Brian Lowry is a CNN Senior Writer, as well as Brian Stelter, CNN Media Reporter (host of The Reliablely Slanted). Sources of reliability), mocked right-of-center New York Times columnist Ross Douthat for daring to write about two new movies in his latest column, even though he’s been a movie critic for National Review for over a decade. It’s the latest demonstration of the mainstream press failing to follow or try to understand conservative media.
Stelter’s June 19 newsletter included a snotty take from Lowry that suggested TimesDouthat and other op-ed columnists should keep their feet on the ground and not let pop culture analysis be left to experts (i.e. credentialed film critics.
I propose (half-jokingly), a pact under which movie critics would swear off politics. New York TimesColumnists who write op-eds no longer discuss movies. Without refuting or dissecting them point by point, the shortcomings in Ross Douthat’s Latest column Imagine two films that are very different. Maverick: Top Gun and The Northman, as a portal to Hollywood’s past — underscore what can happen when news-based columnists choose to dabble in pop culture, a beat where (much like sports) everyone presumes that they’re an expert…
So confident was Lowry he didn’t bother to “refute or dissect” Douthat at all.
So what did Douthat do? He dared to suggest the two new movies “succeeded artistically because they are spiritually artistically akin: two dramas of masculinity and heroism, shot through with powerful — and very different — moral and metaphysical worldviews.”
It is clear to see the frustration of liberals at CNN. You can see the disgusting reaction of CNN’s liberals. The Northman, Douthat wrote: “You can see alternative perspectives — Christian, liberal, feminist — flickering in the background of the story, but the movie declines to pander to them, declines to wink broadly to modern sensibilities.”
The Maverick: “The aviator blockbuster, in which the unidentified enemy exists primarily as a testing for the heroes, offers chaste romance, adoptive paternal and filial relationships, and a message from the New Testament: There is no greater love than this: a man willing to give his life for his friends..”
Lowry & Stelter were unable to persuade a left-leaning voice not to follow their lead. The film critic credit is even in Douthat’s Twitter bioIf CNN would have bothered to check!
Conservative writer on pop culture Kyle Smith wrote on Twitter:
A truly amazing and impressive face-plant was made by Brian Lowry from CNN, when he said that @DouthatNYT should focus on politics rather than film. Ross was the National Review film critic for almost 15 years.
At least Lowry apologized to Douthat in the Monday edition of Stelter’s newsletter.
However, Times film critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis never “swear off” spewing their personal political opinions all over their movie reviews, not just while praising liberal documentaries, but when finding scary “fascist” themes in superhero movies.
Scott and Dargis held a semi-annual handwringing meeting in the pages to the magazine for many years. Times, lamenting racism, sexism, etc. among current Hollywood offerings, offering up scoldings like Dargis’s “White people just need to do better,” or criticism encapsulated by a headline, “Watching a White Academy Squirm.”
When the verdict in the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard case didn’t go the way he wanted, Scott declared “Misogyny isn’t the subtext of American political rage and social dysfunction; all too often, it’s the plain text….” No reporters scolded movie critic Scott for “dabbling” in civil law or feminism.
Douthat can talk in the traditional sociological points, but he is talking about a Viking flick. CNN then feels the need to enforce opinion lanes. verboten topics.
About Post Author
