DUCK DNYASTY: WHEN REALITY BITES

AL JAZEERA 

'Duck Dynasty': When reality bites

by Victor Balta @VictorBalta December 20, 2013 5:00PM ET

Phil Robertson's tirade on race and sexuality prompts a media firestorm in which Americans invent their own realities

Topics:

 

Culture

 

Media

 

Gay rights

The firestorm ignited by Phil Robertson’s gay-bashing comments and denial of black suffering in the Jim Crow South, published earlier this week, served up a reminder that a fractured media landscape has produced bubbles of self-contained realities. The 67-year-old patriarch of the A&E reality show “Duck Dynasty” was put on an indefinite “hiatus” by the network, prompting his family to threaten to leave the show if Robertson is excluded.

Phil Robertson of "Duck Dynasty."

 D Dipasupil/Getty Images

“Duck Dynasty,” which follows the lives of self-described Bible-thumping rednecks in Louisiana who’ve made it rich manufacturing and selling duck-hunting products, is the most popular reality show on television — and A&E is getting exactly what it has paid for. As James Poniewozik of Time wrote, Robertson made “the subtext the text” — which is to say that he brought to the forefront exactly what A&E has been selling all along. One can only speculate how many similar sentiments from him have been left on the cutting-room floor during the TV show’s four seasons. But in an interview with GQ magazine, outside the bounds of A&E’s hired caretakers, Robertson let his true colors show — and put the network in a predicament.

Even more remarkable has been the resulting hypocrisy, twisting of the Constitution and media failing.

Much of the coverage focused on Robertson’s comments that homosexuality is “not logical” and that it is akin to bestiality, promiscuity and prostitution. More disturbing, but far less reported, were his joyful musings about how the black people he encountered in the Jim Crow South were “singing and happy” in the “pre-entitlement, pre-welfare” world in which they lived.

Conservatives raced to defend Robertson’s “right to free speech” and lambasted A&E — the network that gave him and his family lots of money and a national platform in the first place — for the suspension.

Robertson’s suspension even appears to have kicked off the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, with presumed candidates such as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Sen. Ted Cruz and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin backing him by citing the First Amendment. The law states, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” Unless they’ve misunderstood the word “abridging” to mean “denying the right to one’s own reality TV show,” the First Amendment has no bearing in this debate. No one has suggested jailing Robertson for his comments, and the company that has hired him to do a TV show has the right to suspend or fire him as it sees fit.

Increasing absurdity

Especially galling is the fact many of the same people backing Robertson are the ones who in late November advocated the firing of MSNBC’s Martin Bashir — who sophomorically called Palin a “world-class idiot” on his show and grotesquely suggested someone should defecate in her mouth (referencing a notorious slave punishment after she likened the U.S. debt to China as being “like slavery”). Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, in particular, found it “mind-boggling” that Bashir wasn’t “suspended or even fired” for his attack on Palin (Bashir eventually resigned). Yet, when it came to Robertson’s attack on millions of homosexuals and black people, Hannity said this week it was a simple expression of “his right to free speech and his religious views.”

And, because the story wasn’t absurd enough, a Republican candidate for Congress in Illinois told supporters in an email Friday that Robertson is “the Rosa Parks of our generation.”

A&E has been down this road before. In 2007, it suspended “Dog the Bounty Hunter” after a recording of a phone conversation leaked in which the show’s titular star went on a rant including several uses of the N-word. That show, which was also in its fourth season at the time of the suspension, returned a few months later and continued for another four seasons. It will be no surprise if the network decides sometime that it has made its point with the suspension and brings back Robertson and the show — which will likely be more popular, and therefore more profitable.

Meanwhile, the drumbeat of history rolls on, and those who’ve been distracted by “Duck Dynasty” will realize that while this media-fueled drama played itself out, New Mexico became the 17th state in the nation to legalize gay marriage — regardless of what Phil Robertson thinks.