— Who’s the biggest scourge of the tea party movement these days? It
might be film critic
tossing brickbats at Sarah Palin and other right-wing politicians in
between rendering verdicts on the latest movies.
Over the last few weeks, Ebert has used his busy
Twitter page to give the tea party belittling nicknames, predict it will
quickly fade and opine that “a loud movement is not the same as a mass
movement.”
“I write about the TeePees because it’s so sad how
they’ve been manipulated to oppose their own best interests,” Ebert said
in an e-mail, using his latest epithet for the tea party followers. “I
am a liberal.”
His thoughts have earned him scorn from conservatives
who accuse him of elitism and trashing ordinary Americans. More notable
than the political spat, though, is what it says about the rapidly
evolving media and Ebert’s place among them. Because of his decades of
TV appearances, including with his late partner
Ebert is perhaps the only critic in America who really has a household
name.
But due to complications from cancer surgery in 2006,
he has been unable to speak. The story of his recovery battle, along
with a jarring portrait that revealed his surgically ravaged jawline,
recently appeared in Esquire. Tuesday, he appeared on “Oprah” to unveil
an electronic device that gives him back some vocal function. Given the
fact that for years Ebert was never far away from a microphone, there’s
irony in the fact that his current battle with the tea party followers
is conducted in text only, with bite-sized tweets and blog posts.
Now the 67-year-old reviewer finds himself at the
center of the debate over whether and how mainstream journalists — who
have typically labored in silos of specialization and avoided anything
that called into question a pose of objectivity — should mix it up in
the woolly world of social media. Many large news-gathering
organizations, including the Los Angeles Times, have rules governing
reporters’ and editors’ use of Facebook, Twitter and other applications.
Some experts say the time may be ripe to rethink such
restrictions.
“In an era in which newspapers are in decline, any
journalist who attracts attention in any area should be welcome,” said
Levinson
University
keep reporters penned into a small area never made much sense. The
greatest journalists and writers were always Renaissance men and women,
able to do many tasks.”
conservative blogs including Big Hollywood, defends Ebert the new-media
user while attacking Ebert the political thinker. Breitbart says that
Ebert’s Twitter posts reveal a patronizing view of tea party adherents
that serves as a “caricature of the liberal mind-set” and that the
critic brims with “raw contempt for Middle America.”
What especially irked some conservatives was that
Ebert used a nickname for tea party followers that has also long been
slang for a sexual act. When Ebert tweeted that he was unaware of the
term’s pornographic connotation, Big Hollywood countered that he had
referred to such a context in past movie reviews.
But Breitbart adds that the current fracas ultimately
proves how much power has tilted to new media and away from mainstream
outlets such as newspapers, where Ebert has reviewed movies for more
than 40 years.
“I am a proponent of
testament to the new media. Where is he having a bigger impact, in the
Twitterverse or doing his reviews of movies?”
Ebert admits he was slow to appreciate Twitter but is
now a fan. “It’s an art form,” he said in an e-mail interview with The
Times. “It encourages minimalism, almost like a word game.
“Having said more than once ‘I will never be a twit,’
I now feel it is a splendid discipline … I link to great writing on
the web. I also like to link to the unique, the beautiful, the weird.
“That day is a sad day,” he said, “when a
newspaperman fears to tweet.”
—
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