[cavanasm]

Feels like you either missed the point of some of those specific recent examples, or you're oversimplifying them.

With the show, Cops (Live PD as well), the overriding concern was that the film crew and the process had turned law enforcement work into voyeuristic spectacle, literally profiting off the pain of others (some may believe those people deserve that pain, but that's a separate issue), and possibly even influenced the officers being filmed to engage in their duties differently than they might have otherwise.

Left out, also, is that 30 Rock's "censored" episodes featured blackface, which at this point, the issues with the practice have been covered exhaustively, and large corporations are only now deciding to care as they see public opinion shift, but it wasn't a great idea when they produced those episodes at the time, either.

[nomdep]

You are forgetting about Paw Patrol, there is no excuse to try to cancel an innocent (and very popular) show for preschool kids just because one of the characters is a puppy dressed as a cop.

That was the kind of article you would've expected from The Onion, not the New York Times.

I get it, people are desperate to do something for the cause or to prove they belong to the "good side", but this is insane.

[MattSteelblade]

Paw Patrol has not been canceled

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-paw-patrol-get-cancele...

[Tiltowait--]

Cancel culture cancelled. Good luck getting your next job if you have Paw Patrol on your resume.

Magic: the Gathering banned the card "Stone-throwing Devils" because it reminds people of Antifa.

[morelisp]

It was banned because it's a racial slur. It was always near the top of the list for any permanent banning. Mark Rosewater has gone on record about not printing it further because of this more than 5 years ago. https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/106100301518/

All seven recently banned cards are indefensible in both casual or competitive play.

[Tiltowait--]

Banning MTG cards is absolutely cancel culture in action, and is a completely indefensible act. Anyone who supports it is supporting cancel culture.

Stone-throwing Devils isn't a racial slur, unless it's one of those weird things where they go back and dredge up something forgotten. As certain segments of society are absolutely expert at doing. They exult in creating division and making us fight with one another, when we should be united against the ruling classes.

[nomdep]

I knew that but I also was misremembering the article. The idea came from twitter comments, the article was just reporting it, not advocating it. I was wrong.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> into voyeuristic spectacle, literally profiting off the pain of others (some may believe those people deserve that pain, but that's a separate issue),

The entire news media is like that in a large sense. What purpose does interviewing a family whose home got destroyed in a tornado serve? Of course they feel bad. Of course they will cry. “If it bleeds it leads”. Just like a car accident on the side of the road, people are drawn to watch. The news media profits off of that voyeuristic impulse to watch the misery of others.

[cavanasm]

And that's a fully valid criticism of a certain style of mainstream news that I completely agree with, and that is also being discussed in some circles, and even by some journalists, although it hasn't hit mainstream media level consideration openly. All falls into the massive and fraught discussion around how news gets paid for.

[kbenson]

> All falls into the massive and fraught discussion around how news gets paid for.

More appropriately I think (at least for TV), it falls into the discussion of how new doesn't see falling revenues. In the past, news was a payment back to the public major networks paid to get access to the spectrum they were using. when it became obvious there was a way to make the news divisions positive in cashflow instead of cash sinks, they were optimized for that.

Now, where most news is probably delivered through an entirely different medium, even that minimal connection to the public good incentivized through the spectrum allocation is almost gone.

In the distant past, NBC, CBS and ABC would probably have been happy to do away with their news divisions, because it cost them to run them. That they would now fight you tooth and nail to keep them for the opposite reason should put into stark contrast how the incentives have completely changed.

Is it possible to completely disentangle money from news? Probably not, and it might not be a good idea. How do you fund investigative journalism if you do? Influence will flow from the money no matter what, but then again maybe that's not any different than it is now.

I don't know the solution. I'm also aware I'm glossing over the fact that different parts of the news industry had perverse incentives long before this (newspapers...), and that news probably was never as altruistic as I'm making it out to be, but it does seem like it's gotten worse. I have to imagine if the Founding Fathers had the current status quo in mind when they wrote the constitution and initial amendments, they would have tried to put some restrictions on the ownership of the press to go along with those freedoms.

[klyrs]

> What purpose does interviewing a family whose home got destroyed in a tornado serve?

Fostering empathy, ginning up public support for emergency response. Whereas COPS etc were more effective at ginning up public support for brutal policing.

Also there's a key difference: film crews don't influence tornadoes.

[jariel]

"Whereas COPS etc were more effective at ginning up public support for brutal policing."

This is hugely speculative, in fact, I would argue just the opposite: if anything, it shows how ugly, grinding, boring and hugely 'social' policing is, as opposed to anything physical. It's literally about dealing with really weird and sketchy people in difficult situations all day every day.

[wnoise]

https://reason.com/2020/07/01/police-departments-asked-live-...

[jariel]

I'm well aware of the nuance of 'COPS' but those issues don't remotely rise to the need for cancellation. There is quite a lot of 'reality' that comes through even the producers lens, and that's worth something. It's the original 'reality TV'.

And as for 30 Rock: they were obviously not doing 'Blackface' - they were using the notion of Blackface as a comedic device.

'Blackface' is a vaudevillian concept of dressing up as Black people in order to mock them. In 30 Rock, the device was used only by idiotic characters doing stupid and embarrassing things. If anything, they were embellishing the obvious social principle that 'Blackface is bad'.

That people misconstrue 'doing Blackface' with 'mocking Blackface' is quite literally at the heart of the problem of the 'mob mentality' - and that's not even getting into the more complicated issue of whether 'dressing up as someone of possibly another race' is even wrong or immoral in the first place.

And of course, sometimes jokes are a little off - that's comedy and it's ok. In what world do we start banning gags for this reason?

Blackface was obviously wrong 10 years ago and nothing has changed. It's still wrong.

What has changed is the fascism and power of the Twitter mob's ability to deny any kind of context.

Edit: I should add that 'Banning 30 Rock' is not 'catching up with popular interest' - this is misconstruing the opinion of the mob (or your opinion) with the opinion of 'most people'.

Nobody cares about 30 Rocks antics but a few people on the fringes with outsized voices. Network and Ad execs are fearful of said voices - and that's mostly it.

We all live in 'thought bubbles', it's worth walking down the street and looking around, because it's immediately clear that 'most people' are not 'like us'.

If you were to show 100 random episodes of comedy, with a few 30 Rocks sprinkled in, to a 100 Americans, I don't believe a single person would initiate an objection to any of it, let alone 30 Rock.

I'll go further: not even those people who even noticed the cheekiness of the comedy thought to themselves that they ought not to publish it. Not even most of the press writing about it - they're just following the themes and narratives of the hour because that's what they do. It's being pulled because some people (a very small group) are looking for reasons to be outraged and in a hyper-sensitive moment, nobody, but nobody wants to 'disagree' with said outraged person.

[ghaff]

>And of course, sometimes jokes are a little off - that's comedy and it's ok. In what world do we start banning gags for this reason?

This one. To be honest, I'd be real careful right now to pick any hills to die on right now with respect to language, humor, and various other things unless you're really prepared to die on those hills.