donald Trump, we already had some creative issues with (management)… Once that happened, my tweets and all the fallout and controversy, it just accelerated what I already thought was going on things to deal with.”
In September 2017, Hill called Trump a “white supremacist” in a series of tweets. ESPN said Hill’s views “do not represent ESPN’s position.” A month later, she called for a boycott of Dallas Cowboys advertisers after owner Jerry Jones said he would make backup players who kneel during the national anthem.
Hill said ESPN was “trying to play on both sides of the fence” and denied the network was free.
“It’s a conservative culture at ESPN, so the idea that ESPN is run by flower girls is just a lie,” Hill said. “It’s not. On the contrary, if there is. As you know.”
She continued: “Once (the critics) started seeing my face, Michael’s face became more prominent…and then all of a sudden ESPN was too liberal because all they really wanted to say was ‘Oh, y’all It has to be liberal because you get all these women and all these black people popping up on my TV every day. So that means this company must have succumbed to the liberal army.”
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As a result, Hill said management “wanted to suck all the personality out of our show because they care so much about the headlines, what’s being written and all the right-wing media that keeps pouring into our show.”
Hill even caught the attention of Trump himself. In 2017, the former president tweeted: “Jemele Hill at the mic (sic), no wonder ESPN’s ratings ‘slip’, in fact, so much that it’s the talk of the industry !”
“The next thing you know, they don’t want me and Mike on camera. They just want a more traditional ‘sports center,'” Hill said. “That’s not what we signed for. We signed to do something different. We wanted to bring the madness of our previous show ‘His & Hers’ to ‘SportsCenter’ and they didn’t want that.”
Hill said she believed her true self was “too much for the ‘Sports Center’ audience.” She said ESPN was “only worried about the reaction.”
“It wasn’t fun for me, so that’s why I left,” she said. “I didn’t get fired, I chose to leave because the experience was no longer interesting to me.”
Hill left “Sports Center” in January 2018 to join ESPN’s The Undefeated. She left the network entirely to join The Atlantic in October 2018.