Jemele Hill & ESPN

[BmorePat87]

(09-16-2017, 07:29 PM)Matt_Crimson Wrote: I think that's a subjective area.

In my opinion, if an American citizen, especially one that is employed by a company as prominent as ESPN and whose job revolves around opinion pieces wants to make accusations towards the White House or more specifically the POTUS, then the White House should be able to respond.

To me, responding isn't below the office. I think personal attacks like calling people fat, ugly, stupid, etc....like Trump has done before is below the office. If Jemele was just saying little petty things like Trump is a cheetoh, fat ass, whatever.... then yeah I'd say responding to that would be below the office. But what Jemele did was accuse the POTUS of being a white supremacist, which is a very serious accusation to throw at the leader of a nation. If she's willing to make those kinds of accusations and put herself out there like that then she deserves to be told she should be fired if that's the White Houses opinion. It's fair game to me.

If ESPN ultimately decided to fire her then that would be on ESPN for "limiting" her free speech, but as we already know free speech does not entirely extend to the workplace and so ESPN would be out of the woods on that one. Some may argue that the White House could "influence" such decisions by placing their opinion on it. But sharing an opinion on whether someone should be fired for what they said and actually making laws to prevent people from saying what she said are two entirely separate things and so I see no concern. If the Trump administration said they were going to try and shut down ESPN or something like that for not firing her, then I'd definitely say we have a problem.

But as far as I can tell, Jemele accused the president of being a white supremacist and the White House responded. And their response was in relation to a question they were asked by reporters. It's not like the White House had some special session put together just to address Jemele Hill and have her fired. To me this was obviously a bait question by the media to blow things out of proportion and it worked.

It certainly is subjective which is why I stopped short of calling it an encroachment of her rights. Further calls for retaliation of her speech or any sort of calls for agencies to look into other aspects of her life would start to make it more of an issue, but that hasn't happened. 

I just see it like this. She's an anchor on a failing program on ESPN and, like you suggested, the media used her twitter rant to shoot a gotcha question to Huckabee Sanders. The best respond would have been to say that the White House doesn't concern itself with issues like that. Would have shot it down instead of keeping it afloat.