Iconic journalist Jemele Hill went after the White media for its flagrant hypocrisy of castigating NBA star Kyrie Irving for hate speech but remaining conspicuously silent when Jerry Jones was photographed attending a White supremacist rally.
Jones, 80, defied his football coach’s decree and attended a segregationist rally at his Little Rock, Arkansas, high school when he was 14 years old. A photographer captured Jones standing among a group of racist teens who successfully barred Black students from integrating their school in 1957.
Hill, a former ESPN reporter who now writes for The Atlantic, is demanding that the mainstream media hold Jones accountable.
“This is not to say that there should be no room for accountability, of course,” Hill told “TMZ.” “But it seems that it just is nonstop, and over and over and over again and it’s constant.”
She doesn’t buy Jones’ questionable excuse that he was “just curious” about the big media event that day. Hill explains that Jones’ ownership status for the Dallas Cowboys covers him from having to explain himself, whereas Irving’s status as an employee of the NBA has subjected him to incessant questioning by the media about being antisemitic.
“I think the difference in [Jerry] and Kyrie in the treatment is not only a failure by the media, but it’s also a difference in power,” Hill told the entertainment publication.
“Kyrie, he’s a ‘worker’ in the NBA. Jerry Jones is an owner, and as an owner, he gets to dictate the rules of engagement, so to speak. He also doesn’t have to answer to the media as often as Kyrie Irving does.”
Hill agrees with NBA superstar LeBron James when he also chastised the media for not questioning Jones the way they did Irving. She believes the situation would have been handled very differently had Jones been an owner in the NBA because the players exert more power and influence in the league.
