Photo: NBA on TNT/X

On Tuesday, Charles Barkley criticized the media for sensationalizing Tyreek Hill’s detainment by framing it as a race-related issue. Barkley called out reporters and commentators for shifting the narrative, accusing them of unnecessarily turning the situation into a racial story instead of focusing on the facts of the case.

He expressed frustration with the media’s tendency to use race as a focal point in such situations, rather than addressing the real details of Hill’s detainment.

“I hate that we’re gonna throw it in the media because you know the guys are gonna quickly go to race and it bothers me,” Barkley said during an appearance on Fox Sports 910 radio in Phoenix. “We got so many fools in the media who love to play the race card. I said, ‘Wait a minute, they just did the same thing to Scottie Scheffler.’

“The one thing you can’t do as a celebrity, you can’t say, ‘Do you know who I am?’ You say, ‘Yes, sir,’ cooperate one hundred percent. Like I said, I don’t know what happened, but when we let these fools on TV and radio start talking about it, they go straight to, ‘Was it racism?’ I’m like wait a minute now, we don’t know that. I saw the police report say he was uncooperative,” Barkley continued. 

“But the one thing I hate when we put stuff in the media and we let guys who race-bait start throwing things out there, like I said, wait a minute, the same thing just happened to Scottie Scheffler, who actually went and got booked! He went down to the big house.”

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR