I think that her being made to leave would propel her beyond just being a sports writer/personality into more of a civil rights/societal commentary personality.

She has already won.

I find your confusion about my confusion confusing.

Yeah, again, I’m hoping this isn’t coming off as critical of Deadspin or the concept of reporting on what ESPN. Just that while I get it’s a tricky thing to be critical of people within your industry for working for/with shitty people you can’t ignore how that complicity feeds the beast.

Your confusion here is slightly confusing to me.

See, I guess that’s more what I was saying. ESPN is a lot of things. ESPN has published some people who have written some interesting and challenging things. They did employ Hunter S. Thompson. Grantland was them. Sure, they did those things cynically to drive the bottom line but they still did them. They do want…

The only “diversity of thought” that ESPN champions is having sport shouting about two sides of a completely trivial issue, like “IS JOE FLACCO ELITE?” And if that can be a black voice and a white voice, that’s just a colorful “Congratulations!” drawn on top of the angel food cake.

Idealistically I hear what you are saying, but she does have to make a living too though

Eh, whether or not anyone there agrees with the idea is irrelevant. I’m sure there are people high up at ESPN that love the idea of increasing diversity for diversity’s sake. But it’s a corporate entity, incorporated to make money. The fact that people are continuously so outraged that corporations make decisions for…

Just because there seems to be some confusion, anyone who thinks what I wrote is in any way a defense of ESPN is incorrect. ESPN is a great big pile of hypocritical shit and I agree with Burneko here about how fucked up it is that they want pats on the back for their nods towards diversity(and independent thought)…

I’m not going to go into overwrought, sensationalist proclamations here, but something about this DOES feel like a bit of a watershed moment for ESPN, right?

For ESPN’s core values, replace ‘Company’ with ‘Money’.

They try to please everyone and end up pleasing nobody.

All of this is very, very true. And yet I will lose a shit-ton of respect for Jemele Hill if she ever appears on ESPN programming again. I get that sometimes it’s worthwhile to try to change a broken institution from the inside, but in this case, it seems like her voice—her true voice—isn’t going to be heard until…

All ESPN ever wanted was to have some black faces, brown faces, women’s faces, different kinds of faces open their mouths and let ESPN speak through them, so that it could congratulate itself for granting them the privilege.

Yes. Absolutely.

Just a reminder that ESPN makes far more money from cable subscriber fees than it does from advertisers. ESPN is hemoragging money because the younger more diverse audience it hires someone like Hill to speak to is cutting out cable and deciding they don’t need ESPN. Prioritizing 36% of your revenue at the cost of…

she wasn’t attacking ESPN sponsors.

Here’s the ESPN Pledge of Loyalty that employees recite every morning:

“This is my Company, there are many like it but this one is mine. My Company is my best friend. It is my life. I must represent it as I represent my life. Without it, I am useless. Without my Company I am useless.”

The flagship SportsCenter will air in Jemele Hill’s absence, of course. The machine can always find another face.