It doesn't always take the form of "whatabout" explicitly but the same structure of coming up with a deflective stream of distraction is widespread. Since this piece is calling attention to what I wrote about the movies and their real life effect in politics, I'll deal with that.
In doing a wordsearch of D. W. Griffith with other search terms this morning, I came across this video DEFENDING DW GRIFFITH & JOHN FORD with Arthur Lennig (who I'd never heard of before about five this morning) emeritus professor of cinema at the University of Albany. You'll need to listen to what is said to understand what I'm going to say.
First, this is D. W. Griffith, the director of Birth of a Nation which was not only the inspiration for restarting the moribund Klu Klux Klan, it was one of its most potent promotional tool. Despite what my volunteer in everything wrong with the secular left says, that was known from the start of the thing, the NAACP regularly protested and picketed it from even before its release.
In 1913, Dixon sold the motion picture rights to D.W. Griffith, a wildly ambitious and prolific director who, as the son of a former Confederate officer, shared Dixon’s view of Reconstruction as a crime against the South. What really stirred his blood, though, was Dixon’s description of the Ku Klux Klan riding to the rescue of persecuted white Southerners—an image he believed was crying out for the big screen. The Clansman began shooting on Independence Day 1914 and was scheduled to open in Los Angeles on Feb. 8, 1915.
The local branch of the NAACP, however, had other ideas. Dixon’s previous work was so notorious that the civil rights group tried to have The Clansman (it was retitled shortly afterward) banned before having seen it. When the members arranged a screening on Jan. 29, their fears were confirmed. It was, they claimed, both “historically inaccurate and, with subtle genius, designed to palliate and excuse the lynchings and other deeds of violence committed against the Negro.” They sought to have it barred on the grounds of public safety. When their efforts failed, they urged the NAACP’s national headquarters in New York to take up the fight.
As documented in last night's brawl in the comments, there is no questioning the fact that the man who revived the KKK, William Simmons said that he was motivated by seeing the movie, Birth of a Nation, nor that that kind of thing was the intention of the racist who wrote the novel it was based on nor the racist director who filmed it. You don't make that kind of movie without wanting it to have the effect which it did, actually, have. The KKK, one of the most infamous terrorist groups in the history of the United States in both its first and its second incarnations. The second version regularly used D. W. Griffeth's movie to promote itself.
But listening to Lennig, you will hear that he starts with a huge "whatabout" about another infamously racist director of racist movies, John Ford in a movie I used as an example a few years back, Judge Priest. And you can hear just how dishonest it regularly gets when the topic is the cinema by the discussion of black-face and the use of vicious racist stereotyping of black men who want to rape white women - one of the most infamous pieces of racist propaganda which was so dangerous that Ida B. Wells Barnett had to debunk it in writing about the terror campaign of lynching as it was at its height. Lennig, a "professor emeritus" in Cinema at a respected university goes through so many twists and turns to defend D. W. Griffith from people who discuss one of the most obvious things about his career as a movie maker, THE PRIMARY REASON HE HAS ANY RELEVANCE TO POLITICS OR SOCIETY AT LARGE. The emeritus guy does that so baldly and so flagrantly that he makes Kellyanne Conway and Rudy Guliani sound like amateur night at the Liars Club.
If Lennig had named a thousand and one other racist directors, authors, artists, etc. it wouldn't have made Griffith or his movies one bit less racist than they were nor changed the evil they were in American life. Whatabout" doesn't exonerate anyone of what they did. But that argument is pervasive among those who want to defend, especially, profitable depravity and evil.
The emotional attachment that people have to their shows and, in the college credentialed culture-set, to the legend of "the cinema" produced such ridiculous nonsense long before anyone heard of Trump.
It is directly related to the "free speech-free press" bullshit lines about the moral impunity of porn or racist lies, often in lines like "whatabout all those people who look at porn or listen to neo-fascist racist incitement to violence and don't rape-murder people"? That direct relationship takes its most obvious form in paying lawyers to say such stuff in court, to fund "expert witnesses" who will say that on the witness stand or in depositions or in newspaper and magazine articles. I don't know if the now just about extinct porn barons like Heffner and Guccione still inflate the massively overpopulated world of awards with those given to those who lied to their profit or not.
Of course most of the people who listened to Hitler in a newsreel or watched Triumph of the Will never murdered a single Jew (or Pole, or Roma or disabled person, or all of the other the designated forgotten) but that does nothing to cut the causal connection between watching those and the people who did get up and do those things BECAUSE OF WHAT THEY WERE TOLD IN THE MOVIES. Ariel Castro did what he was instructed to believe he had a right to do in porn, he said that was what inspired him, the man who murdered Kitty Genovese was informed by porn, as well.
Hardly anyone who watched Jodie Foster movies went out and tried to shoot Reagan, though the guy who did was motivated by watching her movies. But those weren't carrying the intentional message to kill anyone like Reagan.
Birth of a Nation and other racist movies carry that messaging that gets people killed by intent. Yet the fans of free speech and the cinema want to exempt them from any responsibility for what they produced. I think we see in Apocalypse Now as filtered through the mind of Donald Trump, when violence is made cinematically exciting and dramatic, with Wagner's music (for Pete'sake) the spectacle won't lead the audience to get a positive message, they'll be too excited by the spectacle and music and directorial manipulation of them to be paying close attention to an implied message.
I think word for word show biz has generated more lies than just about any other influential thing in life. I think so when it is done unintentionally as in Francis Ford Coppola's movie, D. W. Griffith's intentional promotion of not only racism but white supermacist violence and in John Ford's racist movies but I think an even higher level of lying takes place in the defense of such stuff by "professors of cinema" newspaper and magazine scribblers who make a living off of the movies, and by the lawyer-liars who are hired to defend the movies from people who are damaged by them or who are appalled by their real-life effects when people take their intentional messaging as a how-to do what is promoted in them. And I certainly include the judges and Supreme Court members who have been a part of that earlier and far bigger and every bit as dishonest "whatabout" campaign. Donald Trump is a direct result of that effort. He, as the public persona who was sold by lies to be president is a 100% American show-biz product, produced under the period of "more speech" in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and its high-point in the American media as it gave way to the reaction starting in the late 1970s, when racist comedians began pushing the envelope back to where it was when Griffith was working.
No one should be surprised by Kellyanne Conway or Rudy Giuliani and the massive lying that has become so dangerous under Trump, it was pioneered by a long line of liars, many of them taken to be of the left as well as those on the right who benefitted by some of the legal tactics meant to enable the left, such as the "free speech" absolutism promoted by that left. It might have been an unintended side effect, like Trump's misunderstanding of Coppola's big cinematic spectacle, but his misunderstanding is an understanding of it. Why anyone would have expected giving lying in the mass media protection from even civil remediation wouldn't lead here is what led to probably the stupidest thing any smart, moderny people have ever done. Especially as they had the whole depraved history of the 20th century under the influence of electronic mass media to inform them. Movies, TV, the girly magazine owners, and the rest of what has become of "culture" had everything to do with that. They paid the lawyers to lie us here. We were suckers for them, that's what show biz is all about.
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