ESPN has suspended SportsCenter anchor Jemele Hill for two weeks, the network’s PR department announced on Monday. The company claims Hill is being punished for a “second violation” of the company’s social-media guidelines. The first came when Hill called the president “a white supremacist who surrounds himself with white supremacists” on Twitter, a statement that attracted ire from conservatives, but which many on the left found uncontroversial. (Hill later wrote that “Twitter wasn’t the place” for “nuanced, complicated discussions, especially when it involves race,” but did not back down from the substance of the remark.) Her second violation appears to have been a series of Tweets sent Sunday night about boycotting advertisers of the Dallas Cowboys, after the team’s owner Jerry Jones promised that he would bench any player who protested during the national anthem.
Hill later clarified that she was not advocating a boycott, but said that statements like Jones’s put an “unfair burden” on players. Her suspension for talking politics on Twitter comes one day after the vice-president orchestrated a preplanned walkout of an NFL game.
