Parting with Partisanism

Scott Hardie | September 3, 2017
After twenty years of reading it daily, I have reached a point where I can no longer stomach The A.V. Club, the pop culture website. I have long enjoyed their humor and very good taste, and accepted that they would occasionally snark about something unhip that I happened to enjoy. A few years ago, we discussed how much we liked them.

But ever since Trump's election, they have developed an obsession with him and the GOP. They devote maybe a third of the site's new content on any given day to coverage of Trump and/or Republicans, which is not at all what I go to a pop culture website to read about. And worse, the tone of that coverage is really mean, and really unfair. The final straw for me was this piece about the GOP citing The Legend of Zelda, which is pretty typical of the Trump-era crap they've produced. Examples:

- "the GOP isn't exactly known for its fact-checking prowess"
- "emphasis on 'devil'"
- "a rare instance of Republicans admitting they were wrong"
- "still incredibly stupid"

This kind of shit is toxic. It makes me feel angry and hateful. And it's everywhere in our society, and we're slowly being poisoned by it. It used to be just a few openly partisan outlets that would get mean (I'm thinking of stuff like Rush Limbaugh), but now hostility seems to be in everything. I used to go to The A.V. Club to get away from "real world" problems and just enjoy some entertainment coverage, but it's been corrupted. I get the reason for it; they're a business and clickbait draws in readers, but it's still quite depressing. (Beyond mercenary reasons, some of the writers have said that they feel a moral outrage about Trump and the GOP and an obligation to oppose them. How tossing out random, inaccurate, generalized insults is supposed to accomplish any moral goal, I do not understand.)

The A.V. Club's jarring move from Drupal to Kinja a few weeks ago makes the site even more annoying, but I wouldn't give up on it for that alone. I tried tuning out the political articles and skipping over them, but there are so damn many that you can't really avoid them, and a bitterness towards Republicans tends to creep into articles that don't even have anything to do with politics at all. I feel like I can't escape it without giving up on the site entirely, something I'm sad to do after so long.

Have you given up on any media sources this yar because you can't stand how partisan they've gotten?

Samir Mehta | September 4, 2017
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Samir Mehta | September 4, 2017
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Scott Hardie | September 4, 2017
Judging from the comments I've seen on some articles, some percentage of the site's readership agrees with you, Samir. They'll take all the Trump-bashing they can get.

I despise Trump too. Seemingly every week, I worry that he's normalizing some new horrible thing (here's one recent example). And the actions of some Republican officials, from blocking Merrick Garland's nomination to obscene gerrymandering to gutting public programs so that the rich can get tax breaks, are beyond frustrating.

But most of the Trump-bashing and GOP-bashing isn't based on legitimate criticism. It's just mockery of anything slightly embarrassing, or it's sprinkling articles about them with random insults. Take the Zelda-related example above: I can say all kinds of awful things about Mitch McConnell's GOP, but being bad at fact-checking or failing to admit when they're factually wrong? That's so many light years away from what's actually wrong with the current GOP that I don't even know what to do with it.

I've seen some A.V. Club commenters argue that it's important that people be informed about the lines being crossed by our leaders. Setting aside how mocking Trump's foibles is missing the point, I already read the news. I'm a paying subscriber and daily reader of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and Slate. (I used to pay for Time, but those damn auto-playing videos on every page drove me away.) I expect my fellow citizens to do their duty and also read the news or otherwise stay informed on their own. I don't remotely consider it the responsibility of non-political media outlets to keep us all "informed" by raging against Trump nonsensically all day long. I also read Entertainment Weekly and Variety every day; I don't expect them to suddenly start running lots of daily articles about, I don't know, Trump having ice cream for breakfast or something. (To be fair, Variety does occasionally cover the Trump administration, especially when it intersects with media, but that amounts to maybe one article per month out of hundreds.)

Like you, Samir, I have no use for pretend even-handedness or false politeness. I want the evils of the current administration called out. But I want them called out in the proper sphere, and I want to be able to go elsewhere without having to hear about them all the time. I would be livid if I tried to relax and take a break from the awful world around me by watching some football and ESPN started bashing Trump too.

Samir Mehta | September 4, 2017
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Scott Hardie | September 8, 2017
I would expect late-night talk shows to make fun of Trump, just like they have with previous presidents. I would not expect them to devote entire episodes to it, as there are B-list celebrities to interview and B-list musical acts to welcome on stage. But more to the point, I don't think it's unreasonable to draw a line between media productions that typically covered politics before Trump and those that didn't, and to expect them to continue in the same ways after Trump. Perhaps more importantly, if they're going to cover Trump, they had better do it well and make the change worth our while; I object more to The A.V. Club covering Trump badly and lazily than to them covering him at all.

I doubt that 30-35% of the country feels glee in 50-70% of the country being infuriated. Not all of Trump's supporters are the same. I know of at least several among my friends who don't feel that way at all and who want to bridge our divide instead of worsening it. I feel the same way towards them. Our conversations are empathetic; we remain in disagreement, but there is understanding instead of insulting. Please don't mistake all of Trump's supporters for the worst of them.

Samir Mehta | September 8, 2017
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