Best woman in basketball. Cough. Cough, that's Doris Burke.
She talks too much. She knows the game but listening her doing the games is not a good experience.
ESPN is a private company and can put people on the air however they want. If ESPN feels like having a lack of representation is hurting their brand, then they have every right to address that. Rachel Nichols then attacked ESPN and ESPN responded in the way they felt appropriate. ESPN has a horrible record promoting black employees. She could have moved past this but she kept attacking ESPN in private.
Here are some facts you may not know
“I just want them to go somewhere else — it’s in my contract, by the way; this job is in my contract in writing,” Nichols told Mendelsohn, referring to hosting coverage during the N.B.A. finals a few minutes after saying ESPN was “feeling pressure” about racial diversity.
“We, of course, are not going to comment on the specifics of any commentator contract,” said Josh Krulewitz, an ESPN spokesman. Krulewitz declined to make Pitaro available for an interview.
Unbeknown to Nichols, her video camera was on, and the call was being recorded to a server at ESPN’s headquarters in Bristol, Conn.
It is not clear why her camera was on, but most people at ESPN believe that Nichols, using new technology during a pandemic, did not turn it off properly. It was effectively the remote pandemic version of a hot mic incident.
Dozens of ESPN employees have access to the company’s video servers as part of their normal work flow.
At least one of these people watched the video on the server, recorded it on a cellphone and shared it with others. Soon, more copies of the conversation were spreading around ESPN, and within hours it reached ESPN executives, in part because of some of the comments from Mendelsohn. He is a prominent political and communications strategist who has worked for the giant private equity firm TPG; was a communications director and deputy chief of staff for Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the governor of California; and is a co-founder of James’s voting rights group, More Than a Vote, which focused on encouraging access for Black voters during the 2020 election.
In a recording of the video obtained by The New York Times, Nichols and Mendelsohn paused for a moment during the conversation after Nichols said she planned to wait for ESPN’s next move. Mendelsohn, who is white, then said: “I don’t know. I’m exhausted. Between Me Too and Black Lives Matter, I got nothing left.” Nichols then laughed.
Mendelsohn, throughout the conversation, strategized with Nichols about how she should respond to ESPN. “Be careful because that place is a snake pit,” he said. They considered a move that Mendelsohn described as “baller” but “hard to pull off”: telling Pitaro and others that having two women competing over the same job was a sign of ESPN’s wider shortcomings with female employees.
Later, Nichols and Mendelsohn went on to discuss the culture at ESPN’s headquarters.
“Those same people — who are, like, generally white conservative male Trump voters — is part of the reason I’ve had a hard time at ESPN,” Nichols said during the conversation. “I basically finally just outworked everyone for so long that they had to recognize it. I don’t want to then be a victim of them trying to play catch-up for the same damage that affected me in the first place, you know what I mean. So I’m trying to just be nice.”
Multiple Black ESPN employees said they told one another after hearing the conversation that it confirmed their suspicions that outwardly supportive white people talk differently behind closed doors.
In a statement, Mendelsohn said: “I will share what I believed then and still believe to be true. Maria deserved and earned the position, and Rachel must respect it. Maria deserved it because of her work, and ESPN recognized that like many people and companies in America, they must intentionally change. Just because Maria got the job does not mean Rachel shouldn’t get paid what she deserves. Rachel and Maria should not be forced into a zero-sum game by ESPN, and Rachel needed to call them out.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/04/sports/basketball/espn-rachel-nichols-maria-taylor.htmlWow, several things of note
1) White Trump voters had a hand in this clearly JK, She has far bigger problems if she thinks that is what led to her demise or stymied her career.
2) She went full on woke, bowed the knee, complained, apologized and got cancelled it did not save her.
Your right she should have let it go, but someone recorded this call, you know these people will stop for nothing once their out for blood. ESPN will pay out her contract.
