Was that keeping it real?
I work in corporate marketing for a multi-million dollar company. Everything we write and design is buffed and vetted, simplified down to a scannable, consistent voice and appearance, a specific color palette, a certain tone. This way, it’s easy for our users to know and trust our brand. But I don’t think any of us want that to be how our journalism is made, do we?
The Super Bowl halftime show is now stale news I realize, but before it's supplanted by the next media spectacle—a war in Ukraine? The end of the pandemic? T Swizzle is engaged? I want to complain about something.
Still Dre…ck
Over and over I kept reading and hearing about how this was the first time the NFL headlined hip-hop in the halftime show. I guess this was to signal that the NFL is now woke? Or look, hip-hop has finally gone mainstream? Weird.
It all seemed kind of manufactured to me. I seem to recall there being a very hip-hoppy vibe at the Super Bowl show many times, like most times honestly?
Sure enough, while “working on deadline,” I did some research. Firstly, did you know Mary J. Blige has her own wine label and her own brand of gigantic gold hoops? Secondly, and more importantly, I found a piece that ranked the top 20 halftime shows–and sure enough hip-hop is everywhere in it. Queen Latifah was in the halftime show in 1998–that was a long time ago. Nelly, Missy Elliot, Big Boi, MIA, Nikki Minaj, Ceelo Green–they’ve all been in the halftime show*1. Hell, Mary J Blige has already been in the Super Bowl halftime show. I knew it. This wasn’t a groundbreaking event, it was a hip-hop oldies parade. The NFL and JayZ’s RocNation are trying to look edgy, but they’re not. And this leads to my complaint.
Why did the press keep heralding this as a disruptive event? Why was this the big story about the halftime show? Why wasn’t it about how the Queen of hip-hop soul sustains a grueling recording and touring schedule but also finds time to press grapes into wine and design and sell marvelous diamond-studded hoops with her bestie?
My suspicion is that the NFL and Roc Nation crafted a press release that they shipped off to every publication. And the editors and writers all just mimicked the message the NFL dictated to them. It was some slick PR, to be sure. It made the event seem relevant and noteworthy which gave the media a reason beyond pure celeb clickbait to write about it. It burnished the sad state of the possibly racist NFL. Dre, Snoop, Eminem, and Mary J got lots of mentions. Everybody wins.
It’s fluff about fluff, I know. But I frequently sense that this same method of "journalism" is happening on topics of actual relevance. There is simply too much media, too many media outlets, too much demand for content.
Our national attention span has a tapeworm.
So the journalists just report on the other journalists. If the first journalist is just typing out whatever the press release said, that’s not reporting. That’s not news.
And I realize what I’m saying isn’t disruptive or groundbreaking either. But it’s worth recognizing and calling out.
It was never a horse
The compelling new Serial podcast series, Trojan Horse Affair, which is super, gets at this and a bunch of other provocative ideas. The two journalists who host it do actual reporting to reveal what's true in a bizarre tale about a fake conspiracy of radical fundamentalist Islamic educators. The conspiracy was fake, as in not real, yet the British press just repeated the story over and over until policy was changed as if there was a rash of radical fundamentalism putting the country’s education system at risk. They never dug deeper to get at the more meaningful newsworthy aspects of what happened. Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.
I don’t like the feeling that all the reporters are just parroting whatever they’re told to say. That’s corporate communications, not journalism.
This isn’t journalism either, by the way. It’s The Pithy, my blog, and I’m writing it again! So stay tuned for more, and please reply anytime and let me know what you think.
While The Black-Eyed Peas did in fact perform in the Super Bowl halftime show in 2011, a council of experts has determined that their music is not in fact hip-hop and they were disqualified from inclusion in my list.