Who complains? Who cares? Well...

Read an interesting Times interview with Chris Rock today.   It's hard to take Rock seriously when he claims that Grown Ups is a better movie than The Artist, but I get his point.    What interests me are his comments concerning how everyone can tweet their outrage so easily when someone says something offensive.  

Q. On July 4 you tweeted: “Happy white peoples independence day the slaves weren’t free but I’m sure they enjoyed fireworks.” Were you surprised at the outrage that stirred up?

A. That’s the kind of joke I would have told on Letterman. We just live in a world where the audience gets a say now. My actual belief? Only fans should be allowed to criticize. Because it’s for the fans. When I hear somebody go, “Country music [stinks],” I’m like, well, country music’s not for you. You’re just being elitist. Only a fan of Travis Tritt can say the record [stinks], because he’s got every one. Same thing with jokes. You’re a fan of mine, that joke’s not even a single, it’s a B-side that never gets released. It’s no big whoop.

Q. Whether it’s your tweet, or Daniel Tosh joking about rape, or Tracy Morgan saying he’d kill his son if he came out to him, does it seem like the Internet is just adding more fuel to these fires?

A. Are they real fires? Or are people just reacting to something? Just because there’s an alarm going doesn’t mean it’s a fire. And I think that people are confusing the two. It’s only a fire when it offends the fans, and the fans turn on you. Tosh has fans, and they get the joke. If you’ve watched enough Tracy Morgan, you let the worst thing go by. When did Tracy Morgan become Walter Cronkite? You have to mean something to me to offend me. You can’t break up with me if we don’t date. 

Twitter is a locus where people complain about someone saying something stupid, like Aston Kucher's (literally) ignorant remarks about Joe Paterno.   But Rock questions its relevance.   I'm not sure he's entirely correct, but my first thought was Rush Limbaugh.   This is a guy who says things that offend a lot of people -- but his core audience remains loyal to him.  One of his jobs is to offend liberals.  He doesn't have to care if they don't like him.   

Late tonight, I came across this piece in Yahoo News.   The satiric newspaper The Onion, in their weekly news roundup video, ran a story about "Sears extremists" planning to fly a plan into the Willis Tower, which was until not too long ago called the Sears Tower. The video features an image of a plane with the Sears logo on it just moments away from crashing into the building.  The humor of the piece is rooted in the absurdity of extremists from a department store, and the absurd resentment the company must feel for having had the building's name change. 

However, the image so strongly resonates with the very recent memory of planes attacking New York and Washington on 9/11 that it's easy to see why the social mediasphere found the image in very poor taste.  (I certainly did.)  The yahoo story reported over 4000 posts in response to the image on the paper's Facebook wall; that number has probably grown since then.  

The article quotes a few of the posts, and what is suggested to me by them is that Rock's argument seems to hold up: the most insightful posts are written by people who genuinely love the paper, and still felt that they had crossed the line of good taste.   Consider this post: 

"I've been an Onion fan for years, but I think this crosses the line," Kelly Davis wrote. "I still love you though, like a child that was really really bad, like got arrested for pot bad. But seriously, I would not like seeing something like this again please."

While some may claim they will never read the paper again, I doubt that to be the case.   That doesn't mean the paper will avoid ending up in the media trash-heap, but I think that some of the twittermoaning is just that, noise, static interference.   If the core signal reaches the desired audience, the medium will remain strong, be that medium a comedian, movie star, or newspaper staff.