Comedy Central Makes a Serious Point. WaPo’s Embarrassing Clarification. The Sheer Delight of Big Jet TV. | Winners & Losers in Today’s Green Room
MEDIA WINNER: The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper
The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper took a break from trolling Americans and traveled north to Ottawa to confront truckers protesting vaccine requirements for drivers who cross the border.
“Three weeks ago, north of the border, a new kind of protest emerged,” Klepper said on Thursday’s episode. “So I traveled to Ottawa, expecting to find some Canada nice, but their messaging was a bit more coarse. These trucks shut down businesses and made roads impassable.”
To recap, Canadian anti-vaxxers have been protesting Covid-19 vaccine mandates that were put in place last month, causing supply-chain disruptions and shutting down roads.
Well versed in confronting protesters, Klepper went on to speak to some of the truckers who have paralyzed Canada’s capital city by turning it into a gridlock.
“We don’t live in Germany. We don’t live in Nazi Germany. Those days are over,” said one protester. “’Show me your papers’ don’t happen anymore. That’s a freedom that everyone should have.”
Klepper pushed back, asking if “the Germany comparison” was a “stretch here in Canada,” prompting the protester to simply say, “No.”
Klepper’s point was a valid one, as we have seen an appalling trendiness of Holocaust comparisons in recent years. Here’s a good rule of thumb: if genocide is actually happening or people are being rounded up and put in concentration camps (like the situation with the Uyghurs in China), then it’s possible a Nazi analogy won’t be totally off-base. Otherwise, just don’t go there.
He might be a correspondent on a Comedy Central show, but Klepper made a serious and important point with this story.
MEDIA LOSER: The Washington Post
The Washington Post issued a correction on Thursday regarding how they described the views of Associate Justice Clarence Thomas in a story on the apparent influence Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) has over President Joe Biden as he decides who he will nominate for the Supreme Court.
The trouble came in how the Post framed a quote from Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS). “If you know that a person has been vetted by Jim Clyburn, you know that person won’t go to the court and end up being a Clarence Thomas,” said Thompson.
The Post added onto the quote a comment that the mention of Thomas was “referring to the Black justice whose rulings often resemble the thinking of White conservatives.”
After getting buried in an avalanche of online criticism, the Post added a clarification to the article: “A previous version of this story imprecisely referred to Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinions as often reflecting the thinking of White conservatives, rather than conservatives broadly. That reference has been removed.”
This wasn’t a hastily-written post on some random blog, or even an op-ed on the Post’s opinion page, but an article presented as a straight news piece with two reporters’ bylines attached and presumably multiple editors involved to approve the story pitch, vet the article, copy-edit, and finalize for publication.
All those people were on board with suggesting a Black judge can’t have conservative views without being viewed as thinking like White people. News flash: Black people are just that — people. Some are liberal. Some are conservative. Some have zero interest in politics. That’s all fine.
The Post’s “clarification” was good, but it’s an embarrassment that ridiculous phrase ever got published in the first place.
Links We Like:
What can actually convince vaccine skeptics to get their shots
– Dylan Scott, Vox
It’s Not ‘The’ Ukraine: The country is much more than a sphere of influence.
– Franklin Foer, The Atlantic
Pamela Moses ‘Requested a Jury Trial.’ So She Got 6 Years in Prison.
– Billy Binion, Reason
The Bones of the Blogosphere: What’s the right way for a blog—or a newsletter—to die?
– Addison Del Mastro, The Bulwark
Read the full Mediaite Green Room Newsletter here, including the outraged reaction to the Kim Potter sentence and our new obsession with “Big Jet TV.” Sign up for your free subscription here.
