Where It's Always 1895

What’s Happening

The new Odyssey movie is coming out, and some of the worst people online have opinions. The internet often has opinions about movies, especially when non-Caucasian people are cast, or not cast. I lived through the hateful posts over Rue’s casting, and Ariel’s in the new live action Little Mermaid. And of course as a longtime Tolkien fan, I know the story of Naz Hamphreys, the British woman of Pakistani descent who was told she couldn’t audition to play a Hobbit (and hobbit) extra because she was too white.

If anything, this Odyssey dust-up hits closer to home, probably because it involves the classics. I’m a medievalist by training, so I understand something of the frustration with people twisting your own special subject into an intellectual pretzel without wanting to understand what the scholarship actually shows. Here, Christopher Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the mythical face that cast a thousand ships. 

What Thomas Williams Wrote

A beautiful movie star is cast in a beloved story. The character is fictional—she isn’t even fully human. Nonetheless, activists and purists insist that the actor is the wrong race.

I’m speaking of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, the 2017 film adaptation of a popular Japanese manga series. Critics accused the movie’s creators of “whitewashing” the heroine, a cyborg whose physical form is entirely prosthetic and whose race and gender are, in fact, mutable. She’s implanted with the consciousness of a Japanese woman, but her memories have been suppressed and edited. The story is an examination of how unstable identity is, and how untethered it can be from the body. Yet for detractors, the politics of representation—the simple fact that Johansson isn’t Asian—overrode the power of the film’s philosophical inquiry.

Audiences are willing to suspend all manner of disbelief in service of a good story—except, apparently, when it comes to race. Hence the controversy surrounding this year’s most anticipated movie, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. [...] 

Such selective indignation relies on an idiosyncratic reading of Greek myth. In the most famous telling, Helen of Troy is not born but hatched. Zeus appears to Helen’s human mother, Leda, under the guise of a swan. After a sexual encounter, Leda lays eggs. Out comes Helen (and her sister Clytemnestra, also played by Nyong’o). Which is to say, Nolan’s critics seem to be committing themselves to the idea that Zeus—the god of gods; the onetime waterfowl—was “white.” His offspring, therefore, could not possibly be portrayed by someone with dark skin.

What It Means

With respect, Williams’s pointing to details of the Leda myth somewhat misses the point, and the danger. It’s not that Musk and the rest suffer from two little imagination, or that they’ve convinced themselves that Zeus in swan form must have been white; it’s that Helen of Troy was beauty personified, and that the greatest heroes and warriors of western civilization would have gone to war over anything other than alabaster skin.

The irony is, in the classical period, whiteness wasn’t the prestige-point it is for Musk and all the rest. In their known world (so setting aside China, the Americas, and the like), culture and power really did center around the Mediterranean, not just southern Europe (which historically had its own limited claims to whiteness) but also the Near East and northern Africa. A black Ethiopian would likely seem more familiar and as part of the in-group than a pale-skinned Visigoth.

I’m reminded of a favorite lyric from the Avenue Q song, “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” (VIDEO):

Gary: Now there was a fine upstanding black man. Princeton: Who? Gary: Jesus Christ. Kate: But, Gary, Jesus was white. Gary: No, Jesus was black. Kate: No, Jesus was white. Gary: No, I’m pretty sure Jesus was black. Princeton: Guys – guys – Jesus was Jewish.

As if that would settle a damn thing.

The reality is, people living in what would become Greece and Italy back in Homer’s time wouldn’t have looked like people in Greece and Italy today, much less like the northern European “white” people they want to connect to that history. As the Vox interview (below) points out, though, this isn’t a one-off impulse. It’s worth thinking about why so many people are drawn to that connection.

Related Stories

The Bulwark: “Why Stone-Faced Fascists Keep Getting Antiquity Wrong” (PF)

Vox: “Why the alt-right loves ancient Rome” (PF)

Salon: “The new Helen of Troy is Black — and that’s upsetting racists” (PF)

Salon: ““This is a mythological story”: Nyong’o responds to criticism of Helen of Troy casting” (PF)

New York Times: “A Black Helen of Troy? Fine. A White Obama? Not Yet.” (PF)

In lieu of a musical break

The whole episode is both applicable and good TV on its own terms, if you have the time.

More Stories about Racism, “Reverse Discrimination” and White Supremacy

Anne Applebaum: "What, actually, is European Civilization?"

Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times: “John Roberts Believes in an America That Doesn’t Exist” (PF)

Politico: “AfD, Vox mingle with ex-US Border Patrol chief, white nationalist leader at ‘remigration summit’ “ (PF)

Salon: “Trump’s dog whistles and prosecutions echo Nixon’s racist strategy” (PF)

Forward: “Arkansas whites-only community sued by woman with Jewish ancestry” (PF)

Wired: “Department of Labor Tells Employees to Report Anyone Prioritizing DEI” (PF)

Gothamist: “NY-based Accenture worker alleges he was axed because of his dreadlocks” (PF)

Salon: “Watching Fox News increases belief in “Great Replacement” hokum” (PF)

Slate: “Does John Roberts’ Whites-Only Childhood Home Explain the Supreme Court’s Callais Ruling?” (PF)

Note

I wrote the below last weekend, then fell slightly more than ‘under the weather’ and wasn’t able to post anything for several days. Since then, and since JVL’s worthwhile piece above, the situation with 60 Minutes has gotten even more dramatic. The new 60 Minutes head Nick Bilton held an all-hands meeting Monday, and depending on who you believe, the long-time correspondent Scott Pelley either stood up bravely for his team or threw a performative hissy-fit to call out his new boss in front of their whole team. 

For the record I lean heavily toward the first option. Even if he could have handled things better, it doesn’t seem like journalists of substance like Pelley were long for CBS. As a favorite show of mine put it all those years ago:

Obviously that’s where the drama is so the conversation’s largely moved on. I still think the bigger issue is with corporate vs. independent media. I’ve long thought one of the biggest dangers Americans are dealing with is how so many people get our political “facts” from the unholy combination of unsourced social media posts and AI slop and thought the best thing we could do was read and share professional, well-edited journalism. Journalists are also more threatened both by the administration and angry people online than I’ve ever seen; they need a team that will stand with them. But professional journalism doesn’t mean corporate media, and independent doesn’t have to mean isolated. Even as the 60 Minutes news story has moved on a bit, it’s still worth thinking about what those labels mean.

What’s Going On

CBS’s 60 Minutes, which you’ll probably either think of as either the gold standard of television news programs or that old show your grandparents watch depending on what generation you’re from, is going through some changes. Specifically, Bari Weiss fired several people who had been doing good journalism on the show for years and replaced at least one of them with someone who doesn’t seem to have the requisite skills to do anything like that. If her job is either to produce good news-content or make more money for CBS, this choice seems like a miss. 

If you don’t recognize her, Weiss is most famous as the founder of The Free Press, a very popular Substack publication among conservatives who think they’re underrepresented in mainstream media, particularly people concerned about being “cancelled” on Twitter back when it wasn’t so kneejerk conservative. Before that, she wrote op-eds for the Wall Street Journal and New York Times on both politics and cultural issues. (She started, I believe, with book reviews.) She’s not particularly extreme by modern MAGA standards, but she’s still comfortably conservative and definitely comes off as a friendly media voice for those in power who might value that kind of thing.

Last year Paramount (CBS’s parent company) bought Free Press for $150 million and made Bari Weiss head of CBS’s news division. Free Press really was wildly popular, though probably not worth $150mil. But more to the point, Weiss herself didn’t have the management or broadcast experience to manage CBS’s news division well. Her real purpose isn’t vocational or economic: it’s to keep Trump happy. 

And as JVL argues, it’s a good example of the dangers of corporate media.

That’s a term that needs some unpacking. I’ll get to that in a minute.

What JVL Writes

Last fall, David Ellison, the chairman and CEO of CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, purchased Bari Weiss’s pro-Trump website, the Free Press, for $150 million. As part of the deal he put Weiss in charge of CBS News, where she quickly went to work making the division’s products more friendly to Donald Trump. We don’t need to recapitulate the entire history here; it is enough to note that, as a business matter, Weiss’s tenure has been an abject failure. Ratings are down across CBS News properties.

But as a corporate matter, Weiss has been a success. First, as a way of greasing the skids of Ellison’s purchase of Paramount, he publicly signaled that he would give Weiss a prominent role at CBS News long before he bought her. Then, once she was put in charge and started breaking things, she made Ellison’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery all the more politically appealing to Trump. Trump publicly praised Weiss, and when Ellison and Netflix got into a bidding war for Warner-Discovery, the president stepped in to thumb the scales and make sure everyone knew that he would approve a sale to Ellison but not to Netflix.

So under Weiss, CBS News has been a failure, both in terms of product and business. The journalism at CBS News is getting worse and the audience is leaving. But the particular manner in which CBS News has failed—by broadcasting its obeisance to Trump—has enabled tremendous success by the division’s corporate parent.

This is what happens in a command economy when the head of the government picks winners and losers. CBS News no longer exists as a unit whose purpose is to create journalism that attracts an audience and drives revenue. Its purpose is to keep the president happy so that Ellison’s other businesses prosper.

It’s not quite right to say that CBS News under Weiss is a charity. It’s more like an ongoing bribe.

What’s Going On Contd.

On a slightly different narrative, The Bulwark’s podcaster in chief, Tim Miller, was recently singled out as a potential foreign agent. From the Reason piece:

The Trump administration has made no secret of its desire to censor bad news about the Iran war. President Donald Trump even accused journalists of treason during the war. Now the administration has found a specific (if extremely tenuous) legal justification for his claims: the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

After The Bulwark journalist Tim Miller shared someone else's paraphrase of an Iranian TV news report about the ceasefire negotiations, the official White House Rapid Response account on X commented that Miller is "starting to take Iranian state media as fact and peddle disinformation on their behalf. Maybe Tim should register under FARA for being an agent of a foreign country."

FARA is a somewhat obscure (to me) federal law requiring people “conducting political activities ‘at the order, request, or under the direction or control’ of a foreign power to register publicly or face jail time or fines.” If someone’s posting on X saying American elections are full of fraud and the results shouldn’t be trusted, it’s not the worst idea for the government and presumably the rest of us to know if they’re bankrolled by Moscow, Beijing or Tehran. The law also has a long history of misuse, and in any event what Tim’s accused of seems to fall far short of what the law requires. 

Whether Tim broke the law is beyond my expertise, and really beyond what my point here requires. To me, this seems to be about Team Trump wanting to suppress news reports that are critical of our war in Iran, and perhaps inflict a bit of punishment on a news site that’s rightly viewed as an anti-Trump publication. Not because they’re biassed but, to abuse a line from another casualty of Paramount’s recent kowtowing to the administration, reality has a well-known anti-Trump bias.

What matters here is less whether Miller broke the law or not, whether the law is a good one or not, but that he’s been accused, and to be accused requires the resources to defend himself. 

What It Means

My parents were, at one point, journalists and editors in local print journalism. They moved on to communications-heavy jobs in the nonprofit world around the time Gannett was closing a lot of those papers. I don’t think their career move was directly tied to the shrinking profitability of local newspapers (they weren’t fired, and they left several years before their papers closed), but it was close enough in time. 

That meant for much of my middle and high school years, I was surrounded by stories of newspapers trying to work financially as the internet took over. Most of them failed. I’ve since learned the problem was more about falling ad rates as the internet gave companies more places to advertise, not shrinking subscriptions per se, but both problems lead to a similar situation. If news outlets can’t get enough revenue through subscriptions or ads or whatever other source, if you wanted to do serious journalism that rose above Buzzfeed listsicles, one of the best paths was to find some sort of wealthy benefactor who would support them not as a profitable business but out of public interest and perhaps as a way to earn or at least buy a legacy. 

Meaning when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post that seemed like a good thing. A sad necessity, to be sure, but it would give them the resources to do quality journalism. Bezos could afford it.

As JVL points out, that was at least a tryable hypothesis in a world where liberal principles still held. Bezos might want to keep the Post afloat in the same way Andrew Carnegie endowed university chairs and public libraries. He could trust the government would treat his other businesses fairly. With Trump, though, if the Post published something the president took issue with, Trump could deny Amazon tariff exemptions or forbid NASA from partnering with Blue Origins. To the extent it was ever going to work, having a benefactor fund newspapers and their modern equivalent was only ever going to work if their owners could expect fair treatment by the government for all their other businesses.

The Ellisons are in a slightly different situation. Larry Ellison the father owns or is heavily invested in several tech companies, most notably Oracle and Tesla. David Ellison the son is much more concentrated in media companies so would be vulnerable to government interference in different ways. But when he wanted to merge with Paramount he needed the government’s approval, and illiberalism meant the government didn’t just investigate those deals on antitrust grounds. He needed to stay in Trump’s good graces if he wanted those deals to be approved.

So rich businessmen as benefactors who have other unrelated companies they need favorable tax rates or government contracts for? That’s not going to work. And even if that doesn’t apply in a major way, if you need regulatory approval from the government, that’s also not going to work. But Tim Miller’s getting threatened by the White House’s social media accounts points to another non-starter: people reporting the news as solo bloggers are basically standing alone, which makes it harder to tell the truth fearlessly, and easier for those with power to intimidate them one by one.

The solution is to find a way of doing journalism, or more accurately a scale of doing it, that can get enough revenue to pay for its expenses on its own, by people committed to their vision or mission and also “ordinary” enough to have less to lose if they fall out of favor with the government. That means having people willing and able to pay for a subscription, or advertisers willing to support them from their end; but it also means having a small enough scope. At this point in his piece JVL goes into a bit of a sales-pitch for the Bulwark, but the same concerns probably factor in for any independent news site trying to pay their bills. They can’t cover every story, their videos and graphics may not be as nice as they’d prefer, they won’t have people working for them in Tehran or Kyiv. But they make do, and they end up providing something of value.

In the end, it’s about finding the right level of independence. Independent from people whose values don’t line up with or at least support theirs, but not independent as in isolated. And that requires finding enough people willing to actually pay for what they provide. “They” meaning independent journalism generally, not just The Bulwark particularly; though if you know me, I suppose my biases by now are clear. 

I also have a bias, though, for people working together to educate people on what’s happening, and to put important opinions into words. There’s a real value to journalists organizing themselves into groups doing the work together, both for us news-readers and for their own protection in a political landscape that can be quite hostile. If the situation is such it has to look more like the Grey Company of Eregion than the great hosts of Gondor and Rohan as they ride out to the Black Gate, so be it. It still matters that someone’s watching your back.

Related Stories

Slate: “New "60 Minutes" head faces blowback as staffers rebuke changes” (PF)

Salon: “Bari Weiss brings Trumpism to “60 Minutes”” (PF)

New York Magazine: “Bari Weiss Chooses War” (PF)

Jonathan V. Last, The Bulwark: "Scott Pelley Is the Hero We Need”

Or in rebuttal:

Chris Cilizza: “Why Scott Pelley Isn't the Hero Everyone Thinks He Is ⏱️”

In lieu of a musical break

More Stories about Journalism and Freedom of the Press

Paul Krugman: "Stop Your Chirping!"

Mark Hertling, The Bulwark: "The Scandal at ‘Stars and Stripes’"

Salon: “Axios accused of “market manipulation” with Iran reporting” (PF)

The Conversation: “Chilling effects of Trump’s war on free speech extend far beyond campus walls – and that’s the point” (PF)

Vox: “The FBI investigates a journalist” (PF)

Reason: “Trump Administration's Review of ABC's Broadcast Licenses Looks Like 'Illegal Jawboning'” (PF)

Salon: “Patel promised to come after the media. So far, it’s only been women” (PF)

Deutsche Welle: “World press freedom declines as authoritarianism rises” (PF)

Wired: “The FCC Has a Fast Lane for Complaints About Trump’s Media Critics” (PF)

Salon: “Military’s independent newspaper captured by MAGA” (PF)

And just for funnsies: