What is Rachel Maddow going to be doing going forward? Hint: It’s not going to be business as usual at MSNBC. If you pay any attention to the cable news business, you will know that Rachel Maddow is the only liberal commentary host that can command an audience on the same scale as Fox’s top stars. So when she hired a big-deal talent agency to negotiate her new contract, no one figured it was primarily about money. She has clearly been worn out by writing and appearing on a prime-time show five days a week for the last 13 years. And along with putting out that show she has written two well regarded books and co-produced a podcast called Bag Man on the fall of Vice President Spiro Agnew. What Maddow’s future looks like isn’t completely clear, but sometime in the spring she will likely end her five-day-a-week show and move to either a weekly show or a series of specials.
I have said many times over these past weeks that no matter the outcome, I’ve won. The outpouring of love and support from family, friends, and fans alike has been incredible! If love is the ultimate blessing and I believe that it is, I am truly blessed beyond measure. 🙏🏾
The one guest host no one on social media seemed to be interested in was show executive producer Mike Richards. But it was Richards who was named as the permanent host, and he managed to last eight days in the job as people remembered his sexist and racist behavior from the past. So Richards has stepped down and management has declared a do-over and gone back to guest hosts. Apparently no one gave this a serious thought.
Who can replace long-time Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts?
While I’m certain someone will, no one can really replace the steady and sure-handed beats Watts provided. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards garnered all the attention, but Watts was clearly at the core of the band. Here’s an interesting video of Jumping Jack Flash in concert that keeps Watts front and center, all the way through.
Remembering Stones' drummer Charlie Watts – Jumpin' Jack Flash focusing just on Watts.https://t.co/vg8o1ytsm2
— RalphIsNow@rhanson40@threads.net (@ralphehanson) August 25, 2021
There’s been an awful lot of loose talk about “critical race theory” (CRT) and how it is being taught in everywhere from grade school to college. Most of the people who use the term have little idea what CRT actually is – instead it’s used as a catch-all for any kind of talk or lessons about the history of race in the United States that deals with racism and white supremacy.
In part one of this series, we got a brief introduction to what critical theory is. In this second post in a series, we’re going to take a simplified look at how critical theory gets applied to race aka Critical Race Theory (CRT).
Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic gives a good overall introduction to the topic of critical race theory.
Historian and author Justin Hartwrote an excellent series of tweets a month ago that sum up the rhetoric surrounding CRT in which he points out that CRT “originated in legal scholarship in the early 1980s with scholars such as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams and others.”
An article on CRT published by the American Bar Association’s Civil Rights and Social Justice Group by Janel George provides a good introduction. She writes that legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw created the term “critical race theory” to describe “a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal cademy and spread to other firelds of scholarship.” Crenshaw points out that like with so much of critical theory, it is a process rather than a thing – a verb, not a noun. It is a method of study, not a set of answers.
The article lists several key principles of CRT:
Race is not biologically real but is a “socially constructed and socially significant.” Race is sociology, not biology.
Racism is a normal part of society and is build into our systems and institutions, including our legal system. It is not he product of “racists” but of how society operates.
Racism is not the product of a few bad people, of racists; instead it is built into our laws and public policy.
People’s everyday lives shape their scholarship and the way they see the world around them. It is important to look at how people of color see and experience the world. Their lived experiences matter.
If you go back to the previous post, you can start seeing how this clearly comes out of the history of critical theory. The principles are critical theory and CRT are clearly connected.
“For example, Harvard law professor Derrick Bell took a critical lens to one of the court’s most hallowed decisions: Brown v. Board of Education. Despite the unanimity of the court’s 1954 decision, little actual desegregation took place in the United States until the Supreme Court began enforcing Brown in the late 1960s. In 1976, Bell published a provocative law-review article that argued that the focus on implementing Brown through elaborate desegregation plans came at the cost of the pursuit of meaningful educational equity for Black children. The courts were consumed with the minutiae of busing plans and student assignments. But this focus on busing, Bell argued, failed “to encompass the complexity of achieving equal educational opportunity for children to whom it has so long been denied.” Bell was not just theorizing — he knew school desegregation litigation intimately through his work on hundreds of cases at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1960s.”
This is, of course, far from a comprehensive look at CRT. If you are interested in diving in a bit deeper into how critical race theory is seen as a realm of academic investigation, I would recommend reading Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic for a good overall introduction to the topic.
Coming next: How critics portray critical race theory.
There’s been an awful lot of loose talk about “critical race theory” (CRT) and how it is being taught in everywhere from grade school to college. Most of the people who use the term have little idea what CRT actually is – instead it’s used as a catch-all for any kind of talk or lessons about the history of race in the United States that deals with racism and white supremecy.
So let’s try to take a quick look at what critical theory in general is about before we get to critical race theory in specific is about. (I’ve heard jumping into CRT from scratch is like jumping into advanced electrical engineering.)
In the decades between World War I and World War II came the rise of a revolution in social science thinking known as critical theory. Originated by a group of German scholars known as the Frankfurt School, these cultural critics were trying to make sense of a changing world that was leaving people alienated, exploited, and repressed with no good way of making sense of what was happening. Many of these scholars were Marxist in their political and social views, and deeply concerned by the upheavals brought about by the end of World War I. These upheavals led to the rise of fascism in some parts of Europe and communism divorced from Karl Marx’s ideas in others. There are several key principles to this approach:
There are serious problems that people suffer that come from exploitation and the division of labor.
People are treated as “things” to be used rather than individuals who have value.
You can’t make sense out of ideas and events if you take them out of their historical context.
Society is coming to be dominated by a culture industry (what we might call the mass media) that takes cultural ideas, turns them into commodities, and sells them in a way to make the maximum amount of money. This separates ideas from the people who produce them.
You cannot separate facts from the values attached to them and the circumstances from which these facts emerged.
Political science scholar Stephen Bronner writes in his book CRITICAL THEORY A Very Short Introductionthat it is out of critical theory that people saw the rise of environmentalism, racial equality, sexual equality, and the examination of privilege. While critical theory cannot always help us understand ideas themselves, it can, Bronner writes, help us understand where they come from:
“To put it crudely, critical theory can offer fruitful perspectives on the historical genesis and social uses of, say, the theory of relativity introduced by Albert Einstein. But it should not attempt to make philosophical judgments about its truth character.”
While I’ve always been a big fan of action and sci-fi flicks, the movie I’ve been most excited about seeing this summer has been Lin-Manuel Miranda’s (Hamilton) and Jon Chu’s (Crazy Rich Asians) musical extravaganza In The Heights.
In the Heights is based on Miranda’s first hit Broadway musical that was a love letter to the Latinx Washington Heights neighborhood near where he grew up in New York City.
The musical is pretty light on plot, serving primarily as a character study of a neighborhood full of immigrants from countries like the Dominican Republic and Cuba, and people who have moved to the mainland from Puerto Rico. The focus is on a group of friends and potential lovers and circles around immigrant bodega owner Usnavi and an aging Cuban abuela. There’s more to the story, but that’s all you really need to know. (And it doesn’t hurt if you know a bit of Spanish.) The movie has received mostly positive reviews, highlighting the vibrant music and dancing.
Heights is from Warner Brothers, which means it debuted simultaneously in the theaters and on HBO Max. (As an experiment this year, WB gave all of their major releases a month on HBO Max at the same time the movies opened in theaters. The studio is not planning to continue doing this in 2022.0
As excited as I was to see it in the theater, I first watched it at hone on HBO with the subtitles on. As any Hamilton fan knows, Miranda’s lyrics stream out at a firehouse pace and with my aging hearing, I really liked having the words on the screen to help me appreciate the depth of his writing. The next evening I went with my Dear Wife and some friends to see it on the big screen, which is where you really want to see it with the spectacular Busby Berkeley style dance number at the swimming pool and the percussive Latin music surrounding you.
One thing it is not is star studded, unless you are a Broadway fan. Bodega owner and narrator Usnavi is played by Anthony Ramos, who debuted the dual roles of John Laurens and Phillip Hamilton in Hamilton; and “Abuela” Claudia is portrayed by Olga Merediz, who played the role of the neighborhood matriarch for the show’s entire Broadway run. Jimmy Smits is the only well-known actor in the cast. (Miranda, who debuted Usnavi on Broadway, has a small part of the piragua guy I.e., the guy selling sno cones.)
Disappointingly, In The Heights has not been particularly commercially successful so far. Among the possible explanations are that it has no stars, it doesn’t have a strong narrative, people don’t know the Broadway show it’s based on, it’s the story of a city block rather than a person, and it’s a story about Latinx culture.
The movie has also faced charges of “colorism,” that is, featuring primarily light-skinned actors in the lead rolls of a story about a Black Latinx community that has people in it of a wide range of skin tones. Aja Romano has written a good explainer on this topic for Vox, looking at how light-skinned Black actors have long been more common in media productions than actors with dark skin. In my skimming of reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, I saw very little mention of this. Notably the one review I saw that did discuss this issue was by a Latinx writer.
The discussion about this went far enough that composer Lin-Manuel Miranda felt compelled to respond to it on Twitter:
For the record, I absolutely loved the movie both times I’ve seen it. If our local community movie theater is able to bring it in next month, I would love to see it again in the theater. I understand and respect the criticisms of it, but I still really loved this movie and hope I someday get to see the stage version of it.
For the last six or seven years, every summer I do a national-scale motorcycle scavenger hunt run by a motorcycle club out of Minnesota known as Team Strange. Each year it has a theme. One of my favorites was “On The Trail of the Whispering Giants.” Whispering Giants are 10-20-foot tall sculptures of Native American figures carved out of tree trunks by artist Peter Wolf Toth. I tracked down about a dozen of them back in 2015 ranging from Lincoln, Nebraska, to North Bay, Ontario.
Last year’s tour had a “Riding to Hounds” theme that called for equestrian statues as well as statues of dogs and foxes. Had great fun picking up a fairly limited number of images during the pandemic, most notably one of “Bass Reeves, Black Lawman” who was the very real first Black U.S. Marshall who was featured in the HBO Watchman series.
This year’s Grand Tour is made up of bonus locations that were intended to be a part of last year’s Butt Lite X motorcycle scavenger hunt rally. (See, it’s a shorter version of the 11-day, 11,000-mile Iron Butt Rally, so it’s Butt Lite…) And just to make it more fun, all of the bonus locations for Butt Lite IX are included as well.
So far I’ve only had one chance to get out and collect grand tour bonus sites, but I hope to be picking up the pace in the weeks to come. Here are my first two:
“In 1964, Dwight D. Eisenhower called Andrew Jackson Higgins “the man who won the war for us”. Higgins was born in Columbus, NE in 1886, and without his landing crafts the Allied strategy in World War II would have been different and winning the war more difficult.” This photo is from the Higgins memorial in Columbus, NE. (74 Columbus, NE HIG)
“George A. Wyman was the first person to cross America on a motorized vehicle. Wyman started in San Francisco, California on May 16 and arrived in New York City 50 days later on July 6, 1903. On June 14, 1903, Wyman stopped in Ogden, Iowa for repairs to his motorcycle.” (38 Ogden, IA WYM)
And finally… on my way home from this trip (which was to visit my 93-year-old father in Iowa), I stopped at Butch’s Deli and Ice Cream in Blair, NE on a cool, drizzly afternoon for a much needed Italian sub and cup of chicken noodle soup.
Huge transitions and consolidations are happening in the media business right now as the COVID pandemic winds down. We’re going to take a look at a number of these changes over the next week or so.
Today we start with Amazon buying out legacy movie studio MGM – home of the James Bond franchise.
eCommerce giant and streaming provider Amazon agreed to buy the MGM legacy movie studio for $8.45 billion. The studio has been around for nearly 100 years and is known for movies such as the Rocky/Creed franchise, Ridley Scott’s feminist road movie Thelma and Louise, but most of all for the more than 40 James Bond movies.
(What about classics such as The Wizard of Oz, Signin’ in the Rain, and Gone with the Wind? Those still belong to WarnerMedia as part of a previous round of consolidation decades ago. What? you don’t remember when Ted Turner was the head of Turner Broadcasting and bought up MGM for their film library, and then was forced to sell off the studio to keep his rapidly growing company out of bankruptcy, right before he was forced to sell out to Time Warner? But don’t worry – MGM as acquired by Amazon still has a library of more than 4,000 movies.)
The purchase is the second largest in Amazon’s history, second only to their $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods grocery stores in 2017.
Tech giants Amazon and Apple have both been seen as likely buyers of legacy media companies that are perceived as being too small to compete in the new streaming-centric media world.
Amazon has the runway to be patient and just scoop up legacy companies (and their libraries) for pennies on the dollar. MGM is just the beginning.
Pure content companies are at a huge disadvantage right now compared to companies that have servers full of user data.
The purchase of MGM will give Amazon Prime video a deep library of content for its streaming service as well as a well-regarded production studio. Amazon has traditionally primarily focused on producing movies and TV shows exclusively for streaming. It will be interesting to see whether they will continue to place MGM movies into theaters.
Amazon’s offer of $8.45 billion was approximately 40 precent more than other possible buyers thought the studio was worth. Amazon does, of course, have the money, with more than $71 billion in cash on hand and a market capitalization value of $1.64 trillion.
Twitterati are making a big deal out of the fact that the first big movie to come out of MGM under the Bezos era will be the long-delayed new Bond movie, No Time To Die. “They” have also been pointing out that Bezos looks like a Bond villain and might even talk like one:
That last one is an actual, unretouched Bond Villain line, but sounds like it could be from Bezos or another billionaire's self-congratulatory memoirs. pic.twitter.com/AkTsozKHAA
I would close by noting that my favorite Bond movie villain is Jonathan Pryce’s Rupert Murdoch clone Elliot Carver from Tomorrow Never Dies who seeks to start a war so he has a great story to cover in his media empire.
For the last few months I’ve been down to posting about once a month with everything going on. Now that the semester is over it’s time to get back to thinking about where our media have wandered off over the last year. So a bit of fun today, and then off to the races this week!
Weird Al’s Hamilton Polka now with 90% more real Hamiton
Weird Al Yankovic did a Hamilton Polka parody song a couple of years ago, and now he’s taken footage from the Hamilton movie on Disney+ and turned it into a truly awesome video!
Baby Yoda, aka Grogu, is a real performer and cuts up on the set of The Mandalorian.
Why hard drive storage is cheaper than dirt:
Trying to understand what large-scale computer storage means? This brief thread gets at the meaning of terabyte in terms of how incredibly cheap hard drive storage is now when bought in bulk. (This is at the core of the meaning of the long tail.)
And Finally … DA drops felony charges against Oklahoma woman who failed to return a rented VHS tape of Sabrina The Teen-Aged Witch 20 years ago. (This is not from a parody site!)
She's been a wanted felon since 2000 for not returning a copy of "Sabrina the Teenage Witch."
Editor’s Note: Thanks to my friend Dr. Michael Socolow, University of Maine, for letting me reprint his article from The Conversation. Near v. Minnesota is such an important media law case that highlights the importance of defending unpopular speech. When I saw Michael’s article pop up on my Twitter feed showing how it applied to the George Floyd case, I was absolutely fascinated.
Darnella Frazier is third from right, recording the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020. Minneapolis Police Department via AP
When 17-year-old Darnella Frazier started recording video of Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd, she initiated a series of historic events that led to Chauvin’s conviction.
The constitutional protections enjoyed by U.S. citizens empower and encourage everyday Americans to discover, record, expose and distribute evidence of governmental malfeasance. This freedom to publicize crimes committed by state actors creates the possibility of improving policing and making the administration of justice more sensitive, effective and responsive.
To understand how the United States developed this unconstrained news culture, you need to return to Minneapolis, to a moment one century ago, when a newspaper exposed police corruption and provided a key turning point in protecting the American public’s right to expose governmental crimes.
Darnella Frazier’s video of George Floyd’s murder was crucial evidence in the case against Chauvin, prosecuted by Steve Schleicher, front right, accompanied by prosecutor Jerry Blackwell, front left. Court TV via AP, Pool
Press abuse vs. press limits
Jay Near always knew there were bad cops in Minnesota.
Today, Near is remembered – if at all – for his legendary Supreme Court victory in the 1931 U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Near v. Minnesota.
In 1927, Near and his business partner were prevented from publishing because The Saturday Press was deemed in violation of Minnesota’s “Public Nuisance Law.” That law outlawed publishing or circulating “obscene, lewd, and lascivious” or “malicious, scandalous and defamatory” materials.
Near sued to lift the prohibition, and his case made it to the Supreme Court, where his publication rights were ultimately vindicated. Near v. Minnesota opened up the modern version of press freedom we recognize today. Calling the Minnesota Public Nuisance Law “the essence of censorship,” a five-justice majority struck it down.
Essentially, the high court ruled that the U.S. Constitution allowed the abuse of press freedom in order to protect the most vibrant and robust public discussion possible. The Court had no illusions – the judges were well aware The Saturday Press published inflammatory misinformation. But in assessing the costs of censorship versus the benefits of liberty, the majority sided with the racist crank against the state of Minnesota.
Making the connection
The expansive media freedoms originating in the First Amendment, and later enshrined in Supreme Court decisions like Near v. Minnesota, would continue into the internet age with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That’s the law that allows people to post freely on internet sites while protecting the internet companies from legal jeopardy caused by those materials.
For better or worse, Section 230 establishes media freedom across the internet in the U.S. And it is this law, built on the traditions of media freedom, that allowed Darnella Frazier – and all citizens who follow in her footsteps – to stand up to the government in ways previously unimaginable.
A portion of the front page of The Saturday Press, Oct. 15, 1927, published by Jay Near that figures prominently in U.S. press freedom law. Minnesota Historical Society
But some stand ready to abandon these long-established legal and cultural protections.
Had Minnesota’s Public Nuisance Law survived Near’s challenge, it very well might have prevented publication of Frazier’s video. Those images could easily have been deemed “obscene,” or a “malicious” or “scandalous” incitement to violence.
But U.S. states can’t outlaw media organizations as “public nuisances.” Yet tensions over media freedom now exist that have the potential to lead to limits on the public’s ability to record and distribute police crimes.
Critics who want to get rid of Section 230 regularly blame it for the plethora of “fake news,” misinformation, and hate speech that infects our web and social media. Because Twitter, Facebook, Tik Tok and others can’t be held liable for users’ content, the companies have felt little pressure, until recently, to moderate the blizzard of material they publish every second.
But media freedom is always a double-edged sword. Without Section 230 protection, social media companies would likely behave cautiously to minimize even the hint of legal jeopardy. Frazier’s video, in such a world, might be deemed too risky to distribute.
The immunity provided by Section 230 encourages YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and others, to stimulate users to post pretty much any news, information or video their users deem newsworthy or interesting.
The repeal of Section 230 could result in a system in which inflammatory or provocative news or images that might outrage or incite people could be deemed too socially destructive or disturbing of the peace by internet companies. And this could include images and video such as the murder of George Floyd.
The idea that U.S. citizens can report, publish, print and disseminate information that might be terribly damaging to authority is a radical one. Even within the United States, this freedom is often considered too expansive. In Oklahoma, for example, a new bill criminalizing the filming of police officers recently passed both houses of the state legislature, and elsewhere the rights of citizens and journaliststo record police behavior occurring in public are regularly violated.
The direct line from Minneapolis in the 1920s to Minneapolis in the 2020s is the notion that protecting people’s rights promises to foster an active, aware and engaged citizenry – and that violating those rights by repressing or censoring information is deeply anti-American.
Last evening I was reading reading CNN’s Brian Stelter’s nightly media news newsletter that had just shown up in my mailbox. The lead story was about how television habits have changed during the pandemic.
Megan Thee Stallion & Cardi B at the 2021 Grammy Awards (Please note, they will be performing an edited version of WAP. If you don’t know what that means, you might want to skip viewing this video.)
The article goes way beyond the reasons that the Grammy’s show might have tanked (No common pop culture; show featured artists that appeal to young people on a medium primarily consume by older people). Stelter quotes Brian Lowry:
The fallout from Covid-19 –- and the impact on these live events -– has hastened a host of problems. One obvious issue across the industry is fragmentation. Without the red carpet fashion and the unpredictability of live acceptance speeches in front of big audiences, why not just wait and watch the clips of anything interesting that happens after the fact?
“Even the Super Bowl wasn’t entirely immune to these forces, which leaves me wondering: To what extent is this huge dropoff not a one-time blip, but the new normal? If the latter, license fees for award shows are dramatically out of whack, and that will have a ripple effect on the organizations behind them, which rely on that TV revenue.”
It’s fascinating how people have reacted to this story on social media (I know, I know, “Never read the comments”).
Does the 58% drop in Grammy’s audience signal the end of broadcast TV as a broad-based mass medium? @brianstelter’s Reliable Sources newsletter examines the question. https://t.co/GNRaqxBLtG
— RalphIsNow@rhanson40@threads.net (@ralphehanson) March 16, 2021
After Stelter shared my Tweet, I got a fair amount of readership and response, including this rather thoughtful one from Joe Flint at the Wall Street Journal who accurately points out that Oprah got a huge audience a week ago with her interview with the disaffected Royals. Though I might point out that putting a top interviewer with guests who have enormous appeal to older viewers is bound to get an audience.
Yes, if we have the greatest TV interviewer of her generation bring in guests with global appeal, broadcast TV can still bring in an audience. But that's a pretty high bar to clear. https://t.co/NeRsYzQXnQ
— RalphIsNow@rhanson40@threads.net (@ralphehanson) March 16, 2021
And this is exactly the kind of debate that one would hope for on Twitter. (But that you so rarely get.) Here’s another reasonable response:
But there were also a number of responses that reminded me of how negative Twitter can be.
The fact that broadcast television is declining is inarguable. But someone tell Big Media they are dying. They are going through a period of transition, moving from legacy media like television to new modes such as streaming. But Disney, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia are hardly dying. And don’t forget the new Big Media like Google and Apple.
Finally, there is the evergreeen “music sucks these day” tweet. I didn’t watch the show because I’m old the music on the show appeals to the young, but I will confess that I would have loved to have watched Brandi Carlile’s tribute to the late John Prine, who won a posthumous Roots Music Grammy for his last album, recor.
Brandi Carlile performing John Prine’s “I Remember Everything”
Movie director James Gunn has had his own personal run-in with the so-called “cancel culture,” aka being held accountable for things you have said.
As you may recall, long before Gunn became a big-time Marvel Cinematic Universe director of the the Guardians of the Galaxy films, he had posted some highly offensive homophobic, pedophiliac rape “joke” tweets. When these tweets were publicized by alt-right activist Mike Cernovich, Gunn was fired by Disney from GOTG3. As I wrote back in 2018, Gunn accepted his firing with grace and apologized for the old tweets.
Since that time, he has rebounded professionally and is now apparently back for directing Guardians 3 as well as a Suicide Squad sequel for DC. But nevertheless, Gunn took extensive criticism for his tweets and got at least temporarily fired by one of his biggest potential employers.
Hint: It’s not going to be business as usual at MSNBC. If you pay any attention to the cable news business, you will know that Rachel Maddow is the only liberal commentary host that can command an audience on the same scale as Fox’s top stars. So when she hired a big-deal talent agency to negotiate her new contract, no one figured it was primarily about money. She has clearly been worn out by writing and appearing on a prime-time show five days a week for the last 13 years. And along with putting out that show she has written two well regarded books and co-produced a podcast called Bag Man on the fall of Vice President Spiro Agnew. What Maddow’s future looks like isn’t completely clear, but sometime in the spring she will likely end her five-day-a-week show and move to either a weekly show or a series of specials.
