Update: Outkick the Coverage Claims Jemelle Hill Was Forced Out Due to Ratings "Collapse"

The story I linked previously claimed Jemelle Hill asked to be reassigned herself, because she didn't feel the network "had her back" in her Social Justice extremist outbursts.

Clay Travis says she was forced out due to Sports Center's ratings collapsing.

He says he's been saying this for weeks, and that she'd be dropped from the show after the Super Bowl, and now ESPN says she's leaving the show after the Super Bowl.

Does that mean he's right about the ratings? I don't know, but he's been right about ESPN layoffs before, and I think they denied those claims before they went ahead and did the layoffs he had claimed were coming.

I've been saying on the air for a couple of weeks that she was being replaced after the Super Bowl because ratings had collapsed. For those of you who would rather watch me talk about it than read about it, here’s the Outkick the Show today discussing the force out.

So I'm not surprised the news officially came out from ESPN this morning.

...

Just like with Bomani Jones, who had the least successful national radio show in ESPN history, ESPN claimed that Jemele asked out of her TV job, but come on, that's not true. She left TV to write for a blog that no one reads on ESPN's website and do some town halls that no one will watch either?

The truth is this: her show was a ratings disaster and she painted herself into a corner by calling the president a white supremacist on Twitter. Which further killed the ratings and made her radioactive on a sports network for advertisers who didn't want to be connected to a personality who was guaranteed to alienate at least half of a sports audience.

Make no mistake about it, this was a huge demotion.

Put it this way, if I moved out to Los Angeles with much fan fare and Fox spent millions of dollars promoting me on a new TV show and then a year later I was off TV and back in Nashville writing on Outkick, would you believe that I'd left because I wanted to? Especially if the show I was on was a ratings disaster and I'd been suspended by Fox for what I'd said on Twitter?

Of course not.

The bigger issue here is this -- despite ESPN’s insistence otherwise I don't think there's an actual market for "woke sports takes." In fact, left wing sports takes and SJW sports opinions are so overloaded on Twitter and sports media now that the entire mixing of sports and left wing politics is causing sports ratings to collapse.

I realize this is basically a double-post, but I thought Clay Travis' claim -- that once again, "Get Woke, Go Broke" has been proven to be the phrase that slays -- was worth noting.

I'll post something else soon-ish, given that this is basically just the last post with a little new information.

posted by Ace at 05:26 PM

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