Matters at ESPN are about to get even more dramatic over the Rachel Nichols situation now that Jalen Rose’s daughter has entered the picture.
Rose’s daughter, Mariah, shared a video on social media Monday in which she tried to pick apart Nichols.
Nichols has been at the center of a controversy since Sunday. A year-old audio recording was leaked to the New York Times that showed Nichols upset over her ESPN colleague Maria Taylor being given the hosting job for the NBA Finals. Nichols felt ESPN was taking away her job and giving it to Taylor, who is black, to mollify the race police as a coverup for the network’s past treatment of minorities.
Mariah criticized Nichols in the video in several ways. She is claiming that Nichols got her job at ESPN through nepotism (a rich claim coming from the daughter of the host of “NBA Countdown”). She also said Nichols should have directed her anger at ESPN rather than Taylor (which Nichols did).
The video is full of inaccuracies and absurdities, but told a good story and therefore it got widely shared.
let’s discuss rachel nichols….this is a tale as old as time pic.twitter.com/t7Rv9t6EQI
— mariah rose (@mariahcrose) July 5, 2021
Mariah ended her video by calling Nichols a “subpar reporter. Boring. Not great.” That’s a pretty sad claim, because nobody who is being in any way objective can say that at minimum, Nichols isn’t good at what she does. She is.
It’s obvious that Mariah was just trying to go viral with the hit video. Rose misses the irony of her opening grievance about Nichols’ nepotism, which completely ignores that the sole reason for Rose’s relevancy is who her father is. She also ignores Nichols’ lengthy journalism background as a newspaper writer for nearly a decade, including eight years for the Washington Post. She ignores that CNN and Turner recognized Nichols’ talent and gave her reporting and show hosting duties before Nichols was brought back to ESPN to host “The Jump” and other NBA programming. She also was completely wrong in her claim that Nichols should have directed her complaint at ESPN rather than Taylor, which is exactly what Nichols did.
It’s truly sad to see someone trying to get famous with an inaccurate, attacking video such as this one. But the apple apparently does not fall far from the race-baiting tree.
