Clay Travis rips Jemele Hill for claiming ESPN wants ‘Black faces, but, not Black voices’
Outkick host Clay Travis says ESPN made mistake of gauging Twitter trends to create content.
After former ESPN personality Jemele Hill blamed radio host Clay Travis for her failed show, the Outkick founder on Friday argued that "she was wrong" because ESPN and many other companies made a mistake of gauging Twitter trends to create content.
"I sometimes feel that people become captured by social media," Travis told "The Brian Kilmeade Show."
Travis said only about 10% of the population actually uses Twitter. He argued Twitter is giving media pundits, public relations professionals, executives, and companies a "distorted vision of the reality."
"When you’re on your phone all day and you have your notifications turned on and people are constantly talking about you, it can make you feel like that is the real world," Travis said.
Travis reacted to Hill calling him an "idiot" in a recent podcast, appearing to blame him for recent drama happening at ESPN.
On Tuesday, Atlantic writer Jemele Hill guest-starred on the podcast Le Batard And Friends for a segment called "An Honest Conversation About ESPN, Rachel Nichols & Maria Taylor."
On the podcast, Hill discussed the controversy alongside Amin Elhassan and quickly related the story to her own drama regarding ESPN. At the 12:50 mark, she shared her belief that ESPN was being led by "idiots" like Clay Travis.
"They let a false narrative persist about our show that people ran away with," Hill goes on. "They let the idiots in the room control the conversation, people like Clay Travis. They allowed those people to direct their course of action. They panicked, and suddenly, they were very intentional about the things that they were doing in our show. They wanted black faces. They didn’t necessarily want black voices."
Hill previously worked for ESPN as an anchor until 2018 when she stepped down to write for the ESPN website The Undefeated. However, many including Clay Travis have speculated her different position was a result of her frequent political statements.
In 2017, Hill originally came under fire for referring to then-President Donald Trump as a "white supremacist." While ESPN condemned her comments, she continued to keep her position through the year.
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Travis said Hill fell victim to believing Twitter is real life.
"If you did that, you would be far left-wing and far, far out of touch with what the real viewer is," Travis said.
"The numbers are a reflection of why she got let go. There were less viewers. She got sucked into the idea that trying to make Twitter happy was going to result in more people watching ESPN and a vast majority of people watching ESPN are not on Twitter following left-wing internal debates all day. They want to get home at the end of the day, they want to crack a beer, and they want to see who won the game, what the latest news is."
Travis concluded ESPN and many other companies "lost their way by making Twitter their lodestar and using that as evidence of what the audience as a whole wants from them."
Fox News' Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.
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