The Serena Williams Controversy Exposes How the Media Uses a ‘PC Point System’ To Determine Morality

Now that the dust is finally starting to settle after this past weekend’s massive controversy centered on tennis legend Serena Williams’ meltdown during the final of the U.S. Open tennis championship, we should all take a look at what we might have learned. In the realm of the media’s treatment of this debacle, there is an awful lot of important stuff that got exposed.

Since the basics of what actually happened have already been debated quite extensively, though largely unfairly, there are only a few key points that need to be highlighted because they have been lost in the mayhem and extreme pro-Serena media bias. There are:

• The umpire may have indeed been less restrained than the moment properly demanded, but technically, he was 100% justified in everything that he did with regard to punishing Serena.
• If Serena didn’t shatter her racquet, which was totally inexcusable down a set and with one conduct “strike” already against her, literally none of this would have become a major topic of conversation.
• The penalty did not cost Serena the match, and the fact that she was going to lose regardless may have actually been a major part of what motivated her desperate temper tantrum tactic to begin with.
• Men, including infamous bad-boy John McEnroe, have indeed been punished just as harshly, and worse, than Serena was, especially once the conduct rules were radically altered late in his career.

As far as the media reaction to this situation, it was so overtly politically correct and lacking in even rudimentary journalistic integrity than even a harsh media critic like me was shocked at what transpired. Here were some of the lowlights:

• ESPN’s Tom Rinaldi simply refused to ask Serena about the episode during the trophy ceremony, instead giving her the opportunity to play the heroine by comforting the woman who beat her, Naomi Osaka, who was in tears because of a situation created by Serena herself.
• Tennis legend Chris Evert, one of the few with the stature to be able to criticize Serena credibly, perhaps because she was actually giving out the trophy, largely defended Serena on ESPN’s post-match coverage. As a woman, Evert helped give Serena’s laughable assertion that this was a women’s rights issue enough traction for it to become a huge part of the media’s preferred narrative.
• Reporters (sycophants?) at the post-match press conference treated Serena with comically kid-like gloves, even asking her how motherhood had influenced her ability to comfort Osaka. At the end of the pathetic presser, there was even loud applause in the room. It was as if President Trump had done a press event with only employees of Fox News Channel being allowed to attend.
• As if on cue, liberal media figures swarmed Twitter in Serena’s defense, using a column by Sally Jenkins (who, it should always be pointed out, but never is, wrote two glowing books about the now disgraced Lance Armstrong, somehow without having a clue about his obvious cheating) in The Washington Post to cement the narrative that the real issue here was not Serena’s outrageous meltdown, but this alleged gender double-standard that Serena was proactively planting before the match was even over. The Post has been Serena’s literal blocking back throughout the firestorm, with two other overtly pro-Serena stories, in which they decided they would throw her race into the mix too, just in case their readers weren’t already getting the message about what the “correct” position is on this controversy.
• Then professional virtue-signalers like Christine Brennan (with whom I have quite a personal history, and who can always be counted on to advance the most popular, politically correct and employment securing position on any issue of public debate) went on TV, and with the help of one-sided anchors, created the gross misimpression that there really is no legitimate debate here other than how badly poor Serena was wronged by evil men.

Now, to be fair, there have been a few semi-brave souls in the media and from the tennis world who have dared to at least partially question the preferred narrative and conventional wisdom regarding this story. But they have mostly been the exceptions that prove the rule.

The mainstream media and the elites of the tennis world are very much part of separate but similar fraternities where no one dares go too far outside of the herd on a topic of high sensitivity, lest they risk getting run over (this is why it should not have been surprising that perhaps Serena’s strongest tennis critic has been Martina Navratilova, who has never really been a charter member of that club).

Conservatives like me have often feared that we were heading towards a media environment where right and wrong were determined not by facts, principles, and logic, but rather by a point system set up by liberal elites to determine someone’s inherent level of “political correctness protection.” The media’s almost universally blind defense of Serena Williams has proven that we have basically already reached that rather scary place.

Under this system, Serena racked up more than enough points for being a huge celebrity, being a woman, being a new mom, being an African-American, and playing to the correct liberal sensibilities (“Because I am a woman you are going to take this away from me?!”) to easily outscore mundane and outdated “pre-Trump conservative” concepts like rules and equal treatment for everyone.  Thankfully that PC point system isn’t yet directly used on the actual athletic field, but just you wait, I am quite sure we are getting there.

Which, as clichéd as it sounds, really is rather symbolic of how we got Donald Trump as our president.

I went into much greater detail on this subject at the start of my most recent podcast, which you can listen to here.

John Ziegler hosts a weekly podcast focusing on news media issues and is documentary filmmaker. You can follow him on Twitter at @ZigManFreud  or email him at johnz@mediaite.com

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.