The Unbearable Kanye West, the Incapable Press
The Unbearable Kanye West, the Incapable Press
Testing the limits of negative publicity.
Happy Monday, all. Parker here. Just wanted to drop a note at the top of today’s newsletter to say 1.) hello and thank you to new subscribers, and 2.) if you have a chance, check out this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s The New Abnormal podcast. I was on the episode to chat with Andy Levy about, well, everything.
Without further ado…
“[Kanye West]’s a jackass.” - President Barack Obama, 2009
Appearing alongside Hitler-defending, baseless-conspiracy-theory-mongering, wildly anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-vaccine right-wing pundit Candace Owens at an October 3 Paris Fashion Week Show, Kanye West donned a shirt with the words “White Lives Matter” across the back.
My initial reaction to this, as with most deliberately provocative stunts, was to roll my eyes and think about The Onion’s 2001 “Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People” headline. Yeah, yeah, we get it, Kanye. OoOoOoOOoOOoo look how edgy you are!
I could use this space to highlight the way “White Lives Matter” gained traction in 2015-2016 as a defense of “white culture,” with a Texas-based neo-Nazi group called the Aryan Renaissance Society rallying behind “WLM” as “a movement dedicated to [the] promotion of the white race.” I could highlight the very smart and thoughtful responses others have had to West’s decision to wear that shirt.
Or, I could go in a completely different direction, and point out that West went on Tucker Carlson Tonight last week and delivered some absolutely unhinged rants, which included a belief that he “felt like the people at the Gap knew about the [Uvalde, TX] school shooting that Matthew McConaughey was talking about before it even happened.”
Or, I could keep following the story, which somehow gets even more bonkers and includes West getting his Instagram account restricted after posting screenshots of (supposed) texts between him and Diddy in which West wrote, “Ima use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me” after Diddy tried to talk to West about the “White Lives Matter” brouhaha. (It should also be noted that there were moments during West’s interview with Carlson that certainly sounded antisemitic.) This led to West firing up his long-dormant Twitter account to say, “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE” and asking, “Who you think created cancel culture?”
But the problem here is not just Kanye West. The problem is that the press simply does not know how to report on bigotry.
And I cannot help but feel as though things have only gotten worse in recent years. Take a look at how major news outlets described West’s antisemitic rants:
Reuters called them “alleged anti-Semitic posts.”
The Associated Press wrote that the posts were “widely deemed antisemitic.”
The New York Times wrote that he “made remarks on Instagram and Twitter that were widely criticized as antisemitic.”
And The Wall Street Journal wrote that West’s “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” tweet was “a purported anti-Semitic tweet” before updating its headline to simply call it “an anti-Semitic tweet.”
Back in 2018, I wrote an article about journalism’s tendency to downplay bigotry by dressing it up in words like “racially-charged” and “racially-tinged.” To illustrate this point, I re-wrote tweets and headlines to show how tiny changes can help clarify what’s happening (which is, ostensibly, one of the goals of journalism!). I then turned those changes into GIFs:
I understand the thought process that goes into this kind of work. The argument goes like this: Well, we can’t possibly know what’s in the speaker’s heart, so we can’t call it “racist” or “antisemitic” or “homophobic” or “sexist” or, well, you get the idea; instead, we’ll just say that it’s reminiscent of racist/antisemitic/homophobic/sexist/etc. language.
It’s the same impulse that journalists cite when trying to explain why they won’t say that a candidate is “lying,” and why they opt for toothless words like “falsehood.” If the past several years should have taught journalists anything (and, to be entirely clear, this is a lesson that should have been learned long, long, long ago), it’s that if you dance around calling something a “lie” or get wishy-washy about whether something is bigoted, it will only elevate and empower the people who use lies and bigotry to promote their worldview.
Trump’s 2016 election should have been a moment of media reckoning with its failures to properly contextualize the lies of a racist madman. Instead, many journalists (and, more importantly, their editors/supervisors/owners of media outlets) shrugged and decided that Trump’s tactic of spewing non-stop lies and bigotry was both something that was normal and something that shouldn’t be talked about in ways that suggest any sort of value-judgment on part of the press.
Instead, the people who are supposed to inform the public find themselves asking whether announcing a plan to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” is actually antisemitic or simply “purportedly”/”deemed”/etc. to be antisemitic. We’re all worse off for this kind of hands-off press.
I asked the indefatigable Carrie Poppy, a journalist I adore, on Zuck Book to respond to her and other journalists reluctance to use "lie" when describing what the subjects of her investigations do when they say things that aren't true. To paraphrase, she gave a response like what you said, "We can’t possibly know what’s in the speaker’s heart".
I didn't graduate from USC's prestigious journalism school like Ms. Poppy did. But if J-school is teaching journalists that the plain language use of the verb "to lie" is unacceptable, and only "Merriam-Webster Verb (2): 1" is the only definition that can ever be used, it creates an even wider disconnect between plain-language readers of news and those who produce those articles and headlines.
In my view, it doesn't matter if we can't know what's in a speaker's heart. We know their intentions by their actions and words. I feel like philosophy solved this problem ages ago. Why do journalists feel the need to re-litigate thoughts vs intentions?
And of course, it goes to the second-hand reporting, where reporters give the same wishy-washy treatment to politicians that defend this. Such as Todd Rokita, Indiana's Attorney General.