The Color of the Sky

I think in general that Media Matters is a useful site. It consistently makes a pretty good case that the media are not, in fact, tilted to the left, and while the site's news choices are selective, they're usually pretty cogent.

Which brings us to the matter of Survivor's play for attention (Defamer, a Gawker site, is covering this pretty extensively). In case you haven't heard or don't care, the show has decided to address its poor record on cast diversity by grouping the tribes according to race/ethnicity. Slug interviewed Jiffy Probst and elicited that the show recruited most of the cast, rather than relying on its usual application process, and Reality Blurred ferreted out the tidbit that 13 of the 20 cast members are Californians, many from LA, and quite a few of them are actors listed on IMDB. This is all pretty desperate, and the show is plumbing new depths in shark-jumping. I was pretty much done with the show last season, although I had to watch a few episodes to fulfill a pseudojournalistic obligations, ending up with my worst piece of reality TV writing ever.

So Media Matters felt a need to muddy these waters to make a political non-point. Rush Limbaugh a racist? Really? Holy cow!

Stick to progress, Media Matters. Survivor is completely irrelevant to anything, let alone to our cultural development. Some will try to argue that I'm wrong, that it's some kind of mirror thingie. Bullshit. It's pandervision, and while there's some point to be made about the tragedy of the show's ability to draw a market, it's not generalizable to politics, which is all your oeuvre should be. Limbaugh thought he was making an elaborate joke and disguising his racist horseshit inside, like a Russian Easter egg; while that's certainly reflective of the eighth-grade locker room in which Rush lives, it ain't news, and you should (say it with me, folks, because it appears to be the theme of the day) just shut the fuck up and stick to why people should punch Tucker Carlson in the gob.