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NY Post: Jackson Frank Out at Philly Voice After Criticizing Sixers’ Israel Statement
Published:
Ryan Glasspiegel at The New York Post:
Jackson Frank, the new Sixers beat writer for PhillyVoice, is out of the job after tweeting in “solidarity” with Palestine in response to the team’s statement about Israel.
“Mr. Frank is no longer employed by PhillyVoice.com as of today,” PhillyVoice.com CEO Hal Donnelly told The Post in a statement.
“We stand with everyone who is absolutely outraged by the senseless attacks in Israel, by the loss of innocent lives and violence against civilians.”
Reached by The Post, Frank declined to comment.
Frank deleted his Twitter account either late Sunday night or early Monday morning. If you missed it, here’s the series of screengrabs:
He got a lot of criticism for that. I noted in an earlier column that the Sixers’ statement mentions Hamas, but not the Palestinian people, so I think that lack of nuance in the quote tweet was what did the most damage. If you wanna throw support behind the people living in Gaza and the West Bank, presumably there would have been nothing wrong with that, but the Sixers only named Hamas in their post, and focused on “innocent lives lost to terrorism.”
Being brand new to the job also doesn’t help. If Frank was some veteran Philly writer with standing and clout, it might have been tenable to offer an apology and move on. Otherwise, the benefit of the doubt might not be there.
Tough situation. Shitty to see someone lose their new job over a tweet. On top of that, he was on Twitter not long ago asking for money.
FWIW, Frank’s Voice bio now just links to the sports page. He wrote an observations post following the Sunday night preseason game and had most of the recent Sixers bylines. He replaced Kyle Neubeck, who left for All City a few weeks ago. Voice will likely circle back and announce a replacement soon, with Sixers preseason already underway.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com