Ken Jennings Faces Backlash After Insensitive Old Tweet Resurfaces

Just weeks after Alex Trebek lost his battle with cancer, Jeopardy announced their plan on how they would continue filming the show. While there are already enough episodes with Trebek as host to air through Christmas day, the game show producers knew they needed a new host in order to film episodes to air in 2021.

Although Jeopardy has not announced an official new host, they have announced that there will be several interim hosts, and the first host will be Greatest of All Time winner Ken Jennings.

You can’t be in the spotlight without having old social media posts you regret dredged up, and that’s true for Jennings. Although he has proven himself to be a very smart man, once upon a time he did write a tweet that was in very poor taste.

Back in 2014, Jennings wrote, “Nothing sadder than a hot person in a wheelchair.” 

In 2018, when he was criticized for not apologizing for the comment, he wrote, “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!”

We’re not sure what exactly this original tweet meant in Jennings’ head, but at least he has realized that the tweet was a bad idea. Watch the video below for more details.

Although the video above says that the tweet wasn’t deleted, it seems that it was deleted in the past few days. You can’t really delete tweets though. There are screenshots. There are memories. Social media and the internet will always find a way.

While some people are clearly upset about Jennings’ tweet, others think it’s time to move on. The tweet was 6 years ago and was meant to be a joke. One viewer commented, “People are way too sensitive these days. That was a very mild post from 6 years ago…”

Another comment reads, “Nothing sadder than people who dwell on the past. Get a life and move forward.”

However, many people are not willing to simply choose to forget Jennings’ tweet.

Were you offended by Jennings’ tweet? Do you think he would made a good host for Jeopardy?