How Hollywood and the Media Cultivate Selective Outrage
In an insightful article called How We Learned Not to Care About America’s Wars, Andrew Bacevich discusses how Americans now accept perpetual war as a reality without complaining or even noticing very much. As Bacevich mentions, there are several reasons for this, such as the military rebranding itself as a progressive institution and the way the government hides the astronomical cost of these wars.
There’s also the fatigue factor. If something goes on too long, it gets exhausting to keep protesting it. And, as the article also points out, wars aren’t even called wars anymore. Finally, wars are limited in scope and tend to affect mainly the poor and less educated who serve in the military. If you have a college degree, there’s a good chance you don’t know anyone who’s served in Iraq or Afghanistan. However, I’d like to focus on one particular aspect of the issue: selective outrage as orchestrated by the mainstream media and film industry.
The Selective Focus of the Pseudo-Alternative Media
Many people who are inclined to protest things take their cues from certain media outlets. Today, in America, this is largely the pseudo-alternative, pseudo-liberal, semi-satirical news programs such as The Daily Show, Bill Maher, Colbert, and Saturday Night Live. Ignoring the fact that these programs and commentators are run by the same types of corporations who own the TV networks and newspapers, liberals manage to convince themselves that these outlets represent an alternative or subversive point of view. In some cases, the hip element reinforces the viewers’ perceived elevated social status. Watching Bill Maher, for example, it’s easy to laugh and feel superior to all those ignorant rednecks, Trump supporters, and fundamentalists. Maher, meanwhile, gets to say many of the same things as the Republicans he lambasts (e.g. anti-Muslim rhetoric) but since he does it under the guise of comedy, he’s mostly forgiven.
If you pay attention, you’ll notice how shallow all this satire and cultural criticism really is. It tends to focus on cultural issues related to race and gender while ignoring more fundamental and institutionalized aspects of society. Thus, if you get your cues from the liberal media, you’ll be outraged that the Trump administration is talking about banning transgender people from the military while not worrying about the constant bombing and other destructive acts that the same military is carrying out every day in places like Afghanistan. So, liberals are nostalgic about Obama’s politically correct aura, even as America dropped more than 26,000 bombs in 2016 alone. What counts in today’s climate isn’t so much what is done but who is allowed to do it and how tactfully it’s done. That, perhaps, is why the liberal media is especially tough on Trump; he’s anything but graceful or “presidential” as he continues many of the same policies as his predecessors.
For more serious commentary, people will turn to familiar sources such as CNN, the Washington Post, The New York Times and other establishment media outlets that really say the same thing as the satirical media, only with a straight face. This isn’t surprising since the “real” and “alternative” news networks are owned by giant corporations. Comedy Central, for example is owned by cable behemoth Viacom. HBO, home of Bill Maher’s current and former programs as well as John Oliver’s current show, is owned by another telecommunications giant, Time Warner.
Saturday Night Live (an NBC show, of course), perhaps unwittingly revealed an underlying smugly pro-war agenda in one of its anti-Trump tirades before the 2016 election. As part of the Weekend Update segment, co-host Colin Jost comments: “That’s why it upset me when Bill Clinton came out and dismissed all Trump supporters as ‘basic rednecks.’ Cuz after the election, when we go to war with Russia, the people we’re gonna ask to go and fight that war are the people you just called basic rednecks.”
Keep in mind, this was before the election, when everyone thought Clinton was going to win. Sure, SNL is supposedly comedy, but their political fervor is often barely concealed activism. That quote, while a throwaway cynical line rather than a real joke, nonetheless reveals a great deal about the mainstream media’s cavalier attitude about America’s wars and who is expected to fight them.
Military Comedies as Tacit Consent
There’s also the often subtle normalization and glorification of the military in the movies. Granted, there have been some notable movies that look at the horror and inhumanity of war, Hollywood also produces its share of feel-good comedies about the military that tacitly endorse America’s wars. A perfect example of this is the movie Whisky Tango Foxtrot, starring former Saturday Night Live star Tina Fey, a mostly lighthearted look at the war in Afghanistan. On one level, this one of those watchable, amusing though hardly memorable dramadies that Hollywood releases all the time. Yet, beneath all that is the way a film like this normalizes what is really a strange and horrific state of affairs — a prolonged, pointless war with no end in sight. Tina Fey and many of her co-stars are likable, well-intentioned characters who never question basic assumptions about US foreign policy. It’s also an example of that old colonial tradition of books and movies that highlight the tribulations of mostly white and North American/European characters in faraway places while the native populations are cast in secondary roles.
We can look at similar examples from earlier movies. In the 1970s and 80s, there were military comedies such as Saving Private Benjamin, starring Goldie Hawn, and Stripes, with Bill Murray. These are similar in tone to Whisky Tango Foxtrot in that they all star likable, comedic stars playing characters who are sort of misfits in the military but who never seriously question or challenge the status quo.
These type of movies play an essential role in getting younger and mostly liberal audiences to not exactly support wars but to accept them as part of the cultural landscape. After all, the audiences for these films (similar to the audiences of Daily Show, SNL, etc.) don’t come from the same demographic as the people who join the military and actually go to places like Afghanistan.
The overall attitude that these films evoke is similar to that expressed in a famous line from a much older movie, Casablanca, which was, among other things, a kind of World War II propaganda film. Humphrey Bogart says, “The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” This bit of folksy wisdom is an expression of fatalism and a tacit acceptance of the reigning social order. This, ultimately, is enough for the establishment to maintain its policies. They no longer need everyone to be fanatically patriotic. Today, it’s enough to sucker the poor people into the military (it helps if they don’t have many alternatives) and get the middle class to shrug their shoulders and focus on culture wars.
Beware of Selective Outrage
The bottom line is that it’s easy to get into a passive mode where you react predictably, taking your cues from sources with their own agendas, whether the mainstream media, so-called alternative media, or Hollywood. Just because John Oliver isn’t sneering at it, Bill Maher isn’t smirking about it and SNL isn’t spoofing it doesn’t mean it’s not important. In many cases, as with America’s endless and undeclared wars, it’s so much a part of everyday life that we’ve stopped noticing.
