Fox News Holds Cringe Segment Declaring Tom Hanks Has Been ‘Canceled’ by the Left

Ken MeyerJun 14th, 2021, 1:39 pm
 

Fox News smashed all the culture war buttons on Monday with a lengthy segment on America’s Newsroom claiming that Tom Hanks is the latest victim of cancel culture.

The segment focused on a recent column by NPR media critic Eric Deggans, entitled “Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It’s Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist”. The piece offers a great deal of praise for Hanks as a performer and a person, but Deggans writes that Hanks should use his position to do more to promote anti-racism.

The column argues that Hanks “built a career playing righteous white men,” but he and other Hollywood giants need to think about how the experiences of Black people have been left out of “historically based fiction entertainment.” More than that, Deggans says Hanks needs to think about how his work — which counts some of the most famous pieces of historical fiction on film — has perpetuated Hollywood’s troubling relationship with race.

From the piece:

I’m not saying Hanks, Howard or Spielberg are racist. I’m not even saying that Hanks should have made or supported a film specifically about the Tulsa Race Massacre long before now… But over this summer, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer, I spent a lot of time investigating the difference between being non-racist and being anti-racist. Anti-racism implies action – looking around your universe and taking specific steps to dismantle systemic racism. So I am saying it is time for folks like Hanks to be anti-racist.

All of this nuance was lost on Fox News. Anchors Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum warned in their segment that Hanks is now under attack by “the left.” The culmination was this graphic declaring Hanks “canceled.”

Hemmer spoke to Fox News contributor (and Mediaite alum) Joe Concha, though they declined to delve into the substance of the piece beyond its intro.

“Because it’s so profoundly stupid and he deserves all the criticism he gets,” Concha said of social media attention the piece has received. “Here is the thing though, for NPR and Deggans and perpetual protesters, no matter what Tom Hanks does, it will never be enough.”

Concha continued by listing Hanks’ philanthropic endeavors, while further mocking Deggans’ opinion that the actor “is not doing enough to make the world a better place.”

“Apparently he is proud of what he wrote,” Hemmer said of Deggans. “He did an interview and said he stands by it.”

“If he is looking for attention, he is getting it,” the Fox News host added, “but being white in America has a lot of pitfalls.”

Hemmer ended the segment with a somewhat awkward outro: “From one white guy to another, Joe Concha we’ll talk to you later in the week.”

While all of this was going on, CNN’s Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy were mocking Fox’s coverage on the column. Deggans responded to them both by saying the coverage was “disingenuous and inaccurate”:

Watch above, via Fox News.

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