Memorandum pointed me Matt Taibbi‘s latest, “NPR’s Brilliant Self-Own.” The essence of the piece,
Yesterday’s NPR article, “Outrage As A Business Model: How Ben Shapiro Is Using Facebook To Build An Empire,” is among the more unintentionally funny efforts at media criticism in recent times.
[…]
NPR has not run a piece critical of Democrats since Christ was a boy. Moreover, much like the New York Times editorial page (but somehow worse), the public news leader’s monomaniacal focus on “race and sexuality issues” has become an industry in-joke. For at least a year especially, listening to NPR has been like being pinned in wrestling beyond the three-count. Everything is about race or gender, and you can’t make it stop.
[…]
This was functionally the same piece as the recent New York Times article, “Is the Rise of the Substack Economy Bad for Democracy?” which similarly blamed Substack for hurting “traditional news” — and, as the headline suggests, democracy itself — by being a) popular and b) financially successful, which in media terms means not losing money hand over fist. There, too, the reasons for the rise of an alternative media outlet were presented by critics as a frightening, unsolvable Scooby-Doo mystery.
It’s not. NPR sucks and is unlistenable, so people are going elsewhere. People like Shapiro are running their strategy in reverse and making fortunes doing it. One of these professional analysts has to figure this one out eventually, right?
Taibbi is a skilled polemicist and a reader unfamiliar with both Shapiro and NPR might well come away persuaded. And this section is brilliant satire:
A brief list of just a few recent NPR reports:
“Billie Eilish Says She Is Sorry After TikTok Video Shows Her Mouthing A Racist Slur.” Pop star caught on tape using the word “chink” when she was “13 or 14 years old” triggers international outrage and expenditure of U.S. national media funding.
“Black TikTok Creators Are On Strike To Protest A Lack Of Credit For Their Work.” White TikTok users dance to Nicky Minaj lyrics like, “I’m a f****** Black Barbie. Pretty face, perfect body,” kicking off “a debate about cultural appropriation on the app.”
“Geocaching While Black: Outdoor Pastime Reveals Racism And Bias.” Area man who plays GPS-based treasure hunt game requiring forays into remote places and private property describes “horrifying” experience of people asking what he’s doing.
“Broadway Is Reopening This Fall, And Every New Play Is By A Black Writer.” All seven new plays being written by black writers is “a step toward progress,” but critics “will be watching Broadway’s next moves” to make sure “momentum” continues.
“She Struggled To Reclaim Her Indigenous Name. She Hopes Others Have It Easier.” It took Cold Lake First Nations member Danita Bilozaze nine whole months to change her name to reflect her Indigenous identity.
“Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It’s Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist.” Tom Hanks pushing for more widespread teaching of the Tulsa massacre doesn’t change the fact that he’s built a career playing “white men ‘doing the right thing,’” NPR complains.
That’s just hilarious.
And there’s a great deal of truth in the critique. While I don’t listen to NPR as much as I once did, with podcasting having destroyed my patience for sitting through stories that I don’t care about, the network does have a tendency to ride hobby horses to death. As a much-more-conservative listener years ago, I found their reporting on issues I cared about fair and in-depth. But they weren’t exactly subtle about inserting long feature stories on their flagship “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” programs that advanced a progressive viewpoint on the social issues of the day. It got to be a bit much.
Alas, a sampling of some of the linked stories reveals that Taibbi’s satirical summaries of the NPR features above, while hilarious, simply misrepresent the shows. So, for example,
“Geocaching While Black: Outdoor Pastime Reveals Racism And Bias.” Area man who plays GPS-based treasure hunt game requiring forays into remote places and private property describes “horrifying” experience of people asking what he’s doing.
just ain’t true.
[S]oon after he started, Cadd, who is Black, read a forum where people were talking about how they were rarely bothered by the police while geocaching.
“And I was thinking, man, I’ve been doing this six months and I’ve been stopped seven times.”
As a Black person, Cadd said those encounters can be terrifying.
So, while geocachers are rarely asked what they’re doing and yet Cadd was stopped seven times—by the police—soon after he started. That . . . seems like a story. Oh, and, no, he’s not going on private property.
Geocaches are not supposed to be placed in locations that require someone looking for them to trespass or pass markers that prohibit access. And by uploading the coordinates of a cache page to the geocaching app, the hider must agree that they have obtained “all necessary permissions from the landowner or land manager.”
Still, Cadd avoids certain caches — if they are hidden in the yard of private homes, for example — because he feels it could be dangerous for him.
[…]
He writes about encountering racism on the road on his blog, Geocaching While Black. He’s had some harrowing encounters, such as being called “boy” in Paris, Texas. Or finding a cache hidden inside a flagpole that was flying the Confederate flag.
There’s more to the story but you get the idea. It’s exceedingly anecdotal and the evidence is a single man’s telling of his own story. Given the blog’s titular topic and the need to continually generate content, it’s not inconceivable that it’s idiosyncratic or exaggerated. But, frankly, it seems incredibly plausible given what we know about how people perceive Black men who are in places where they’re unexpected.
That was the first of the stories I went to and I won’t deconstruct all of them but Taibbi’s take here was simply dishonest.
The story about the Black plays opening on Broadway? Yes, all seven of the new post-pandemic plays were written by Black playwrights? What more could those ungrateful, uppity people want amirite? Well, it turns out that five of them are first-timers and—you may be surprised to learn this—most shows appearing on Broadway have historically been written by whites. No, it’s true.
Five plays have already been scheduled for 2022, and none so far were written by Black writers.
“Seven Black shows coming to Broadway — it’s unprecedented. It’s what we would like to see, especially after the racial reckoning we’ve had in this society over the past year, and more specifically in the theater industry,” Shade said. “But we also have to be realistic about the placement of the shows. We have to be realistic about what this may mean for Black artists going forward.”
Oh, and
Still recovering from the latest wave of the pandemic and with the Delta variant on the rise, tourism in New York remains low. Plays — particularly new Black-written plays — face extreme pressure to be immediately financially successful, Shade said, and risk being quickly shut down and shut out if they aren’t.
So, yeah, one might forgive some trepidation as to whether a surge of Black-written plays portends a new era or is merely an anomaly.
Of the stories that I sampled, the one where Taibbi’s critique rang truest—and one that I had read previously—was the Tom Hanks piece. It is indeed absurd to criticize Hanks, seemingly universally viewed as a good guy and an ally, for making movies about good white guys. And too much of the piece seems to do that. It takes a while for it to finally get to a legitimate point:
He’s not alone. Superstar director Steven Spielberg has a similar pedigree (notwithstanding occasional projects such as The Color Purple and Amistad). And fellow director Ron Howard. These stories of white Americans smashing the Nazi war machine or riding rockets into space are important. But they often leave out how Black soldiers returned home from fighting in World War II to find they weren’t allowed to use the GI Bill to secure home loans in certain neighborhoods or were cheated out of claiming benefits at all.
They don’t describe how Black people were excluded from participating in space missions as astronauts early in America’s space program. As the book and film Hidden Figures notes, even brilliant Black and female mathematicians faced discrimination in the space program during the 1950s and 1960s. If given better opportunities, perhaps they could have helped us get to the moon sooner, by putting our best minds on the problem, regardless of race.
In some ways, Hollywood is tripped up by its own storytelling habits. Often, in modern films and TV shows, open and ugly expressions of racism are used to telegraph to the audience that a character is a terrible person. Think of the moment when a mobster in The Godfather notes he wants to focus selling hard drugs to Black people or “the coloreds” because, “they’re animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.” Our antihero, Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone, had resisted selling drugs at all, but accepts a compromise.
Once that dynamic is established, it’s tough to show a character the audience is supposed to love displaying the type of racism that was common in their time. Which means the product of that racism – from lynchings to redlining – is often disappeared, too.
This is, somewhat obliquely, an attack on structural racism more so than on Hanks or Spielberg or even Hollywood. Even well-intentioned tropes— that vulgar expression of racism is something only bad guys engage in—can unintentionally normalize more subtle forms of racism. The column, alas, falls into the op-ed trope of relying on a recent happening (in this case, an NYT op-ed by Hanks on the Tulsa massacre) as a hook to make a point the writer needed an excuse to make. So, it turns a valid critique of a system into a rather weak complaint about a person trying to be an ally.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to go through Shapiro’s recent oeuvre to compare it to these NPR stories. Indeed, scanning through the front page of his site, The Daily Wire, it appears his only regular contribution is an eponymous podcast. But I’d be surprised if the actual content of his analysis displayed anything like the subtlety of even Taibbi’s cherry-picked examples.
