Over the past two weeks, the media has been atwitter about race relations in the United States. First, Don Imus made his spectacularly stupid “nappy-headed hos” comment on his nationally syndicated radio program; then, the world was reminded of the three Duke lacrosse players, who were finally exonerated of the rape charges leveled against them by a black stripper.
Thanks to the media coverage of these stories, we’ve become embroiled in a loud, contentious and often pointless argument masked as a deep discussion of race in America. It’s like listening to a rambling, semi-coherent, facts-averse drunk at a bar expound on topics with slurring ignorance. The usual suspects have come out in force – Bill O’Reilly, Jesse Jackson, Nancy Grace, Al Sharpton – along with some new faces that have slumped to new lows, including The New York Times.
Because the two stories represent opposite ends of the spectrum, the media’s reaction has been schizophrenic: There has been shocked saber rattling directed at Imus, and shocked vituperations directed at the woman who made the rape charges. These reporters are incensed that they had not realized earlier that the story was full of more holes than a chain-link fence. In short, there has been a steady supply of “shock,” gushing forth like some sort of terrible media orgasm.
The common factor in how the mainstream media cover these stories, however, is how knee-jerk and reactionary the coverage is. Journalistic epistemology is replaced by the philosophy of righteous indignation. This has always been the case with journalism, but these stories illustrate how pronounced the problem is today.
In my opinion the most shocking thing about the Imus situation is that it indicates that Jackson, Sharpton and Imus are still relevant figures. Did the Earth suddenly get sucked into a wormhole and travel back to 1988? Will acid-wash jeans come back in style? This is far more shocking than Imus’ comments because his comments have always bordered on the boorish.
Imus has lost his job as a result of the media backlash, primarily directed by Sharpton and Jackson. Time Magazine put Imus on its cover and dedicated pages to the situation, trying to come to the bottom of why some people can say certain racially charged things – Borat, for example – and others can’t. The reason, apparently, is because people like Borat are “fictional” and they act as “satire.” This is a brilliant example of stating the obvious.
The coverage of the dropped charges in the Duke lacrosse rape case, on the other hand, represents a different tactic. Ironically, the news organizations that initially blew the story out of proportion – CNN, The New York Times and Newsweek Magazine – are now the ones currently covering the case with the indignation redirected at District Attorney Mike Nifong. Some news organizations, such as the New York Post and Fox News, have gone so far as to publish pictures of the accuser along with her name.
I’m not sure what the reasoning for this is. Are they hoping that someone actually assaults her so they’ll have a story in the future?
During the height of the kerfluffle, Sharpton’s Spidey Senses started tingling, and he became a major player in the controversy, charging the players with rape. Sharpton has been wrong about this in the past – spectacularly wrong, as was the case with the Tawana Brawley “rape” case, which ended with Sharpton being successfully sued for slander. He appeared on O’Reilly’s program, declaring the players guilty.
I don’t know what sickens me more: How inept Sharpton’s arguments were, or that he made O’Reilly look like a latter day Clarence Darrow by comparison. Nobody wants O’Reilly to be right.
But maybe that’s going too far. O’Reilly will always be a monumental idiot. He and Sharpton deserve each other. If Sharpton and O’Reilly ever have a repeat performance, I sincerely hope that it ends the way the movie Scanners did, with Sharpton and O’Reilly locked in psychic battle until both of their heads spontaneously combust.
The real criminal in the case is District Attorney Nifong, whose obstinate refusal to drop the case, even in light of a preponderance of evidence verifying the lacrosse players’ stories, means that he irreparably destroyed the trust given to him by his constituents. This probably won’t matter to Nancy Grace who rallied to Nifong’s defense, as she has never met a District Attorney she didn’t want to publicly fellate on her program (figuratively, of course).
The lacrosse players are innocent of committing a crime, though by all indication they are monumental jerks. They hired strippers to come to their pathetic party, which I must assume was an exercise in preppy excess – popped collars as far as the eye could see, and a disturbing air of WASPy entitlement. They explicitly asked for white strippers and called the accuser a n—– when she was leaving. The racial slur was, apparently, in response to the woman’s insult of the boys’ genitalia. Still, there is something significantly wrong with the psyche of a person who would automatically resort to spewing the most terrible epithet imaginable in response to an insult.
Nevertheless, as much as the media has inundated us with these stories, they don’t properly illuminate the still-festering racist attitudes in America. Instead, on a certain level, the conversation becomes so dumbed-down that the media covering the stories end up propagating stereotypes.
There are greater things to worry about now, so let’s forget these constructed stories and the virulent talking heads who feed off of them.
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