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This point is pretty inarguable—the media is obviously dominated by white folks. There's never been a minority (or female) host of The Tonight Show. Every few years we all have to debate why there's so few minorities on Saturday Night Live. Can I get an Asian on Monday Night Football or what? Come on, people.Koenig isn't the problem in all of this, though. She's simply a person with a soothing voice and the absurdly enviable job of "public radio personality." Though a good number of people have gotten on the "hate Sarah Koenig" bus (don't worry, the bus is a plug-in hybrid), I think many of them are responding to her suddenly exalted position in the liberal media landscape more than the content of her show. It's not so much that Serial is a terrible podcast, it's that people who aren't white never seem to get the chance to make something like that.I will be your best friend, Liberal White Media. In 2022, I will be your deputy editor.
— jay caspian kang (@jaycaspiankang)November 19, 2014
By the way, most people who are talking about all this stuff are white. Earlier this week white person Laura Miller, one of the co-founders of Salon (the ultimate white liberal media internet outpost), tweeted out a rebuttal to Kang's article by white person Jaime Green. That was around the time white person Sarah Miller wrote her own rebuttal of Kang. The whiteness of the people discussing Serial's whitenessisn't a coincidence—the advantages in access, education, and connections that white people tend to have relative to other ethnicities means that the people with the largest megaphones usually have a certain type of skin pigmentation. That inherently unfair fact about the world is pretty obvious, but talking about that makes some white people—even white people who say the word "problematic" all the time—sort of nervous.It's telling that Serial has been called "The Wire of Podcasts," since the very same (white) people who evangelized on behalf of that show are shoving a feeding tube of praise down my throat like I'm getting fattened up to be turned into foie gras. I get it, white liberals! You like this show! You hate the idea that your enjoyment of the show makes you somehow racist or complicit in racism! It makes you nervous that a nonwhite person is aware of your consumption habits and looking down upon you for them! I hear you. Now leave me alone. I'm going to watch Mystic Pizza again.Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.Much needed: The Problem with those
— Laura Miller (@magiciansbook)November 17, 2014