Jemele and Mike

Dude, asked and answered.

She's nice to her colleagues and works hard.

 

Sure, but she works for a sports network, which says it's not political, that has said it doesn't want its personalities making political comments, and that has fired/suspended others for making political comments.

If ESPN just lets this pass, it's going to be a big deal.

 

Who?

P.S. She's also been suspended for making political comments.

 

Flesh this out. What does a big deal mean?

People getting angry on twitter?

 

Just think of all the liberal voices YF is going to introduce us to in the next 24 hours on this thread, now that the Politics playpen is fenced off.

 

Some of the animals are more equal than others.

 

That's more about Pearlman - and how male sports journalists have a bad habit of grading their female colleagues on a curve - than it is about Hill.

 

This is what I was replying to—the idea that she's just coasting or been given special considerations is ridiculous. She's been working for 19 years, and more than a decade at ESPN.

Do you guys have any idea how hard it is to rise at ESPN? It's a massive organization, with literally thousands of driven, skilled people. You don't just accidentally end up hosting SportsCenter.

As for specifics—I have no idea if her stuff is still online, but I was with her in South Africa for the World Cup in 2010, and she reported and wrote the shit out of that tournament. She was fantastic to work beside.

 

She's a serviceable sports columnist. Really, her talent is as a "personality." A person with enough grasp of nuance to qualify as "one of the best columnists" in the country doesn't send out those Trump tweets nor write that Newton column, though that was six years ago and people can grow. But I said that she penned serviceably written meatball opinions and within 24 hours she validated that statement and tweeted out the kind of meatball opinions about Donald Trump that emanate daily from the kind of people I ultimately block on Facebook. (Some of it is the fault of the medium and what it rewards.)

I don't care how fast or far she rose at ESPN. Again, that's just an appeal to authority, a logical fallacy masquerading as a defense. Donald Trump is the President of the United States, a country of 350 million with a meat grinder of a primary system, and I don't see you or anyone arguing that we owe his governing ability deference on that basis. I care about whether her work supports Pearlman's assertion. From what I have read, it does not.

 

Didn't she get suspended and/or have some previous kind of social media dust-up? I want to say in the last three years or so.

Seems like she's a little too old and experienced to continue to need coaching on that front.

 

She wrote that cheering for the Celtics is like cheering for Hitler.

 

Ah. Well at least it was something important that was worth sticking her neck out for.