In my house, we haven’t watched television news for more than 10 years. Seriously. Because TV news has become a sad and disgraceful circus of whipped-up frenzy where all headlines are breathlessly delivered with great import, and the news is “teased” during prime-time commercial breaks with summaries intended to scare the pants off god-fearin’ white heterosexual middle-class home owners, where everything comes down to the terrorists, e coli, or Danger To Your Children.
So I get my news from NPR and the BBC, from Nicola (who gets hers from The Economist), and online — in this case from John Scalzi, who wrote about Fox News taking a racist swipe at Michelle Obama last month, and expressed himself so well that I just want to point to it and say, Yep, what he said.
I’ve been meaning to link to this ever since I read it, but I dropped off the grid for a while right around that time, so it’s taken me until now to return to it. And isn’t it weird that I feel like I have to apologize for being “late”? Yeeps, internet culture is so… immediate. But there’s unfortunately no shelf life on racism, and there shouldn’t be a shelf life on smacking it down either.
My friend Mark Tiedemann has posted an essay of his own — springboarding from the Fox News/Michelle Obama episode — about the complicated relationship American culture has with notions of competence. Check it out.