On Monday, I sent out a blog touching on the subject of media capture, using as a frame the news that liberal journalist Matt Yglesias was leaving Vox. Today, Yglesias included his own take on what is wrong with media, which has some interesting overlaps and divergences from my own take.
I highly recommend reading it in full (even if you find yourself disagreeing), but found this passage most interesting, making a slightly different point than the one:
People who cover politics professionally, for better or worse, end up spending a fair amount of time talking to Republicans and trying to understand what conservatives think about public policy issues. If we’re doing our jobs at all correctly we can do stories that bring a mostly-progressive audience a greater understanding of what is happening on the other side. And when a professional political reporter does a bad job it’s often because he or she is taking a dive to maintain relationships with sources on the right, or bending over too far backwards to be fair.
At the same time, we political journalists have our fair share of totally ignorant hot takes about music or cooking or sports or whatever else that we can fire off.
The flip side is that our colleagues who cover sports or music or cooking also have hot takes about politics. Hot takes that come from the very narrow demographic and ideological niche that dominates the media and is untempered by the need to actually cover politics.
In recent years, there has been a well-discussed trend of athletes and sports coverage getting more political. Colin Kaepernick was probably the most prominent example of this, but this summer’s NBA bubble saw a lot of overt activism about racial justice. There has been a critique of this movement that jumps to the conclusion “just stick to sports,” as if activism in sports is new. As someone who wrote a whole thesis paper in college on the intersection between America Nationalism and Baseball in post 9/11 America, I can assure you, this is not a new trend. It has always been with us. Look no further than this video form the 2001 World Series:
To be clear, to the vast majority of Americans, there was nothing particularly offensive about the politics of Lee Greenwood celebrating American in the wake of 9/11 as a show of national unity. But just because something is inoffensive does not mean it is not political in nature. The years since 9/11 have seen Greenwood’s song become a more explicitly political anthem, case in point:
What brings me back to the Yglesias piece, though, is that he gets at two trends ave started happening in the last 4-6 years to make it feel like sports are becoming more political:
Politics has been overrunning into more and more areas of our lives, leading to more sports commentators have been wading into talking about politics, which is not their area of expertise by any stretch.
Because of demographic trends in media, those commentators increasingly have views outside the normal distribution of view, mostly in one direction (being more left than the average American).
Personally, I'm not too fond of it when sports commentators weigh into politics. This is not because I always disagree with them or because it is wrong for celebrities to offer political commentary. Rather, most sports commentators (and coaches, and athletes) do not think enough about politics to have good, thoughtful takes. They end up saying things that are plainly ignorant and make themselves look bad. Sometimes this is because their digital media bubble makes them immune to how fringe their views are. As Yglesias says:
If everyone in digital media is an under-fifty college graduate living in a big city, then it’s not that everyone in digital media is a far-left weirdo, but you do get drastically more far-left weirdness.
But it is also true that sports commentators often do not know what they are talking about! The same analysis holds for film, style, music, and (!) religious commentators (celebrity pastors are some of the worst at this). Cultural thinker’s ability to speak fluently about economic policy is probably low, just as most economists are probably unable to think carefully about fixing the mechanics on a jump shot.
Case in point, what happened with Steve Kerr talking about the NBA and China last summer:
Now first off, I like Steve Kerr. He is a good guy, a thoughtful guy, and a genius basketball coach. And it is worth acknowledging that he had addressed the same question in a much more humble way a few days earlier, by basically saying “I don’t really understand the situation,” which is a fine thing for someone to say about a political or social issue they have not looked into deeply!
But yes, when Kerr does go to give commentary, it is bad. Just reading just briefly about what is going on in Xianjing will make you see the false equilivency Kerr gets himself into by giving an uninformed take:
How do you protect a culture that is being wiped out?
For Uighurs, this is more than just a hypothetical. Repressive measures against the ethnic minority have progressively worsened: the Chinese government has corralled more than 1 million of them into internment camps, where they have been subjected to political indoctrination, forced sterilization, and torture.
The targeting of the Uighurs isn’t limited to the camps: Since 2016, dozens of graveyards and religious sites have been destroyed. The Uighur language has been banned in Xinjiang schools in favor of Mandarin Chinese. Practicing Islam, the predominant Uighur faith, has been discouraged as a “sign of extremism.”
Beijing frames these moves as its way of rooting out terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism. But the aim of China’s actions in Xinjiang is clear: to homogenize Uighurs into the country’s Han Chinese majority, even if that means erasing their cultural and religious identity for good. What is taking place is a cultural genocide.
Now, I generally think it is good practice when thinking about politics to practice a form of “Whataboutism” on your own side: what has my self/side/country done wrong that I might be blind to because of my biases? And Kerr is right, mass shootings are a bad thing that happens in the US, and it is definitely fair to say that our government could do more to stop. And yes, Americans’ treatment of Native Americans was a form of cultural genocide in our historical past. But you still have to acknowledge that to brush off the fact that the Chinese government systematically committing cultural genocide against Uyghurs and to brush it off so cavalierly is a form of ignorance. Heck, Noam Chomsky, who famously denied the Cambodian genocide, is even condemning China’s actions.
So yes, it is a problem that digital media has platformed many to talk about politics to create this perception of liberal hegemony in media. One solution may actually be “sticking to sports,” not completely, but more than is currently fashionable.