Jackie Robinson made headlines earlier this week for all the wrong reasons when a web page honoring the Major League Baseball great was removed from a Department of Defense website dedicated to athletes who served in the military.
The media pounced on it as an example of Donald Trump’s anti-DEI policies running amok.
Several ESPN personalities, for example, immediately attacked the removal, assuming ill intent by the Trump Administration.
Jeff Passan said the people who removed the Robinson article were “ghouls,” Mina Kimes claimed that the DoD was attempting to “erase” Robinson from history and Stephen A. Smith said the removal was not “an honest mistake at all.”
Now, OutKick has learned how it happened. According to a Department of Defense official with knowledge of the situation, on February 27 a group of DoD employees were instructed to flag any pages that were considered to be DEI content.
Those employees were given roughly one week to examine thousands of documents. Due to the condensed timeline, several mistakes were made throughout the process, which included flagging the Jackie Robinson article, among others, as DEI.
Sean Parnell, United States Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, confirmed as much in a statement released Thursday.
“Over the past few weeks, we’ve taken action to identify and archive DEI content from our websites and social media platforms,” Parnell said.
“Without question, this task was an arduous but incredibly important undertaking. We enforced an aggressive timeline for our DoD services and agencies to comb through a vast array of content, while ensuring that our force remains ready and lethal.”
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Once the articles were flagged, “DEI” was added to the URL so that automated software could later expunge all marked pages. According to the Department of Defense source, there was little oversight of the people conducting the review, which contributed to the mistakes.
While Parnell claimed that “AI tools” were the primary contributing factor to the mistakes, the Department official noted that the original source of flagging came from Department employees.
“Every now and then, because of the reality of AI tools and other software, some important content was incorrectly pulled offline to be reviewed,” Parnell said.
The Department official said that the Robinson article was mistakenly removed, but Parnell hinted that some of the other content that was pulled might not have been the result of an error.
“When content is either mistakenly removed, or if it’s maliciously removed, we continue to work quickly to restore it,” Parnell said.
The Robinson article, along with many others, have since been restored to the Department of Defense website.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post has reported that a senior Defense Department spokesman, John Ullyot, has been removed from his role and is expected to be reassigned after issuing a questionable statement in the wake of the Robinson situation.
The statement included: “Discriminatory Equity Ideology,” Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission.”
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