I must confess, it’s been an exhausting week, even in the warp speed world of news and information that we live in.
I thought I had acclimatized to the pace of the tweeter in chief and the 24-hour news cycle, and the hot-takes and the whataboutism and the reaction and the counter reaction and the overreaction and the non sequitur reaction, but sometimes it all gets too much and you have to stop and wonder, what happened to us?
Performative outrage happened to us.
Speed and technology has allowed us to respond with ire, and not much thought, because, well, everyone seems to be doing it.
Weighing "in" is more important than weighing "up" whether you have something to say that is important, interesting or contributes to the discussion. We can open our mouths (or tap out our thoughts) before putting our brain into gear.
Facts, schmacts. I’ve got something to say so I’m going to say it, because the other side said something and I have to respond.
False equivalency has become our deity. What about…(fill in the blank) has become our default response.
While I am reluctant to declare that we have reached peak anything, this past week was quite a week for whataboutism and performative outrage.
You may have followed the saga of Roseanne Barr last week, the comedian with a well-documented history of peddling conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic and racist sentiments.
After a racist tweet directed at former Obama White House Advisor Valerie Jarrett, Ms. Barr was fired by ABC, despite the fact that her eponymous show was the biggest hit at the network this season. As far as ABC was concerned a line had been crossed.
The predictable reaction to this decision by ABC was swift, a liberal network silencing Ms. Barr, a challenge to the First Amendment etc. etc.
Let’s put aside the fact that such criticism reveals a complete lack of understanding of the First Amendment, we’d barely had time to wring out every last "hot take" on the Roseanne Barr story before comedian Samantha Bee managed to torpedo that conversation with a performance that got everyone going.
If you don’t know who Samantha Bee is, she is a comedian, alumna of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, and host of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.
She created a stir this week by using a vulgarity to describe Senior White House Advisor and First Daughter Ivanka Trump.
Was this worse than what Roseanne Barr did? Battle stations were manned.
Let the false equivalency begin (as if the use of a vulgarity is a moral sin equivalent to being a racist).
Even PBS viewers are not immune from the outrage fever.
Samantha Bee’s show does not air on PBS, it airs on cable channel TBS.
But that hasn’t stopped several PBS viewers (at least I presume they are since they wrote to the public editor of PBS) from demanding that Ms. Bee be removed from the airwaves of PBS and be fired.
I have no doubt that those who are writing in are genuinely appalled by the language used by Ms. Bee (I don’t condone it either), but they don’t seem to know what they are talking about.
Here’s a sampling of the sentiments we have received in our inbox with regard to Ms. Bee:
“PBS should stand up against the remarks of Samantha Bee by terminating her show Full Frontal. It by no means upholds the values and integrity of journalistic news.”
“Samantha Bee should not be on PBS with her unacceptable comments.”
“Liberals need to start setting a higher bar of vile commentary at all levels. You should take the example of ABC for their expeditious expulsion of 'Roseanne' and apply the same to 'Samantha Bee' This is just as disgusting, if not more so.”
To me this is peak performative outrage.
Of course Ms. Bee is not a journalist, so it is not her charge to "uphold the values and integrity of journalistic news," nor does she work for PBS.
It was an opportunity to jump on the outrage bandwagon, to criticize PBS for something it had nothing to do with. There’s a lot of that!
What it also highlights is the extent to which we have forgotten how to interact with each other, to act with civility and to engage on the merits of ideas and base our challenges on facts not knee-jerk tribalism.
When we respond to our worst demons rather than to our better angels, we’re not contributing to a dialogue, we are making the problem worse.
I'd have expected different from a PBS audience.
Posted on June 4, 2018 at 9:32 a.m.
