Politics, in both the personal and grander sense, weave themselves through our lives and touch almost all aspects of social interactions. It’s always been my belief that culture and politics are a symbiotic relationship where one reflects the other, and to ignore the trends, subtexts, and ideas which get expressed in sports, technology, art—even trashy and bad art—on the belief politics are “more serious” is naive at best, and hopelessly ignorant at worst. Why analyze TV shows and music? Because the music and stories we tell each other say something about the era in which they were created and about the people who made them popular. How are sports political? Because they’ve been that way since at least the Greeks used the Olympic games as a tool of trade and foreign policy, to Jesse Owens humiliating Hitler’s ideas of Aryan supremacy, or Muhammad Ali refusing to go to Vietnam.
But, for many, there are some lines which should not be crossed. A significant part of the public thinks actors should act and get off their soap boxes, athletes “should shut up and dribble,” and sports blogs and cable networks should “stick to sports,” even when everything surrounding those events and topics related to those events is affected by the political environment. The recent death of Deadspin came after the private equity firm that bought a cultural website centered on sports decided the best thing to do was to rip everything out of it which made Deadspin unique to sports commentary and popular in the first place.
Colin Kaepernick’s protest of racial injustice by kneeling during the national anthem and Megan Rapinoe’s refusal to take part in anthem ceremonies out of solidarity with Kaepernick during the U.S. women’s national soccer team’s World Cup run have been the subject of much debate from both sides of the political spectrum, and a place where economic considerations become a part of the equation. Donald Trump and conservatives have used the anthem protests as a wedge issue for the culture war in order to stoke white resentment among the Republican base, with the resulting firestorms leading many of those making money decisions in the sports industry, from professional sports leagues to news networks, to scurry away from either covering, discussing, or wanting to involve themselves in political discussions.
The NBA’s recent acquiescence to no criticism of China’s actions in Hong Kong is just one example where the bottom line is more important than allowing people to speak their feelings. ESPN’s Dan Le Batard recently defied the network’s edict of “no politics” by calling out Trump’s racism, and called ESPN’s reluctance to cover those issues directly “cowardly,” leaving reporters in the position of using the athletes as “human shields” to discuss anything political.
However, beyond conservative griping of “woke social justice warriors” and “virtue signaling” or any other words they want to demonize, there is a flip side to all this. If sports and entertainment are part of the bread and circuses of our existence, there is an argument that to infuse politics directly into them is to defeat their purpose. Many people watch sports and go to the movies to escape the bad news, not to be reminded of it. This may be why according to reports, ESPN’s own polling on the subject indicates the feeling that sports coverage should be devoid of political coverage is bipartisan, with a majority of Democrats saying they don’t want to hear political news during sports coverage on the network.
And that gets into another problem when entertainment and politics intersect. Do we really want (or need) Skip Bayless opining on impeachment any more than we need to be lectured about Trump by Kanye West? A common criticism of actors speaking out and wearing ribbons at awards shows, appearing in political rallies, and TV shows having “very special episodes” on major issues is that it is feel-good symbolism without substance, leading to the people they’re trying to convert rolling their eyes instead of taking things seriously.
So this got me thinking about the intersection of these things. Why do people want this sort of separation? And is there any point where people think there should be separation of politics and entertainment?
I recently asked whether anyone’s endorsement or criticism ever changed someone’s opinion on a topic or candidate. Well let’s add another aspect to it. Has any entertainment, non-political coverage, or sports figure changed the way someone looks at an issue?
A famous quote attributed to, but disputed by, Michael Jordan goes: “Republicans buy shoes, too.” That, allegedly, was Jordan’s response to questions about his refusal to inject his star power into the Senate race between Democrat Harvey Gantt and Republican Sen. Jesse Helms in his home state of North Carolina. The campaign was noteworthy for being ugly and very racist on Helms’ part.
The same dynamic is present in the media, who because they’re owned by large, risk-averse corporate entities will jump through semantic hoops in order to not offend anyone in the audience—even the racist, lying assholes.
From James D. Walsh at New York magazine:
Deadspin was, by all accounts, beloved, sustainable, and efficiently operated for years prior to Great Hill’s acquisition. Insiders at the company describe a turnkey operation that could have operated successfully for years to come. Now it appears to be on the edge of collapse — with no permanent editorial staff to speak of, few if any freelancers willing to contribute to it, a paltry and anonymous output since the mass resignations, and a previously loyal readership alienated by the new management. How did things go so epically wrong?
“I really think that they didn’t know what they bought,” said Diana Moskovitz, an editor at the site for five years. “They thought they bought publications with staffs that just roll over, or they were just okay with making us completely miserable and they didn’t care about who was on staff or about the quality of the content.”
The same economic forces which lead to media organizations rationalizing not calling a lie a lie or a racist a racist are also devouring their industry out from under them, while they try to triangulate in an attempt to please everyone in a polarized audience … which ends up satisfying no one.
From Hua Hsu at The New Yorker:
What Clay Travis describes as his “red pill” moment happened during a 2015 protest at the University of Missouri. The football team threatened a boycott, joining student activists who were concerned about a string of racist incidents on campus. But Travis was troubled that few in the media had scrutinized the students’ stories. He felt that the students were exaggerating, maybe even making stuff up. Even if these things actually happened, were “a poop swastika” and “an alleged racial slur, with no witnesses, happening off campus” really in the purview of a university president? “This wasn’t about right or wrong,” he writes. “It was about white men being afraid of being publicly branded as racists.”
These “fake racism allegations,” and the media’s defense of the campus’s “little terrorists,” inspired Travis to become a sort of radicalized bro. He began blogging about the “sham nature” of the protests. Some people found his responses glib, if not racist. This initially disturbed him. But, as often happens nowadays, he read these reactions as attempts to “silence” or “scare” him and so as proof that his skepticism was merited. He came to see the First Amendment as representing “a marketplace of ideas” hospitable to all inquiries, no matter how uncomfortable they might make some people feel. In his book, he speaks his mind with a confrontational verve. He wonders why nobody questioned whether a well-publicized incident involving racist graffiti scrawled outside LeBron James’s home actually happened. He suggests that black athletes are a protected class, insulated from media criticism. He also theorizes that the predominantly white sports media vilifies Ryan Lochte and Grayson Allen because they are white and, therefore, safe targets.
He writes that sports once constituted our “national connective tissue, the place we all went to escape the serious things in life. It didn’t matter if you were a neurosurgeon or a janitor; everyone’s opinion on sports was equal. Even better, sports was the one place where we could all go to escape the partisan rancor afflicting our country elsewhere.” Yet while he wants athletes to keep their politics to themselves, and networks to stop treating those views as newsworthy, his career has flourished by doing the opposite. Travis’s vision of the past helps explain why sports, full of hallowed traditions and strict hierarchies, pairs well with politically conservative outlooks. When he laments the present-day media’s role in our “national balkanization,” he’s simply describing a world that is open to a wider, more unpredictable array of voices. Of course, this is a world in which he’s a star, weaving riffs about overpaid point guards and noble linemen, whiny celebrities and showmen politicians, into a story about his America.