Why doesn’t Buzzfeed just admit that they do little to no research before doing — well, anything?
Their "journalism" is like the colostomy bag on the body of life. While trying to explain just how “woke” they are, Buzzfeed either twist facts to fit their narrative or they ignore them all together.
Case in point is an article from Buzzfeed’s Sylvia Obell, in which she claims that the current iteration of ABC’s “Roseanne” is harder for black people to watch because the lead character voted for the evil white supremacist President Trump, which makes it tough to “relate to television character that do not look like us.”
Here’s part of what Obell wrote in her introduction:
This was the case for Roseanne during the show’s first run from 1988 to 1997: a family sitcom centered around a working-class white woman with a stereotypically black, “sassy” nature resonated with some black families at the time. This is especially true if you consider that the only black sitcom that matches the length and popularity of Roseanne during its run was The Cosby Show, which centered on the upper-middle-class Huxtables, whose parents were a doctor and a lawyer living in a three-story brownstone in New York City.
Wow! Someone’s a racist.
First, is Obell saying that having an attitude is a predominantly black thing and that white people are guilty of cultural appropriation? That’s pretty derogatory toward black people.
Oh, and really? “The Cosby Show” was the only sitcom that enjoyed a successful run, like “Roseanne?” I guess Obell never heard of “Sanford & Son,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Good Times” “Family Matters” or “The Jeffersons.”
Besides the “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” the other shows may not have achieved the level of popularity of “Roseanne.” But all of the other shows were hugely popular, and people regard them as classics. I guess being an entertainment reporter doesn’t include knowing about television.
Later in her self-righteous diatribe, Obell used a source that didn’t help her argument. She used an a 2017 article from the uber-Left leaning Daily Beast in which they claimed that Roseanne Barr “embraced the Alt-Right.”
While Barr has admitted to voting for Trump, the very same Daily Beast article had a hard time pinning down Barr’s political leanings. It was as confused as its writer.
In the very same paragraph, Obell tried to walk back her racism by claiming the same affliction that befell black sitcoms also affected white sitcoms, too.
“There's also an argument to be made that since Roseanne, there have been few if any network television shows that represent white, blue-collar families,” Obell wrote.
Umm…”Malcom in the Middle,” “The Middle,” “Freaks & Geeks,” “King of Queens,” “Still Standing,” “The Goldbergs,” “Reba,” “According to Jim” — I could go on, but you get the idea.
So, if there hasn't been any successful black sitcoms or "white, blue collar" network shows, then Asian and Latino people must have cornered the market of TV. That statement is as ridiculous as Obell's article.
Obell’s knowledge of the entertainment industry is lacking at best. I listed all of the shows above off the top of my head, and a major website’s entertainment reporter can’t take two seconds to do a simple Google search?
Obell reveals herself to be more about pointing out differences in the races and less about actual entertainment. That’s fine if you want to do that, but don’t pass yourself off as an “entertainment reporter” if you know very little about entertainment. Obell is emblematic of the Buzzfeed mentality of sensationalism before journalism.
Maybe Obell would get to her supposed goal of racial equality easier if she didn’t dissect everything based on the “plight” of black people. Black people are more than capable of making decisions about what they watch without people like Obell making it about fictional oppression.