ESPN Suspends Jemele Hill Over Ad-Boycott Tweets

ESPN on Monday announced it has suspended 6 p.m. "SportsCenter" co-anchor Jemele Hill for what the network characterized as a "second violation of [its] social media guidelines."

AdAge reports the action came the day after Hill fired off a tweet storm criticizing Dallas Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones, who in a post-game press conference Sunday evening had said that any of his players who did not stand for the national anthem would not take the field.

"The whole deal is political and incited by politics," Jones said after Dallas' 35-31 loss to Green Bay. "But let me be real, real clear: The thing that the National Football League needs to do and the Dallas Cowboys are going to do, is stand for the flag. We're going to do that."

Hill responded shortly thereafter, tweeting to her 768,000 followers that Jones' statements had "created a problem for his players, specifically the black ones. If they don't kneel, some will see them as sellouts."

But it was Hills' subsequent tweets that agitated ESPN brass. After suggesting that Cowboys fans could show their support for the players embroiled in the protest controversy by turning their backs on the team ("stop watching and buying their merchandise"), Hill proposed an advertiser boycott. "How about not patronizing the advertisers who support the Cowboys?"

Jemele Hill

According to AdAge, when an ESPN Radio producer tweeted Hill back with a partial list of Cowboys sponsors (AT&T, Bank of America, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Ford Motor Co., MillerCoors, PepsiCo), the "SportsCenter" co-host made her proposal more explicit. "Change happens when advertisers are impacted. If you feel strongly about [Jones'] statement, boycott his advertisers," she wrote.

Earlier Monday, before ESPN released a statement confirming that it had suspended Hill for two weeks, she clarified her earlier tweets. "Just so we're clear: I'm not advocating a NFL boycott," she tweeted. "But an unfair burden has been put on players…"

While Hill's call for aggrieved Cowboys fans to boycott the team's on-site sponsors wasn't designed to implicate any of ESPN's on-air partners, the brands that are among the most visible at AT&T Stadium also happen to buy an awful lot of inventory on ESPN. For example, Dr Pepper is a particularly unfortunate brand for any ESPN talent to target, no matter how indirectly, as the beverage manufacturer not only advertises in "Monday Night Football," but is one of the lead backers of ESPN's annual College Football Championship event.

ESPN naturally didn't address any of the sticky sponsorship issues Hill's tweets may have dredged up, saying in a statement only that she had acknowledged a month ago that her "impulsive" social-media outburst about President Donald Trump (she characterized him as a "white supremacist") had been detrimental to "her colleagues and [the] company. In the aftermath, all employees were reminded of how individual tweets may reflect negatively on ESPN and that such actions would have consequences. Hence this decision."

Hill's "SportsCenter" co-star, Michael Smith, is expected to sit out the two weeks she is sidelined from the show.