Media top headlines September 17
In media news today, ABC, CBS, and NBC networks dramatically drop off border crisis coverage in August, Bill Maher scolds liberal media for scaring people over COVID, and Twitter mocks Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin for an apparent ‘the record’ failure. Cancel culture has affected nearly every industry, from the media to Big Tech, academia, and the government. “There isn’t a subject you can think of that there isn’t a cancel culture position already set in stone on that subject,” Fox Nation host Lara Logan told Fox News. Its effect on media is so extensive that Sharon Osbourne, who left “The Talk” earlier this year after years on the show due to allegations of racism, recently said she doesn’t feel like TV is a “safe space” due to the prevalence of cancel culture.
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Similarly, Portland State University philosophy professor Peter Boghossian recently resigned from his position, saying that the university was attempting to silence him and prevented him from teaching what he was hired to do. Most recently, rapper Nicki Minaj has faced harsh backlash from media figures like MSNBC’s Joy Reid for encouraging followers to “pray” before getting the vaccine.
Logan said cancel culture is so pervasive that many people assume that Americans widely accept it. “You start to get the sense that you are outnumbered and that everyone agrees with these people, and it’s completely untrue,” she said. “It’s completely and utterly false.” Cancel culture, she said, is “designed to break your will,” but standing up to it is possible. Logan said evidence that cancel culture could be stopped comes from history.
“We didn’t always live with cancel culture on this scale,” she said. “In the natural world, we don’t all agree.” Logan used the analogy of a family, who may consider themselves Republican, but will still have a different take on the same issues. Cancel culture, Logan said, is a “subversion or a perversion of the natural order of things” because it proposes that there is only one morally acceptable position on anything.
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It is about more than just political opinions, Logan explained. “At its heart, the thing that defines cancel culture is it’s about the most powerful of all battles: The battle and the conquest of the human spirit.” Logan continued that the only way for a canceled culture to succeed is for people to surrender. “The only victory that has to be given that cannot be taken from anyone is surrender,” she said. “And conquering the human spirit is the ultimate battle in any fight.”
Regarding canceling culture, Logan said surrender takes the form of self-censorship, particularly for journalists who do so to protect their careers. Logan told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Wednesday that many people, including Minaj, are beginning to recognize the effects of cancel culture in society. “Now, people are seeing, ‘Wait a minute, it’s too many subjects.’ Whether it’s the southern border, or the vaccine, or the way they handled COVID or four million other things, the way they handled Afghanistan.” Logan said that people on both the left and the right are beginning to recognize the tactics of cancel culture and stand up against them.
