Media Watch: Late Night too white, NYT’s Alessandra Stanley complains — Would she make the same complaint about Jews in the media?
Some whites might have thought that by casting a ballot for Barack Obama, they’d be treated to a few reverse turns on the vice-grip of white guilt in America. Even a few pro-white folks might have speculated an Obama win would serve to quiet the shrill attacks on whites as the source of all evil.
No such luck. In fact, for some anti-white activists and media figures, it’s been just the opposite: The election of Obama only underscores the need for the rest of white society to exit the stage.
And no corner of the culture is safe. Alessandra Stanley, a critic for the New York Times, complains that on late-night TV, “every single host of a late-night network talk show is white, male and mainstream. Still.”
We could stop for a moment and point out that this isn’t exactly a big group — from Jack Paar on, we’re talking about maybe 25 people. We could note that Arsenio Hall, a black man, had a successful run as a late-night TV host in the 1990s. We could note that comedians tend to be male. We could note that the men who’ve ascended to these spots tend to be pretty funny, and that a focus on their race is unfair so long as they’re delivering the laughs. And we could note that the world of entertainment overall is hardly a bastion of white exclusion.
But the biggest thing to note is that we’ve come to a place where the smallest of white redoubts gets hit with the diversity howitzer. Jimmy Fallon takes over from Conan O’Brien, who in turn will replace Jay Leno, and, for the New York Times, it’s as if the Nazis are marching through Paris.
Read her complaint, and you’ll see that it’s not just the whiteness and maleness of the hosts that Stanley hates — it’s their affirmation of white culture. “Each night a network talk show repeats a ritual of civility that is both intimately familiar and a total fantasy — a relaxed Thanksgiving dinner where no daughter-in-law bolts from the table in tears…. At the close of each show they convince us that everything is all right in the world, and Mommy and Daddy still love each other.”
What Stanley means to say is that 1950’s-style white America is a bad thing, and anything that resembles it should be whacked. If you’re not doing crude, scatological Howard Stern-style humor or blue material a la Richard Pryor, you’re out of touch. In other words, you’re white.
For an enemy of whiteness, Stanley is at least targeting correctly. I have always been a huge fan of David Letterman, who is possibly one of the smoothest white men alive: cool, unflappable, hilarious. He’s also unafraid to engage in a little ethnic humor, as with his light mockery of Mujibur and Sirajul, the Bangladeshi owners of the tourist trap down the street from his studio.
Letterman’s not just funny — he’s definitively white in his demeanor, and that must drive some crazy. Clearly, it drives Alessandra Stanley crazy. All these white men — Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Fallon — are calm, well-dressed, and in complete control from center stage. They’ve got a dapper style — Fred Astaires of the monologue, conjuring images of dry martinis, steak dinners and rounds of golf with Ben Hogan. Their humor allows them to poke fun at the world around them. They’ve got power and they’re having fun. It is, in short, an image of white men that our anti-white cultural elite despises.
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Stanley herself has been accused of having a (more than standard?) liberal bias, and is mistake-prone, according to gossip site Gawker.
None of this is surprising, and whatever her own ethnicity, it’s a safe bet that she’s cozy with the Jews who populate New York power circles and the Times. With Wikipedia accuracy issues in mind, Stanley reports that she was once married to a journalist named Michael Specter and is friends with the Times’ Jill Abramson.
Needless to say, we won’t see Stanley complaining that in the entertainment industry, “almost every single writer, producer, owner is Jewish and hostile to whites. Still.”
White men, don’t let the Alessandra Stanleys of our world hector you off the stage.
Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.
