Jemele Hill is getting candid about the “conservative culture” at ESPN that led to her controversial departure after an infamous tweet about former President Donald Trump.
“I wasn’t a good fit for the ‘SportsCenter’ culture. Definitely not a good fit for the management that was overseeing ‘SportsCenter’ at the time. And I got tired. I got really tired of fighting every day to be myself.” Hill said Thursday on Kenny Mayne’s podcast, “Hey Mayne.”
Hill, 46, joined ESPN as a columnist in 2006. She began co-hosting the podcast “His & Hers” with Michael Smith in 2011. The popular podcast went on to become an ESPN2 show in 2013. Hill and Smith were promoted the evening anchors of “SportsCenter” in February 2017.
“By far ‘SportsCenter’ was the most high-profile job I’ve had at ESPN,” Hill recalled. “It was the highest paying job I’ve had at ESPN. But it’s also the worst job I’ve had at ESPN.”
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After landing the coveted role, Hill said many “seasoned ‘SportsCenter’ anchors,” including Mayne, Mike Greenberg and Scott Van Pelt, all gave her and Smith the same advice: “Don’t let differ.”
“By giving us that advice, it’s an implicit warning as well. It became really apparent very quickly,” Hill said. “So we had some creative issues with (management) before Donald Trump … After that happened and my tweet and all the fallout and controversy, it just accelerated something that I think was already in the process.”
In September 2017, Hill called Trump a “white supremacist” in a series of tweets. ESPN said Hill’s views “do not represent the position of ESPN.” She was suspended a month later after calling for a boycott of Dallas Cowboys advertisers after owner Jerry Jones said he would have players kneel on the bench during the anthem.
Hill said ESPN was “trying to play both sides of the fence” and denied claims the network was liberal.
“It’s a conservative culture at ESPN and so the idea that ESPN is being run by flower children is just a lie,” Hill said. “It’s not. It’s the opposite, if anything. As you know very well.”
She continued: “Once (critics) started seeing my face, Michael’s face became more prominent … then all of a sudden ESPN is very liberal because what they’re really trying to say is ‘Oh, you should all be leaning toward liberals because you have all these women and all these black men who are suddenly on my TV every day. So this means that this company has surely been handed over to a brigade of liberalism.”
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As a result, Hill said that management “wanted to soak up the whole personality of our show because they were so concerned about the headlines, what was being written and all the right-wing media that kept coming to our show.”
Hill even caught the attention of Trump himself. In 2017, the former president tweeted: “With Jemele Hill on mike (sic), no wonder ESPN’s ratings are ‘rocked,’ in fact, rocked so bad it’s the talk of the industry!”
“Next thing you know, they didn’t want Mike and me on camera. They just wanted a more traditional ‘SportsCenter,'” Hill said. “That’s not what we signed up for. We signed up to do something different. We wanted to bring the craziness of ‘His & Hers,’ our previous show, to ‘SportsCenter,’ and they didn’t want that. “
Hill said she believes her authentic self “was too much for the ‘SportsCenter’ audience to handle.” She said ESPN was “just worried about the reaction.”
“It wasn’t fun for me and that’s why I left,” she said. “I didn’t leave, I chose to leave because the experience was no longer fun for me.”
Hill left “SportsCenter” in January 2018 for ESPN’s “The Undefeated.” She left the network entirely to join The Atlantic in October 2018.
