The breathless headline reads ‘White Men Really Are Insufferable’: Jimmy Kimmel Blasted For Playing Dead During Black Creator’s Emmys Acceptance Speech
Turns out it’s only a Tweet by a fan. Who cares?
The media needs to stop acting as if “somebody said something on Twitter” is news. It’s not. These are dysfunctional people on a dysfunctional platform that should just go away.
QUOTE: The media needs to stop acting as if “somebody said something on Twitter” is news. It’s not. These are dysfunctional people on a dysfunctional platform that should just go away.
Great advice…especially for the next time Trump rants and/or lies on the Truth platform.
That said, sometimes two things can be simultaneously accurate. Yeah, the media made too much of the incident. Yet, the gag was a bit weird and went too far. It distracted from the moment of the winner…similar to how Kanye West stole the Grammy moment from Taylor Swift. The gag would have been better if had ended once the winner was announced so she could have had her well deserved moment. I suspect other award winners didn’t have to compete with such a distraction. Given that, I see the Twitter complaint having some basis in validity despite over generalizing.
I think Crowhill’s point is that the thing that happened that the Twitter comment is about is news, but “someone said this on Twitter about this thing” really shouldn’t be regarded as “news.” News is stuff that happens, not people nattering at one another, unless their nattering actually has real world implications for anyone other than themselves.
Or at least, the thing that happened that the Twitter comment is about *might be* news.
Indeed, I agreed with Crowhill’s point…especially as it pertained to others that have frequent silly selfish rants on social media.
Yet, with the advent of social media, when an individual comment “goes viral” it can become news. This seems to be what happened in this case. The person had an individual comment. That comment sparked a controversial conversation. The media, looking for likes, clicks and views reported on the comment, the controversy it created and the thing that sparked the individual comment.
I suspect that if no one paid attention to the individual comment, it likely wouldn’t be picked up by media. Maybe that’s the lesson here. Ignore silly individual comments on social media and that *might* lessen the likelihood it will become news.
I agree that once something has “gone viral” it can “become news,” but I think that’s precisely the problem. “A lot of people are talking about something someone said” still probably isn’t something that most of us should regard as real news, to be reported on and analyzed by professional news organizations and individuals, as opposed to just something we might hear about and think is reasonable, silly, good, evil, or whatever other passing opinion we might have of something that we hear, that is not very important to spend much time thinking about.
So I think we do agree.
Typically the media puts out things they feel their audience will consume. So, it seems the real power is in the consumer’s hands….as to what becomes “news”. As I said previously, if it’s largely ignored by the public…it likely doesn’t become “news”.
Kimmel says…
“That was a dumb comedy bit that we thought it would be funny. Then people got upset, they said I stole your moment. And maybe I did. I’m very sorry if I did do that. I did do that, actually…”