Very few purported media controversies really matter.
Very few of these stories really matter.
M ainstream media organizations and social media are often obsessed with absolutely idiotic and fake controversies. It becomes easier to see this when you view them in retrospect.
In a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review, Adam Piore laments the existence of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page for 7,500 words. One of the controversies he addresses is the “racist op-ed headline, ‘China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia.’”
The op-ed in question, by Walter Russell Mead, noted that China was struggling to get control of the emerging pandemic and that its response was secretive, self-serving, and unimpressive. Mead then went on to opine and worry that China’s financial markets were also secretive and corrupt and that a shock or failure in these markets could spread a financial contagion.
It was anodyne. And yet it was denounced in the public and in a letter from Wall Street Journal reporters. The controversy was hyped by the New York Times. Wasn’t this headline racist? An article at NBC argued unpersuasively that the phrase “sick man of Asia” was a trope meant to reinforce racist stereotypes about the Chinese as disease-ridden. In truth, the phrase “sick man of Asia” had been used to refer to Chinese political instability in the late 19th century. It was derived from the phrase “sick man of Europe,” which referred to the tottering Ottoman Empire. It is this use of the phrase, which most Americans would have glanced over in high-school world-history courses, that gives the phrase its familiar ring to newspaper readers. And, although there is much criticism to be written about China’s hygienic practices and traditional medicine, the focus of Mead’s op-ed was absolutely in the vein of discussing political instability.
Although every single person commenting on the story was literate, and should have been expected to perceive the historical allusion at work and its fittingness for an editorial on that subject at that time, a dishonest game was played. The headline was folded into an emerging and then ongoing moral panic about how the real danger from COVID-19 was not the virus itself but anti-Asian racism. The publisher of the Wall Street Journal ended up issuing a statement saying that the headline “clearly caused upset and concern amongst the Chinese people, which we regret.” The Chinese government itself protested the headline and cited it as a reason for tossing out WSJ journalists from China.
This turned out to be just a thin excuse. China’s government began kicking out more journalists later because journalism about China’s response to the pandemic or its persecution of minorities is too embarrassing. China no longer wants independent journalism about what it does. More recently it has banned all private investment in journalism in China.
One of the reasons that blowups seem so important to media people is that media people have an ingrained sense of themselves as the clerical class that has effectively replaced religious clergy as the ordained moral leaders and shapers of society. Media people, in these controversies, reveal their belief that the American people are, by and large, completely irrational simpletons who will be activated to perform heinous acts of violence the minute a prominent person or institution says the wrong thing.
Pretty soon we would figure out that millions of people would die from the coronavirus — a fair few more than died from anti-Asian racism caused by Wall Street Journal headlines. Sure, there were a handful of distressing incidents of violence, and ignorant words were exchanged. But these were not caused by the WSJ headline. And it would be weird if they were. Because not even the deaths of millions of people worldwide from COVID, joined to the increasingly credible conviction that COVID-19 emerged from a poorly managed Chinese lab, have led to organized violence by our simpletons.
It’s natural for humans to disagree about what should be socially acceptable. But from the Google Memo to the latest tweets that get some celeb canceled from a gig, very few of these stories matter. Dave Chappelle’s observation in his latest comedy special is exactly right. “Apparently, they dragged me on Twitter,” he says of one controversy. “I don’t give a f***, because Twitter is not a real place.”