Former ESPN star Jemele Hill has responded to fellow ‘Around the Horn’ alumnus Jay Mariotti’s claim that the show was canceled because it turned ‘woke’ and was filled with anti-Donald Trump personalities.
Mariotti was one of the original big-name newspaper columnists to appear on the ESPN talk show alongside Woody Paige, Jackie MacMullan, Tim Cowlishaw, Kevin Blackistone, Bill Plaschke, and more.
As ‘Around the Horn’ airs its final episode in May after a two-decade-plus run on the sports network, how the show changed its tone and drove away fans because of its panelists’ political rhetoric is the reason for its demise, per Mariotti.
‘John Skipper ran ESPN at the time. I think what John Skipper wanted from some of the shows was he started to install people on the shows who became anti-Trump – can I put it that way?’ Mariotti said to Front Office Sports.
‘Our show was about sports. Honestly, we did delve into politics. But you were never going to get me on ripping the president or praising the president. We’re not going that far. I started to watch the show and I would see people down and out anti-Trump.’
‘I’m not going to tell you whether I’m a Trump guy or not. That’s really irrelevant. I did not want to watch a sports show and see it delve into that. And I think it started at the top from management, at the time, that they wanted this to be the tone of the show. Jemele Hill had her say. Michael Smith had his say. I was like, “Can we get back to this?”‘
Jemele Hill has responded to fellow ‘Around the Horn’ alumnus Jay Mariotti’s anti-Trump claim
Mariotti was one of the original big-name newspaper columnists to appear on the talk show
Hill, who was suspended by ESPN in 2017 for calling Trump a racist on social media, was a much-less frequent contributor on the show and rarely overlapped with Mariotti.
Hill left ESPN in 2018, while Mariotti has not appeared on ‘Around the Horn’ since a 2010 arrest, which he pleaded no-contest to. Hill has rarely stayed quiet when others bring up her name, as she’s a consistent target due to her interaction with Trump.
‘I don’t really appreciate Jay bringing my name into this or my friend Michael Smith,’ Hill said on X. ‘For one, I don’t even know Jay like that. And secondly, I started doing ATH in 2007 or 2008. Donald Trump obviously wasn’t in office then, so to suggest that ESPN started putting anti-Trump folks on the show on purpose is just a dumb statement.’
‘The beauty of ATH is that it was a mechanism to get a variety of voices on air. It has launched and furthered so many careers, including mine. Having a run of over 20 years in sports television is a testament to what an institution this show became.’
More than two dozen panelists rotate as contributors on the current version of the show.
