Jackie Robinson Web Page Purge Due To Human Error In Race To Meet DEI Deadline

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." 

The Department of Defense says it mistakenly removed a page on Jackie Robinson as part of a DEI purge and OutKick received exclusive details on how it happened. 

(Getty Images & Imagn Images)

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