After Alex Trebek lost his battle with pancreatic cancer at the age of 80, the producers of the show “Jeopardy!” had to figure out how the show would go on. They knew it was Trebek’s wish for the popular game show to continue without him, but who would be the perfect host?

A new official host for “Jeopardy!” has yet to be announced, but Ken Jennings is the first of a series of interim hosts to grace the game show’s stage. Shortly after it was announced that Jennings would be hosting “Jeopardy!”, he was surrounded by controversy.

While Trebek was known as an all-around nice and kind man, Jennings was immediately accused of being insensitive. A tweet he posted back in 2014 resurfaced and got many people upset all over again.

In the controversial tweet, Jennings wrote, “There’s nothing sadder than a hot person in a wheelchair.” It’s easy to see why many people are upset by this tweet, and Jennings even admits that it was insensitive and a bad joke. In 2018, he responded to the controversy about this tweet by tweeting, “I never did a public flogging thing for this but I did apologize personally to angry/hurt people who reached out personally. It was a joke so inept that it meant something very different in my head & I regret the ableist plain reading of it!”

With Jennings in the spotlight again, the “wheelchair” tweet resurfaced, and Jennings ended up deleting it. Now, Jennings has responded to the controversy surrounding this tweet again, but this time he doesn’t mention exactly which tweet he is talking about. Instead, he explains that he has “tweeted some unartful and insensitive things.” 

He also explained why he used to leave “bad tweets” up on Twitter instead of deleting them and why he has come to believe that was a mistake.

Here comes the apology part. Jennings explained that he never wanted to hurt anyone and that the things he said were “dumb.”

It seems that Jennings is going to be a lot more careful about what he tweets in the future. He wants 2021 to be a fresh start, and he plans to be “kinder.”

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