Wednesday, while looking up something to read while eating lunch, I clicked on an article that senior writer Jayson Stark wrote for ESPN.com. The article, which focuses on possible reasons for historically low road records in major league baseball this season, can be found here.
While the majority of article and its topic of focus were interesting and seemingly innocuous enough to get me through part of my lunch, I was taken aback by the first two lines of the article: “Some things in life don't make a whole lot of sense. And by that, we don't mean just the ongoing fame and fortune of Whoopi Goldberg.”
Apparently, we now know what Jayson Stark thinks of Whoopi Goldberg, but what the heck his opinion of Goldberg had to do with the topic of the article is beyond me. Additionally, Stark makes this statement as if it is a given that everyone agrees with his assessment, which implies that Goldberg has little talent and does not deserve her popularity and success.
Frankly, I disagree with Stark’s unstated premise. I like Whoopi Goldberg. I don’t often get a chance to hear what Goldberg has to say on The View, on her radio show, on in other forums, but, generally, when I have heard her discuss topics or even use them as the basis for comedy routines, I am often exposed to interesting, enlightening perspectives that contribute usefully to my understandings of things in ways that many other perspectives—or at least many dominant perspectives—are lacking. I also have enjoyed many of her acting performances—probably most notably in The Color Purple—and I have enjoyed the times when she has hosted the Oscars. One of my most lasting memories of the Oscars was one year in the mid-1990s (either 1994 or 1996) when she ended the telecast with a statement encouraging young folks at home to believe that they could reach their dreams.
The instance that impressed me most involving Whoopi Goldberg, though, was an exchange with conservative talk-show host Sean Hannity in June 2006, when she was a guest on Hannity & Colmes, which I happened to catch while flipping through channels while it aired. I don’t have a video link for the exchange, but a written transcript of it can be found here. In this exchange, it was clear that Goldberg and Hannity disagreed on many of the things that they discussed, but the discussion was not the standard fare of American talk media in general or Hannity’s show in particular. Rather, the two spoke respectfully and civilly to one another throughout the interview—something that I attributed largely to Goldberg responding to Hannity in a tone that conveyed mutual respect and understanding amid disagreement, an approach that was able to convey a willingness to understand where one’s fellow discussant is coming from, while also effectively and sensitively asserting one’s own perspective in a way that one’s fellow discussant might consider it. Indeed, this was perhaps one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of what Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin have called “invitational rhetoric.” I’m not alone in my assessment of this exchange, as this link illustrates.
So, given all of this, I have to wonder about the appropriateness of Stark’s comment on Goldberg. It seems like Stark was just trying to be amusing in opening his article by making some blanket statement about a popular culture phenomenon. It’s the kind of thing that a lot of editorialists seem to do. It’s even, seemingly, a trend within some styles of editorial writing that appear to try to emulate the kind of sarcastic writing (a.k.a. Gonzo journalism) popularized by the likes of Hunter S. Thompson. However, while Thompson’s sarcastic use of such references often could convey, like Whoopi Goldberg, some enlightening, useful perspective, many of the emulators just come across as mean, inconsiderate, and, frankly, ignorant. CBS Sportsline writer Gregg Doyel would seem to be an exemplary embodiment of this kind of bad emulation (and, by the way, more to come on Doyel soon, particularly since I’ve recently discovered that he very publicly used this style to respond to a comment on one of his articles that I sent him via the Internet this spring). Stark seems to be utilizing an element of this style to open his article, but, in the end, it ended up being dismissive in a way that was insensitive, inaccurate, and, seemingly, inappropriate; it ended up making the article not so innocuous; and it ended up making at least this reader wonder about what Stark stands for and about the kind of discourse upon which Stark would have information, discussion, and, ultimately, society built.
4 comments:
A few thoughts. One, I'm probably more in Stark's camp than yours with respect to Goldberg. I've never particularly found her funny, and the Oscar for Ghost(!) still astounds me.
That said, I think you're right that the snarkiness is misplaced. There's really nothing gained through a cheap shot like this on.
It's become almost a cliche among sportswriters--even generally good ones, like Stark--to attempt some clever pop culture pun. Bill Simmons does it well, most likely because he appears to be relatively current. But Whoopi Goldberg? Wouldn't that have played better, say, in 1993?
That's, I think, the beauty of many forms of entertainment. We can disagree on whether we enjoy Whoopi Goldberg or anything else .. even Jayson Stark, for that matter. And that's fine ... to quote Sly and the Family Stone (and many others before and after them), "different strokes for different folks." We don't have to find pleasure in the same things. It's the universality with which Stark offers his statement that ultimately becomes one of the problems with it.
I do think there is room for this kind of journalism/editorialism. I know I've read some of Bill Simmons, but not regularly enough to offer judgment here; perhaps, though, he does a good job with this kind of editorialism ... it certainly can be done well. I think one of the keys is a measure of self-reflexivity. When one uses this kind of tone and these kinds of references, I think one has to convey a sense of recognizing the limitations of one's own perspectives and one has to be willing to turn it on oneself. Hunter S. Thompson, for instance, advocated this subjective and sarcastic, popular-culture-reference-filled style, but from what I've read of his work, that self-reflexivity was there. I'd guess that if Simmons is good, then he has a good measure of it, too. When the likes of Stark venture into this without really knowing what they're doing, that's when it becomes inconsiderate and mean-spirited, while making one sound like either a profound ass or quite an ignoramus. Again, Gregg Doyel from CBS Sportsline, as I'll likely be writing in a couple of days, comes across as exactly that to many, many readers. Another good example is Ann Coulter. She claims to be doing parody and satire, but the sense of self-reflexivity is nowhere. She comes across, instead, as the devil incarnate: self-righteously mean, callous, and full or privileged arrogance.
Finally, I think this reference to Whoopi Goldberg does play out in today's American popular culture ... particularly because Whoopi Goldberg is now part of The View. It plays out differently than in 1993 or 1986 because of that, but I think she has a level of cultural relevance because of her association with that show. And, the politics of identification with The View might be an element of Stark's perspective that warrants examination. The View is predominantly characterized, including by its own accord, through identification with women. Is it, then, an instance of hegemonic masculinity, for Stark to choose Whoopi Goldberg for this kind of statement within a sports forum?
I wish that Kathy Griffin had been made a permanent host on "The View" instead of Whoppi. She's far more offensive.
LOL
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