ESPN, the network that's standing by their writer and former host Jemele Hill after she went on a Twitter tirade earlier this week accusing President Donald Trump of being a white “supremacist” and calling his supporters racists, has reportedly suspended longtime SportsCenter anchor Linda Cohn, a female pioneer in the world of sports journalism for the past three decades, for daring to say the network is moving away from straight sports coverage and embracing politics.
Clay Travis’ Outkick the Coverage broke the news of Cohn’s suspension Tuesday night, reporting:
Last night Outkick broke the news that Linda Cohn, one of the most respected women to ever work at ESPN and the person who has hosted more SportsCenters over the past 25 years than any other current employee, was called and told by ESPN president John Skipper not to come to work after she went on the radio in New York City this past April and said as follows:
“They definitely overpaid for many of these products, whether it’s the NBA or starting up networks like the Pac-12 Network and SEC Network,” she said on WABC’s “Bernie and Sid Show.” “It’s well documented … They [also] did not see that they would lose all these subscribers [to competitors like Netflix.]
But it was more than just that. Politics played a part, as did the network’s move away from strictly covering sports.
I felt that the old school viewers were put in a corner and not appreciated with all these other changes. And they forgot their core. You can never forget your core and be grateful for your core group.”
Outkick reports this simple statement was enough to get Cohn temporarily booted from the network. The report added multiple employees have since come forward expressing outrage that Cohn was suspended simply for stating that ESPN has slowly become more political (an obvious fact to those who can still bear to tune in). ESPN workers reportedly told Outkick that the network’s more conservative employees have been all but bullied into silence as the once-sports network tilts farther and farther to the left.
While Cohn sits on ice, Hill, on the other hand, received only what could generously be called a half-hearted slap on the wrist for her race-laden rant against Trump and the 63 million Americans who voted for him. In response to the public backlash that followed her meltdown, ESPN released a statement Wednesday, saying:
The comments on Twitter from Jemele Hill regarding the president do not represent the position of ESPN. We have addressed this with Jemele and she recognizes her actions were inappropriate.
In her Twitter tirade, Hill complained that if Donald Trump “were not white, he never would have been elected.”
Perhaps if Cohn were a race-baiting liberal like Hill, she never would have been suspended.
(Cover photo credit: Facebook/Linda Cohn)