Rachel Nichols, a white NBA reporter, returned Wednesday with her show, “The Jump,” after an unannounced, one-day break amid furor over her race-related remark last year about a Black colleague, Maria Taylor, reports CNBC.
“There’s so much to talk about today,” Nichols said without irony early in Wednesday’s broadcast of the basketball-focused show, which began as scheduled from Phoenix at 4 p.m. ET.
Much of the NBA media world has been talking about Nichols and Taylor since Sunday, when a bombshell New York Times expose revealed details of a July 2020 phone call Nichols had with Adam Mendelsohn, the high-powered communications advisor to Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James.
During that call, which was captured by a live video camera in Nichols’ hotel room without her knowledge, Nichols griped to Mendelsohn about Taylor getting a coveted job hosting ESPN’s pregame and postgame coverage of the 2020 NBA Finals.
Nichols had assumed that job would be hers, as part of her contract, and suggested to Mendelsohn that Taylor got the gig because of her race — and because ESPN, which is owned by Walt Disney Co., wanted to burnish its “diversity” credentials.
“If you need to give her more things to do because you are feeling pressure about your crappy longtime record on diversity — which, by the way, I know personally from the female side of it — like, go for it,” Nichols said on the call, audio of which was published by the Times.
ESPN reportedly never disciplined Nichols for the remark, which, like the rest of the conversation, was fed into the network’s control room in Connecticut from her camera. A tape of the video began circulating within ESPN shortly after the call.
On Tuesday, two days after the Times article, ESPN revealed that Nichols was being benched from covering the NBA Finals.
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