ESPN’s Near-Capitulation to Trump

The Donald, focused on always on the most critical issues facing the President of the United States, tried to get ESPN host Jemele Hill fired for accurately describing his political views:

Donald Trump’s White House is mounting a concerted effort to shame a private employee and even get her fired — all because she criticized the president.

The latest came from Trump’s Twitter account, in which he claimed that people are dumping ESPN “in RECORD numbers” due to “its politics (and bad programming).” That seems, in part, to be a reaction to ESPN host Jemele Hill’s Twitter comments on Monday that Trump is “a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.”

After issuing a pathetic apology, the network apparently tried to go further:

ESPN originally tried to keep Hill off the air on Wednesday evening, but Smith refused to do the show without her, the sources said. Both sources also said that producers reached out to two other black ESPN hosts, Michael Eaves and Elle Duncan, to ask them to serve as fill-ins for the show — but Eaves and Duncan did not agree to take the place of Hill and Smith, either.

I look forward to ESPN’s forthcoming treatise on diversity and human resources, Does It Matter Which One?

At least Hill got to keep her job, so Harvard remains the week’s leader in the craven response to conservative criticism sweepstakes.