ESPN NBA Countdown host Rachel Nichols caught being white & racist.......
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ESPN Ups The Ante, Makes $3 Million Per Year Offer to Maria Taylor
ESPN has offered Maria Taylor a contract that will raise her salary to $3 million per year, which is about three times the amount she is currently making
ESPN’s $3 million offer to Maria Taylor may not let her finish NBA Finals
Taylor’s current contract expires in less than two weeks, on July 20, which is the date of a potential Game 6 of the NBA Finals.
nypost.com
ESPN’s $3 million offer to Maria Taylor may not let her finish NBA Finals
By Andrew Marchand
July 8, 2021 | 7:14pm | Updated
After her private and insensitive comments were made public, ESPN’s Rachel Nichols was dropped from the sidelines to start the NBA Finals broadcast.
Now it is unclear whether host Maria Taylor will finish the league’s marquee event. This is despite a lucrative contract offer.
Though it isn’t “Stephen A Smith money,” ESPN has a contract on the table for Taylor in the neighborhood of $3 million per year, The Post has learned.
The deal represents roughly three times more than her current $1 million per year.
Sources said Taylor has interest from both NBC and Amazon, while CBS, Fox and TNT are not involved.
Taylor’s current contract expires in less than two weeks, on July 20, which is the date of a potential Game 6 of the NBA Finals. If a new agreement isn’t reached, it is unclear right now what ESPN and Taylor would do if the Suns-Bucks series extends.
Besides hosting The Finals and “NBA Countdown,” Taylor, 34, is the college football national championship sideline reporter and NCAA Women’s Tournament host. The new deal would expand her role even further, though the specifics are unknown.
During the pandemic, when salaries were beginning to be cut, top-paid talent was asked to take 15 percent pay cuts, and with layoffs on the horizon, ESPN offered Taylor a deal that would have eventually escalated to nearly $5 million in the final year. Taylor turned it down.
The 53-year-old Smith has a salary of nearly $8 million. Taylor has hoped to end up in that neighborhood, according to sources.
ESPN is offering Maria Taylor a contract worth roughly $3 million per year.NBAE via Getty Images
Though ESPN is now offering less, the around $3 million per is still a significant raise and comes in the wake of ESPN pruning salaries. For example, longtime quirky “SportsCenter” anchor Kenny Mayne was offered a 61 percent cut from around $1.7 million salary, while MMA personality Ariel Helwani, who was making nearly a half-million, was asked to accept a 5 percent decrease. Both Mayne and Helwani left the company.
Clouding the negotiations is the New York Times article in which Nichols’ nearly year-old private comments were made public.
https://nypost.com/2021/07/06/espn-rachel-nichols-and-maria-taylor-all-look-bad-in-this-drama/
In them, Nichols said that ESPN may strip away her contractually agreed upon role as the host of The Finals “because [ESPN is] feeling pressure about [its] crappy longtime record on diversity” in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement.
ESPN executives failed to take any meaningful action over Nichols’ comments, which may have been illegally recorded. The Times story came to light on the eve of The Finals and with Taylor’s current contract winding down.
Since the article, ESPN removed Nichols from the sideline, though her afternoon show “The Jump” was skipped prior to the first game of The Finals. It is back on-the-air now.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver questioned how ESPN dealt with the issue, lamenting the fact that Nichols and Taylor were not brought into a room to hash Nichols’ comments out.
Taylor did not respond to a text message asking for comment. ESPN declined comment.
Rachel Nichols interviewing Chris Paul on ESPN at the end of the NBA Western Conference finals.NBAE via Getty Images
As is the normal process, Taylor’s representative has reached out to the major networks, but NBC and Amazon are the only known potential landing spots, according to sources.
NBC has the Super Bowl this year, which could create marquee opportunities. Mike Tirico is largely expected to replace Al Michaels as the “Sunday Night Football” play-by-player next season, which would open up the “Sunday Night Football” pregame show host role.
An interesting sidelight to this possibility is that Drew Brees will begin as an NBC NFL pregame analyst this season. Taylor was highly critical of Brees after his comments last year in regards to players not standing for the national anthem.
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Amazon, according to sources, has interest in Taylor for its exclusive Thursday night package, which begins in 2022. She could be on the sideline or a host.
For now, she is still under contract to ESPN, but the shot clock is winding down on her current deal, leaving in question of whether she will finish out The Finals.
Stephen A finally went too far for his white saviours. To think it was over language. Go figure. Enjoy the suspension.
yup
she definitely
DESERVED to be the lead voice of the NBA finals...
Rachel Nichols and ESPN’s Failed Diversity: "I Know Personally From the Female Side of It"
Comments about Maria Taylor from ESPN's Rachel Nichols maintain systemic sexist racism—along with other women jockeying for the guys' club.
msmagazine.com
Rachel Nichols and ESPN’s Failed Diversity: “I Know Personally From the Female Side of It”
7/20/2021 by STEPHANE DUNN
Recent furor over unearthed comments by ESPN basketball analyst Rachel Nichols demonstrates how the inclusion of an elite few women will not dismantle ESPN’s or sports media’s patriarchal culture.
ESPN commentator Maria Taylor, ESPN commentator, at the 2020 College Football Playoff National Championship in New Orleans on January 13, 2020. ( Bobak Ha’Eri / Creative Commons)
When the late radio jock Don Imus casually called the predominantly Black female Rutgers basketball team, “nappy headed hoes” back in 2007, I became fully aware of how sports media is like an exclusive guys club. Talking about women’s bodies and looks, whether they are professional athletes or their partners, is the norm. The stereotypes and condescending talk is simultaneously racialized and gendered.
Being a sports lover who regularly listens to sports radio and watches ESPN requires a duality. I spend as much time fuming over the unchecked sexist dribble of the male show hosts as disagreeing with their game or team predictions. I’ve come close to risking life and limb to pull over, call in and rip them.
Women are just now becoming more visible playing notable roles on national sports platforms. But the recent furor over unearthed comments by ESPN basketball analyst Rachel Nichols demonstrates how the inclusion of an elite few women will not dismantle ESPN’s or sports media’s patriarchal culture. It’s easy to tag Nichols’s outed comments about Maria Taylor, her Black female colleague, as “racist” but they exemplify racist sexism.
In her statement, Nichols identifies herself as female versus her view of colleague Maria Taylor as Black, saying: “I know personally from the female side of it—like, go for it. Just find [diversity] somewhere else.”
Nichols’s lack of solidarity with Taylor as two women marginalized at male-centric ESPN and her dismissal of Taylor’s unique experiences as a Black woman suggest how timely that famous refrain attributed to Sojourner Truth remains: “Ain’t I a woman?”
Maria Taylor with two male colleagues. (Twitter)
As far back as abolitionist times, this convenient exclusivity reared its contradictory head. The erasure of “other” women (read: non-white) in the infrastructure of women’s or feminist organizations—and in representative language—hampered the fight for women’s rights collectively. Underlining that was a denial of gendered whiteness and the social empowerment therein. In other words, whiteness was not a visible racial construct while Blackness functioned as the synonym for racial visibility.
In the fight over the 15th Amendment’s exclusion of race in denying Black male enfranchisement, pioneering women’s rights crusader Susan B. Anthony and like-minded white female peers fell back upon notions of gendered Black inferiority. They instead championed racial solidarity with white men to argue for their rights as white women over former ally Frederick Douglass’s support of citizenship rights for emancipated Black men subject to severe racial violence and disenfranchisement.
Black women were not central focal points in either Black men’s claim to the privileges of citizenship, or white women’s right to the same. Harriet Tubman, Truth and other Black women begged to differ. They challenged the exclusion of Black women and highlighted interlocking gender and racial oppression, inserting themselves into the elite public conversation about freedom and personhood.
Cancelling Rachel Nichols is the too easy reaction, fodder for symbolic “cancel culture,” and about as useless as her best “wishes” for Taylor.
Nichols’s sports expertise or the sum of her career isn’t at issue. It’s about how she, like other white women jockeying against other women for a seat in the guys’ club, helps to maintain systemic sexist racism rather than transforming the culture for all.
Maria Taylor Not Leaving ESPN Before End Of NBA Finals
The “NBA Countdown” host’s contract expires on Tuesday.
July 19, 2021
By
Russ Heltman
There won’t be a mid-series switch for NBA Countdown after all. The New York Post’s Andrew Marchand reports that Maria Taylor and ESPN have agreed to a “mini-extension,” allowing her to finish out the 2021 NBA season before deciding to stay with the company long term.
ESPN did not offer a statement to Marchand but the host is expected to be at her normal spot on the broadcasts for Games 6 and 7 on Tuesday and Thursday.
All of this as rumors swirl surrounding the rising stars’ next move in the industry. The Post also reported last week that NBC is eyeing Taylor to be a marquee addition to their sports department. The prevailing thought was to add her to NBC’s Olympic lineup if she bowed out of ESPN the day her contract expired on July 20.
Maria Taylor could still bolt for NBC if they make the right offer, but the “mini-extension” might delay her first appearance on NBC airwaves. Leaving for NBC could mean she takes over for Mike Tirico as the face of their studio sports coverage. Tirico signed with NBC to eventually replace Al Michaels as the voice of Sunday Night Football.
With Amazon and NBC striking a new deal for production on Thursday Night Football, those days could be coming sooner rather than later. Amazon has made it well known they desire to pair Michaels with another heavy hitter for instant credibility in their streaming-only booth, starting in 2022.
As for Taylor’s current role on NBA Countdown, the team is missing one of its playmakers in Jay Williams, who recently tested positive for COVID-19 and experienced mild symptoms while quarantining in a Milwaukee hotel room.
Unfortunately, Williams will not be on site for any more Finals games as the sports media world awaits Taylor’s next move in the industry.
She’s gone and she is going to have plenty of offers
yup
and what ESPN fails to realize is this something that will NOT be forgotten and brought up with the laundry list of other fumbles concerning HR ESPECIALLY concerning women and race the last few years.
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She’s about to be NBC’s Robin Roberts. I can see her doing the today show.
Damn, NPR 
So she's married to a white boy too? Makes sense now. I think it's only her and Sage Steele (who we know is a certified bedwench) left at ESPN now.
EDIT: Forgot about Elle Duncan. She's the only non-bedwenching sista left there
I’m sorry but this bitch sounds like a groupie. If you’re going to say that, speak on it when the so called “ring chasers” win a championship. Is one way superior to the other? Is the result the same?
While the result is the same, doing it the way Giannis just did is superior to chasing rings ala Durant, Harden, etc.
I feel you. But the way it comes across to me, is that if she feels that way. She should say, yeah he won a championship but it has an asterisk because he’s a ring chaser. I’m psyched for Giannis, it’s his first one, and he put up a 50 piece to get it.
All these eyes on Taylor and it's Nichols who should be getting the heat. She makes one weak-ass statement and disappears. Taylor quits, nichols is back in front. Shit is disgusting.
“Want Rachel Nichols to be a part of the Bucks championship”: Giannis hands the Larry O’Brien trophy to the ESPN analyst following Finals win over Chris Paul and Suns
Giannis hands the Larry O’Brien trophy over to Rachel Nichols as he says to her that he wants her to be a part of the Milwaukee Bucks championship.
“Want Rachel Nichols to be a part of the Bucks championship”: Giannis hands the Larry O’Brien trophy to the ESPN analyst following Finals win over Chris Paul and Suns
Giannis hands the Larry O’Brien trophy over to Rachel Nichols as he says to her that he wants her to be a part of the Milwaukee Bucks championship.thesportsrush.com
“Want Rachel Nichols to be a part of the Bucks championship”: Giannis hands the Larry O’Brien trophy to the ESPN analyst following Finals win over Chris Paul and Suns
Giannis hands the Larry O’Brien trophy over to Rachel Nichols as he says to her that he wants her to be a part of the Milwaukee Bucks championship.
He’s doing too much.
WAY TOO MUCH...
And he gonna learn the hard way all that love from the media ain't real
At all.
That’s the truth
Ass getting ate in publix parking lot
No people may be looking
Grocery bars
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