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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   31841 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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there has been a palpable increase in the number of questions related to black writers and activists,

Given the trajectory of many, many programs which don’t involve Mr. Jennings, it’s likely not his doing. Correlation, causation. Not that he has any reason to fight it, but if it makes you feel any better, you can probably blame faceless executives and market research.

It’s especially disheartening to know that a man with his depth of knowledge and clearly impressive mental faculties isn’t able to see the nuance around these issues

There’s, uh, a few conclusions that you could take from that.

But I think the set of (knowledgeable & impressive faculties & nuanced opinion & wanting to talk about it & visible) is vanishingly small. Having a complicated, technical opinion on the Current Thing is inversely correlated with wanting to blast that opinion on social media. And with getting an audience when one does so. It’s probably worse when you’re competing for the attention of media executives with their own politics.

And with getting an audience when one does so. It’s probably worse when you’re competing for the attention of media executives with their own politics.

I don’t think that this is honestly much of a factor; my understanding is that Jennings has been very consistent and very vocal about his politics for many years before anyone was considering him for a major media role, and before those specific beliefs were fashionable. The guy genuinely is an old-guard Gen-X progressive, and I don’t see any evidence that he’s either played up or played down those opinions based on any mercenary career concerns. Nor do those politics appear to have had much bearing on his selection for the Jeopardy! hosting gig; he got the role because he was already an extremely well-known institution on the show, and because he genuinely earned it over a long period of time. That’d have been true whether or not his political commentary was frequent or sparse. (Although obviously his specific opinions didn’t actively harm him, which wouldn’t have been true if they’d been significantly right-of-center instead.)

Sorry, I meant that in the general case of media selection pressure, not for Ken in particular. It’s just another filter.

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