Media top headlines November 17
In media news today, NPR gets slammed over story highlighting 'disappointment over Boston electing Asian woman mayor, PolitiFact doubles down on widely mocked 'fact-check' on Kyle Rittenhouse, and the media gets roasted for coverage of the Steele dossier in The New York Times
There is nothing, and I mean no thing whatsoever, that our media says it loves more than celebrating diversity.
It is the stuff of progressive television producers’ dreams. Newspapers and websites have departments and sections that deal with little else. But it turns out that not all diversity is created equal in the eyes of our pundits and scribes. In fact, there are some very strict rules about what kind of diversity should be celebrated most, if at all.
NPR SLAMMED OVER STORY HIGHLIGHTING ‘DISAPPOINTMENT’ OVER BOSTON ELECTING ASIAN WOMAN MAYOR
Take the curious case of a now deleted tweet from National Public Radio, the soundtrack of progressive Volvo owners everywhere. The tweet was an accurate summation of their article attached to it that reported how the election of Boston's first Asian mayor, Michelle Wu, was met with mixed reaction by some who wished a Black candidate had won the keys to Beantown.
Michelle Wu after she is sworn in as mayor, becoming the first woman and first person of color elected to the office, in Boston, Massachusetts, Nov. 16, 2021. REUTERS/Faith Ninivaggi
It is not entirely clear why NPR chose to delete a tweet that hews almost completely to the strict intersectional rules governing good and bad diversity. After all, lefty media has had a field day smearing Virginia Lt. Gov.-elect Winsome Sears, the first Black woman to serve in that role. One MSNBC contributor referred to her as a "Black mouth" advancing White supremacy. See, that's bad diversity, not to be celebrated.
Winsome Sears celebrates winning the race for lieutenant governor in Chantilly, Virginia, Nov. 3, 2021. (REUTERS/ Jonathan Ernst)
The rules to this game are pretty straightforward. It operates on a hierarchy of oppression with a twist. Basically the more oppressed, or marginalized a person is (in the eyes of the left), the more diversity points they get. And they are stackable points.
Being Black gets you close to the top, but not as close as being Black, transsexual and queer. The twist is that if you are a conservative all of your diversity points are erased and you move to the bottom of the list, even below White conservatives – because you should know better.
NPR PANNED AGAIN AFTER APOLOGY FOR ‘CAUSING HARM’ WITH TWEET ON MICHELLE WU BECOMING BOSTON MAYOR
It is a tiresome and demeaning system, but one which the American left is devoted to with an almost religious zeal. Antisemitism is bad, unless it is attached to attacks on the state of Israel. Black achievement should be celebrated, unless it’s Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas or Dr. Ben Carson. Asian success is OK, but not too much Asian success. That is why progressives want to take away testing to get into New York City’s top public high schools – they have the wrong diversity, they are overwhelmingly Asian.
The impetus behind this strange set of rules may be well intentioned, but in practice it quickly and always becomes a ridiculous and dangerous tangled knot of identity. In the end what winds up being celebrated is not actually diversity – which is to say a real coexistence of different kinds of people and ideas – but rather just progressive ideology.
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In fact, most Americans love diversity. It is, to borrow a phrase from the left, our lived experience. Interracial marriage is at all-time highs – we enjoy each other. What we do not enjoy is ranking systems that boil our individual lives down to left-wing talking points. This is why Chinese voters in New York City came out in force for Republican Curtis Sliwa in this month’s mayoral election. Those voters didn’t care about intersectionality, they cared about their kids’ educations.
Curtis Sliwa campaigns for mayor in Manhattan ahead of the Nov. 2 election. (REUTERS/Mike Segar)
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Whatever spreadsheet of good and bad diversity they have at NPR and our other progressive legacy media outlets needs to get thrown in the dustbin. This way of categorizing all of us is pointless, and frankly gross. The American people are rejecting it. NPR got a taste of that this week. Maybe they will change their ways.
But don’t count it. The progressive’s race essentialism is going to be a hard habit for them to kick. And one deleted tweet will not fix the problem.
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