Sometimes, I get incredibly depressed about what it’s actually possible to do or put on the air in the mainstream entertainment environment. Then, something like this happens:

ABC Studios has acquired the rights to the Oscar-nominated documentary film How to Survive a Plague for a possible ABC miniseries, which would be executive produced by the docu’s writer-director David France and producers Howard Gertler and John Lyons. The documentary revolves around controversial AIDS activists who infiltrated the pharmaceutical industry and helped identify promising new drugs, moving them from experimental trials to patients in record time.

I don’t particularly expect this to get made. But that anyone would even consider making a mainstream television miniseries about AIDS activism is a sign of how far we’ve come from when you literally had to stage a die-in to get attention to a disease that was an obvious public health catastrophe. And maybe it’s a sign of what the apparent collapse of network television ratings will make possible. If networks (other than CBS) stop believing that they can pull mass audiences with bland fare, maybe they’ll go after narrow, passionate audiences instead. That development has kept alive shows like Parks and Recreation by accident, but I’d love to see what the networks come up with if they start thinking that way deliberately.

In The New Republic, Marin Cogan dismantles a central assumption of Netflix’s House of Cards, the idea that all female reporters in Washington are constantly sleeping with sources for stories. The show got Washington Herald-turned-Slugline reporter Zoe Barnes’ arc wrong, she argues, not because no reporter ever succumbs to the personal charms of a staffer or member of Congress, but because the show reverses the dynamic. Instead of throwing on v-neck t-shirts and push-up bras and heading over to Congressmen’s townhouses, the more common dynamic is powerful men in Washington putting the moves on women they assume are interested in them. Marin reports:

As a political reporter for GQ, I’ve been jokingly asked whether I ever posed for the magazine and loudly called a porn star by a senior think-tank fellow at his institute’s annual gala. In my prior job as a Hill reporter, one of my best source relationships with a member of Congress ended after I remarked that I looked like a witch who might hop on a broom in my new press-badge photo and he replied that I looked like I was “going to hop on something.” One journalist remembers a group of lobbyists insisting that she was not a full-time reporter at a major publication but a college coed. Another tried wearing scarves and turtlenecks to keep a married K Street type from staring at her chest for their entire meeting. The last time she saw him, his wedding ring was conspicuously absent; his eyes, however, were still fixed on the same spot. Almost everyone has received the late-night e-mail—“You’re incredible” or “Are you done with me yet?”—that she is not entirely sure how to handle. They’re what another lady political writer refers to as “drunk fumbles” or “the result of lonely and insecure people trying to make themselves feel loved and/or important.”…“I think journalism schools should have workshops for young female reporters on managing old men who have no game and think, because you’re listening to them intently and probing what they think and feel, that you’re romantically interested, rather than conducting an interview,” says Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at The Atlantic. “Every female reporter I know has had this issue at one time or another.”

Marin’s piece clarified for me the reasons I reacted so viscerally to the element of the show that portrayed Zoe as the initiator of her affair with Frank, and her colleague Janice’s revelation that, despite slut-shaming Zoe, she too was sleeping her way up the ladder. The arc wasn’t just a male fantasy—it was a fantasy that erases an ugly reality by inverting it. It’s not Frank’s fault for stepping out on his marriage, or putting Zoe in a position where she feels like she has to put up with his advances to get a story. An ugly scene between them in which Zoe asks Frank “If you just want the girl who will do your bidding, you have that. Why do you have to fuck me?…Why do you need this? You don’t seem to get any pleasure out of it. I certainly don’t,” is, in the framework of the show, at least partially her due for being naive enough to think that what was going on was something other than, as Frank puts this, “a transaction between two consenting adults.”

What Marin is talking about is a very specific form of sexual entitlement. But this week also saw the debut of Said To Lady Journos, a compilation of the way female reporters have been harassed on the job. “If you got shrapnel in your ass, I’d be happy to take it out,” a contractor says to a reporter in Iraq. “Why don’t we make it a camera, and turn it on you?” a city councilman tells a reporter who is asking permission to tape record their interview. And these are the things that people are saying to female journalists in person.

In combination, it makes the thought of recommending journalism as a career to young women kind of exhausting. Be ambitious? Pop culture will tell people that you’re an amoral blogslut. Get sexually harassed on the job? You were probably Zoe Barnes-ing it up. This is not to say that no woman with a reporter’s notebook and a hard pass has ever behaved poorly, or that journalistic sauciness doesn’t make for compelling drama. But when it comes to sexism fatigue, the Evil Girl Reporter has me particularly tuckered out.

To highlight a story about the return of dangerous, pre-crash practices to the housing market, Bloomberg Businessweek decided to publish a cover that didn’t just blame consumers rather than lenders for the rise of subprime lending and the treatment of mortgages as a way to get access to cash, but specifically portrayed consumers of color (and female consumers) for engaging in this behavior:

It’s awful as art, and as Ryan Chittum explains in a great piece at the Columbia Journalism Review, awful as journalism. “The narrative of the crash on the right has been the blame-minority-borrowers line, sometimes via dog whistle, often via bullhorn,” he writes. “Minority borrowers were disproportionately victimized in the bubble. But BusinessWeek here has them on the cover bathing in housing-ATM cash, implying that they’re going to create another bubble.”

Predictably, Bloomberg Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel has apologized in a statement to Politico, saying “”Our cover illustration last week got strong reactions, which we regret. Our intention was not to incite or offend. If we had to do it over again we’d do it differently.” It’s appropriate that they’ve apologized. But I’m fundamentally dissatisfied with these sorts of apologies, because they neither explain how the offending incident came to pass in the first place, nor the practices an organization will employ to make sure they don’t repeat the same errors in the future.

Does Bloomberg Businessweek have people of color or women on its design staff, who could be among the first people to filter out ideas that they’ll later present to the editors? And if they don’t, are the white people designing the magazine soliciting input from staffers of color, or from reporters who might be knowledgeable about the racial dynamics of an issue that’s turning into a cover story? Are there people of color on the editorial team that’s responsible from picking among the cover options? And if not, are the people in that position going to people who can give them a gut check? If neither of these things is happening, why not? What are the internal editorial standards regarding cartoons, caricature, and race? If those don’t exist, why don’t they? If Tyrangiel wants to answer these questions, I’m more inclined to listen. If you want to walk a line and publish edgy covers, you have a particular obligation to think about where the line is. And if you want forgiveness, you need to actually look at yourself and your practices in a systemic way.

As this trailer for a Wonder Woman movie, made by Jesse V. Johnson, a stuntman who is trying to transition to directing, has circulated over the past couple of days, much of the focus has been on how awesome it is to see Diana laying some serious smackdown on Nazis:

My reaction to it was somewhat different. What struck me as the most interesting part of the trailer was the way said Nazis treated their captive, and the things they assumed about her because she was a woman. There was the implication of sexual torture, the idea that one of her captors and Diana would have “fun.” There was the treatment of her ambitions to protect innocent people as if they were delusional or pathetic. And then there was the assumption that she was physically vulnerable, which is part of what makes watching her turn the tables so entertaining.

But it also suggested a direction that a Wonder Woman could take that might both allow her character to fit into the established superhero arc while also allowing her to be distinct. In Iron Man, Tony Stark’s narcissism and self-regard are his greatest weakness: he keeps having to acknowledge that he both needs and is attached to other people in order to defeat his enemies. In The Avengers, he has to face up to the possibility that destroying himself might be the best thing to do for everybody else. The Hulk has to learn that anger can’t be permanently contained, it can only be managed and channeled. So why not make Wonder Woman’s big struggle against the expectations that come along with being a female superhero? Just as Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s opponents kept coming at her even as her Big Bad count piled up, you could get some comedy and irritation out of the constant underestimation of Wonder Woman, especially in comparison to other members of the Justice League. Leavening villains’ threats with a tinge of sexual nastiness could be a creative way of commenting on the double standards for superheroes and superheroines—James Bond may be sexually threatened, but not so much Batman or Superman, and nipples on the Batsuit or a bulge on the Man of Steel’s suit aside, neither of DC’s other franchise players would ever end up in hotpants and a strapless top.

In other words, why not make the point that superwomen, just like high-achieving women in the real world, have to work through obstacles that their male counterparts couldn’t imagine. And just because Diana can do everything Batman can do backwards and in heeled boots doesn’t mean that it’s fun that she has to. This would be a lot less depressing than David E. Kelley’s attempt to recast Wonder Woman as a stressed-out single gal in the city, which thankfully never made it onto the air. And it doesn’t mean you have to get rid of the Nazi-punching, but it’s always nice when badassery actually conveys something other than the fact that the Amazons apparently offer rigorous machine-gun marksmanship training.

The bridge is yours.

-Amazing magazine covers from the last 100 years.

-What happened to primetime broadcast shows aimed at children?

-Surprise: it’s older Americans who are more likely to correlate video games and violence.

-Alfonso Cuaron is making a television show about a lady with superpowers, which will star Jamie Chung, and now I am happy.

New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum and I got together for a Bloggingheads episode about Scandal and House of Cards, and towards the end of it, Emily made a critically important point that I hadn’t considered before: we’re really at the first moment, post-West Wing, when political shows are emerging as their own form of procedural that can operate in both comedy and drama.

Political shows are everywhere, in all media, and part of what’s striking about them is how varied they are in setting and form. Parks and Recreation, which follows a local city councilwoman and employees of a small-town public works agency, seems likely to get a sixth season, given NBC’s ratings woes. The network took another stab at political comedy with 1600 Penn, a family comedy that happens to be set in the White House. ABC’s Nashville featured a municipal mayoral race prominently in its first season, though it’s an open question whether that plot will remain a significant part of the show, and the network has ridden to ratings success with Scandal, which makes the president an object of sexual desire, and explores the desire of his family, staff, and lover to possess both him and the power that he embodies. CBS is bringing politics into the police procedural with Golden Boy, which tracks the rise of an ambitious young cop to the police commissioner’s office. Starz recently ended its dark political drama Boss, but HBO’s sitcom Veep, which takes a similarly biting perspective on people in power, but from a mocking rather than a grand angle, is returning for its second season this spring. And new media outlets have their own spins on political procedurals as well: Netflix made a big push around its glossy, expensive adaptation of the British miniseries House of Cards, while last year, Hulu debuted a low-budget story about the staff of a midwestern political campaign, Battleground.

Precisely because this is an emerging space, it means that the conventions and values of political procedurals are very much up for grabs. What will the stock cast of characters in political procedurals be? So far, the formula of the West Wing seems to have stuck, with shows focusing on a politician and the relationships of (mostly) his staff and surrogates to that figure. The tone varies: the candidate was more of a distant figure in Battleground than in other shows, and the president is alternately warm and fuzzy in 1600 Penn and an object of intense sexual passion in Scandal. In Veep, the Vice President is risible, in Parks and Recreation, Leslie Knope is kooky but irresistible, and in Boss, Tom Kane was an almost demonic force, as is Frank Underwood on House of Cards. Interestingly, most of these shows have spent more time on governance than on campaigns: campaigns make for a great season structure and allow for a certain number of shenanigans on the trail, but you can’t do them often. Governance stories are harder to pull off, but they can be a way to bring in more characters and set up more complex long arcs, as has been the case with Leslie’s five-years-long fight for Pawnee Commons.

But even though a lot of these shows are spending time on the work of government rather than the process of getting into it, it’s far from clear what their views on government are. In House of Cards, Frank Underwood has no particular attachment to any ideology or policy—the federal government is basically a chew toy for him in his pursuit of self-aggrandizement. Veep wants to satirize the meaninglessness of political ritual in Washington, but spends much more time treating its titular Vice President as an eager flake. In both Scandal and Nashville, the president and the mayor, respectively, are underqualified, pretty-boy stalking horses for other interests. Parks and Recreation is unique in that it’s able to both recognize both the ludicrousness of political ritual and still believe that government can do a lot to make people’s lives better.

As a critic, I often think I’m harder on shows that wade into politics than those that don’t even bother, in part because it’s what I know and what I prioritize, I want badly for those shows to get politics right, and it’s easier for me to spot errors of logic and procedure. I might have graded Golden Boy higher, for example, if it was just a standard police procedural rather than a story about how a rising police commissioner decided what his values as a cop were. But thinking about political shows as an emerging genre makes me want to fight even harder for them to be smart, and to ask good and interesting questions (which is not to say they have to be inherently progressive to work). It would be an awful shame if the conventions of a new style of procedural were getting set and they turned out to be as lazy and cliche as some of what’s on offer today.

This post discusses plot points from the February 27 episode of The Americans.

It’s not new for The Americans to discuss marriage, but this is the episode in which the show’s main theme ran most strongly through all three of the main storylines in play. When Elizabeth visits Udacha, she uses his widower status to make him emotionally vulnerable. “I’m very sorry about your wife. It was 35 years, right?” Elizabeth asks. “And eight months,” the man reminds her. She may be playing him, but when Elizabeth remarks “That’s really something,” you sense that she means it.

But what that “something” means, she isn’t exactly sure. After the defense contractor she’s seducing beats her badly with a belt under the cover of adding a little BDSM to their encounter—”It’s supposed to hurt,” he tells her—Phillip, newly enlightened to Elizabeth’s experiences with sexual trauma, refuses to accept that what’s happened to her is simply one of the consequences of her job she has to accept. But just because Phillip found out with Elizabeth in training doesn’t mean she’s ready to accept his protection. When he tells her “I’m going to deal with it,” Elizabeth is dismissive. “You’re going to deal with it? If I wanted to deal with him, you don’t think he’d be dealt with? I wanted the intel and I got it,” she tells him. “I don’t need you to fight my battles for me. It’s over.” But he isn’t willing to accept her independence in this matter. “Somebody beat the shit out of my wife,” he insists. “I’m not your daddy. I’m your husband, Elizabeth. What do you think husbands do?” “I wouldn’t know,” she spits back at him. And she’s still skeptical when, after their caper with the car (the best action sequence the show’s filmed so far), Phillip comes after her instead of leaving her to extract herself. “You didn’t have to pick me up,” she tells him. “I didn’t have to bring you coffee, either,” he explains. “Or a vanilla cream donut.” Left unsaid is that husbands, at least in Phillip’s conception, do the little things as well as the big ones. And when Elizabeth asks Phillip to “Show me another way” to live her life, she’s telling him that she’s willing to listen to what he thinks marriage means, and to accept some of his desire to be good to her.

And down the block, Phillip’s raquetball partner is having trouble living up to his own standards for what it means to be a good husband. When Stan’s wife comes downstairs in a new nightie, she tries to tear him away from his study of Cyrillic—meaningfully, given his mix-up in tone with Nina from earlier in the episode, he appears to be taking them from a robot—with memories of what their relationship used to be. “You know, a few years ago, before your long stint undercover, we used to go line dancing, you and I,” she tells him. “And we used to drink Chianti at the bar at the old Spaghetti Factory, and host bridge nights once a month. And we used to have those family double bubble blowing contests. And you knew your son’s three best friends’ names. Life was pretty frickin’ great, wasn’t it? Remember?” Stan has ideas about what it means to be a good husband, telling Chris that he should try to be nicer to Martha if he wants to win her back, and later snapping at him “What you don’t know about marriage, and family, and responsibility, and obligation, and answering to people on a one-on-one personal level for 23 years? I could fill a goddamn warehouse, Chris.” What’s harder for him is that he knows who he wants to be, and he’s failing to be it. Part of him got lost out there with the white supremacists, and he still hasn’t managed to recover it.
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Last night, PBS aired Makers, a documentary about the history of the feminist movement, exploring everything from the relationship between women’s liberation and the struggles for black and gay civil rights to the rise of the eighties power tie as women entered previously male-dominated professional fields. While some of the subjects may be familiar to those of us who ended up in women’s studies classes at some point, Makers is a reminder of how much feminist history has been forgotten or obscured over the years, starting with the rumors of bra-burning at the Miss America protests. Because part of the goal of Makers was to spark discussions about the state of feminism today, I spoke with one of the subjects whose work is of particular interest to anyone who cares about the portrayal and employment of women in popular culture: Marlo Thomas.

As the star of the groundbreaking sitcom That Girl, Thomas fought to preserve the integrity of the show’s portrayal of a single woman’s life—and to hire more female writers. And as the creator of Free To Be You And Me, the book, album, and television special for children that challenged pre-existing notions of gender norms, Thomas fought to give children entertainment that would change the way they saw their possible futures. We spoke during the Television Critics Association press tour in January about the evolution of sitcom roles for women, Brave and princess myths, and the struggles women—and men—face to have it all. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’m excited to talk to you in part because my first job as a critic was when I was eight years old for my local paper—I wrote children’s books.

You were a critic at eight years old? How cute!

I was, my author photo has me in little pink glasses and the world’s largest lace collar. I was proof that women, even at eight years old, aren’t paid enough. I was paid in five-dollar gift certificates to the local bookstore. So I was really curious to talk to you because Free To Be You And Me was inspired by the lack of good books for boys and girls alike. What do you think about the rise of young adult fiction? It seems to me that there are many more options for young female readers today. Have we made enough progress if what young girls get offered is Twilight?

Well, you know, far be it for me to tell people what to write. I must say that after we did Free To Be You And Me, and its phenomenal success, and its continued success, I’m surprised that more and more people aren’t writing about that. I saw the movie Brave, which is taken right from Atalanta [a princess story from Free To Be You And Me], which is exciting to me. And I just wish more people would follow, not just follow the path, but find the path to children’s imaginations that is going to open up their horizons and their minds. It just seems that—my husband has two grandchildren, they’re now 16 and 17, the girl is 16—and I’ve noticed with her stuff, it’s all princesses, and the boy’s stuff is all violence. All violent games from the GameBoy on up. And I look at it, and I try very hard to bring other things in, but that’s what all their friends are reading, and watching, and playing. I’m disappointed, I really am. Somebody, some book company has to make it their job, or part of their imprint, part of their conscientiousness to say “Why aren’t we putting out books that do this?” The Free To Be You And Me classic, when it came ou,t there was nothing like it. We’ve already paved the way. Why doesn’t someone pick it up? I can’t do it all.

I think you’re describing two different challenges. It’s hard to ask individuals to take on all the work for anyone else. And you mentioned the persistence of the pricness myth. I felt conflicted about Brave. I like that she’s a different kind of princess, but the victory at the end is that she gets to choose her own husband, who will still be dyanstically important. A princess is still a princess.

Right. But it’s just that she was athletic, and she ran, and she took some action. That’s a big difference from the other princess, from Cinderella. But it’s true. In our princess story, Atlanta at the end decides not to marry, and go off to explore lands. We were feminists writing that. I don’t know that the people from Brave got our whole message, though they took a lot of it…I don’t know, it’s sort of a surrendering to a happy ending, or what you consider to be a happy ending. When I was doing That Girl, they wanted me to have a wedding at the end of the series. And I refused. I refused to have a wedding, to have her get married at the end of the show. And they said “It’ll be great! It’ll get huge ratings.” And I said, “But then I’m copping out to every girl who loved this show…This was the first girl to say “I don’t want to get married, I want to work. I want to have a career. I want to live in my own apartment.” All of those things. And the mail was extraordinary about girls wanting to be just like her, and grandmothers saying “Don’t marry Donald!” They really were very invested in this single girl. The idea of betraying them at the end of the show and getting married just seemed like a true betrayal. I wouldn’t do it. Even that, Clairol was the sponsor, and they wanted a wedding, and ABC wanted a wedding, the producers wanted a wedding. It took a feminist to say “No, no wedding!”
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Colorado's Nick Kasa

If National Football League teams are asking prospective players about their sexuality, that would be a violation of the law and the league’s collective bargaining agreement, the NFL Players’ Association said Wednesday. Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio reported this week that teams wanted to know if Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o is gay, after the projected first-round pick was embroiled involving a fake girlfriend this winter. A second player, University of Colorado tight end Nick Kasa, said today that NFL teams had asked questions about his sexuality.

Kasa, who is projected to be selected in April’s draft, told an ESPN Radio affiliate in Denver that teams have asked him whether he has a girlfriend and if he likes girls, Queerty noted:

“[Teams] ask you, like, ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ Are you married? Do you like girls?’ Those kinds of things, and you know it was just kind of weird. But they would ask you with a straight face, and it’s a pretty weird experience altogether.”

Such questions from NFL teams would be a violation of the league’s collective bargaining agreement, which includes a non-discrimination clause that covers sexual orientation. In a statement emailed to ThinkProgress, NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith said the league should “seek out information” about which teams have asked questions about sexuality:

“I know that the NFL agrees that these types of questions violate the law, our CBA and player rights. I hope that they will seek out information as to what teams have engaged in this type of discrimination, and we should then discuss appropriate discipline.”

The non-discrimination provision was added to the collective bargaining agreement during labor negotiations in 2011. It covers all current and prospective NFL employees.

The NFL will investigate the line of questioning, it said in a statement to CBS Sports. “Like all employers, our teams are expected to follow applicable federal, state and local employment laws,” the NFL said in a statement. “It is league policy to neither consider nor inquire about sexual orientation in the hiring process. In addition, there are specific protections in our collective bargaining agreement with the players that prohibit discrimination against any player, including on the basis of sexual orientation. We will look into the report on the questioning of Nick Kasa at the Scouting Combine. Any team or employee that inquires about impermissible subjects or makes an employment decision based on such factors is subject to league discipline.”

Saturday Night Live is known for its topical humor, but the weekend before last, it sparked debate by wading into theological controversy. In what Hero Complex suggested was the “most blasphemous skit in ‘SNL’ history,” the show drew fire for airing a skit that satirized Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained by using a premise that is possibly even more controversial than Tarantino’s original: What if Jesus Christ rose from the dead…To exact revenge? As a thumping big-budget soundtrack rocks in the background, a voiceover touts the film as “A less violent ‘Passion of the Christ’” and quips “He’s risen from the dead … and he’s preaching anything but forgiveness.”

The studio audience seemed to love the skit, but, as happens with many of SNL’s forays into religious satire, the skit sparked a firestorm of criticism from conservative Christians. Twitter and SNL’s website immediately lit up with complaints about the segment, with commenters decrying it as “blasphemous,” “offensive,” and “just wrong.” The Catholic League was also quick to weigh in, calling the skit “vicious” and “uncharacteristically bloody”. Conservative televangelist Pat Robertson, for his part, reviled the whole thing “anti-Christian bigotry that is just disgusting.”

But there is something peculiar about the outcry over the “DJesus Uncrossed”: Most of the complaints aren’t emanating from the progressive Christian pacifists. Instead, much of the criticism is coming from hyper-conservative Christian circles, a world that, oddly enough, includes voices that preach a vision of Jesus eerily similar to SNL’s gun-toting Messiah.

Though the image of Jesus mowing down victims with a machine gun horrifies many Christians—and rightfully so—others, like Patheos blogger David R. Henson, have pointed out that hidden in SNL’s bloody humor is a powerful satire of an overly-violent, hyper-masculine subculture that has begun to influence not just our popular culture, also multiple strains of Christian theology. Influential mega-pastor Mark Driscoll, for example, has become famous for saying that he believes in a Jesus who has a “commitment to make someone bleed.” He reportedly refuses to believe in a “hippie, diaper, halo Christ” because, as he puts it, “I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.” Meanwhile, churches across America have started creating “Fight Club” groups for men, and several Christian communities are even basing services around Mixed Martial Arts fighting.
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Jack Jenkins is a writer and researcher for the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

The bridge is yours.

-Amandla Sternberg, who played Rue in The Hunger Games, is going to star in a sitcom with Craig Robinson.

-Breaking Bad steps up for Albuquerque’s homeless community.

-This Game of Thrones ad is truly amazing.

-What was the best sitcom of the last 30 years?

-Ron Swanson’s wedding toast for Ben and Leslie:

Cable news gets a bad rap for being truncated and sound-bitey, but the kind people at Al Jazeera was nice enough to ask me and a couple of other critics to come on and discuss the results of the Academy Awards—for 25 minutes:

For all the talk about the billion people who theoretically tune into the Academy Awards, there’s very little conversation about the overall international reaction to the results, unless a win sparks off a very particular reaction, as was the case with Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s Best Foreign Film statuette for A Separation. I don’t agree with everything my fellow panelists said, but it was fascinating to hear how Argo and Zero Dark Thirty are playing outside the United States.

The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport has released its 2012 study of minorities and women covering sports at America’s news outlets this week, and unfortunately, its findings haven’t changed much since it released its first study in 2006.

According to the Institute, 90 percent of sports editors are white and an equal percentage are men. As the first chart below shows, whites make up at least 86 percent of all assistant editors, columnists, reporters, and copy editors covering sports too. And as the second chart shows, at least 80 percent of those in each category are men:

The most interesting part of the study, though, is that without the world’s largest sports outlet, the numbers would be far worse. ESPN is the target of constant (often deserved) complaints in the world of sports journalism, but when it comes to diversity, the Worldwide Leader is leading the way, as the Institute’s president Richard Lapchick wrote at Sports Business Daily:

In the new report card, of the 12 people of color who are sports editors at “Circulation A” media outlets (the largest newspapers and dot-coms, with a circulation of 175,000 or more), four work for ESPN, which employed two of the six African-American sports editors and two of the four Latino sports editors. If ESPN’s people of color were removed, the percentage of sports editors in the “A” organizations who are people of color would drop from 15 percent to 11 percent.

Of the 11 women who are sports editors at this circulation level, six work for ESPN. If the ESPN sports editors who are women were removed, then the percentage of female sports editors at this level would drop from 14 percent to 8 percent.

Those numbers translate down the ladder too. Without ESPN, the percentage of columnists of color working at top outlets would drop from 20 percent to just 7 percent. Without ESPN, the percentage of female columnists at top outlets would drop from an already-low 13 percent to just 5 percent.

Indeed, ESPN has a strong diversity hiring policy outlined on its web site and it has won numerous awards for hiring a diverse cast writers, editors, and columnists. It regularly features minority and female hosts, analysts, announcers, and journalists on both its scheduled programming and its live broadcasts. ESPN is proof that there are qualified minority and female reporters and editors out there, and it is also proof that the rest of the sports world needs to do a better job finding them.

But ESPN also has the benefit of being able to cherrypick from the entire sports world, since most of its reporters are already established names before they join the Worldwide Leader, so the idea that this is a problem that begins and ends with the hiring process fails to explain the problem entirely. The problem starts well before hiring and runs far deeper.

As Chip Cosby, a sports reporter and former colleague of mine, explained in September, minorities face obstacles involving access, economics, and history. Many young minorities don’t see journalism as a way into sports, and many are less able to pursue jobs that are pretty low-paying before a reporter climbs the rungs to a top beat or columnist job. Even if they wanted to pursue writing, many don’t see it as a profession that is accessible to them, since they don’t often see minority reporters writing and talking about the sports they follow. Most of those problems also extend to women, who still face stigmas when reporting on sports, especially when they cover men.

Many of those problems are beginning to fade, thanks in large part to ESPN, which has made both minority and female sports reporters covering sports more visible and prominent. But as the latest edition of the Institute study make clear, many of the barriers blocking both minorities and women from entering the world of sportswriting still exist.

During the first episode of CBS’s new police procedural Golden Boy, which premieres tonight at 10 PM, Walter Clark (Theo James) tells a reporter who is interviewing him about his rapid rise from street cop to police commissioner, “Inside me there are two dogs at war. One good and one evil. Now which one wins?” The reporter knows the answer immediately: “The one you feed the most.”

The language might sound a bit stiff. But it’s a great premise for a television show. Many major problems in law enforcement today are the results of gorging the evil dog, from the profits police departments can make from asset forfeiture, the kinds of quotas that were the subject of the third season of The Wire, and an arms race between police departments and criminals that have made it more likely cops will bring military-style force to bear on civilians. Golden Boy, which flashes back and forth between Clark’s arrival in the Homicide department seven years before his appointment as Commissioner and his early days performing his duties in that new post, sets itself up as the story of how Clark acquired the principals that guide him in his post. It could have been a fascinating—and dark—look at how someone acquires the sense of power that allows them to become former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, who is currently in jail for committing conspiracy, mail fraud, and lying to the Internal Revenue Service, or to see how The Wire‘s Ervin Burrell turned into the kind of craven career-hound he was.

But Golden Boy doesn’t have the guts to go there. Instead, the show is the story of Walter Clark’s journey from hotheadednes to sober spouter of aphorisms. Commissioner Clark is the kind of man who says of confidential informants “They’re an important part of the job and they die forgotten…It’s doubtful his associates know he was a snitch. It might bring trouble to the family,” failing to acknowledge the kind of pressure that police departments put on suspects to turn them into confidential informants, and once they’re doing that job, that the incentives can encourage such sources to bring in false information. He is, apparently, the police brass equivalent of television’s bevy of moderate Republicans, a guy who turns his back on the Mayor to meet with victims’ advocates because he’s appalled by the suggestion that he’d “Blow off a victim’s advocate for a guy I don’t like?” As a fantasy of police immunity from political pressure goes, this dream practically comes spangled in My Little Pony-style rainbows and sparkles, it’s so sweet optimistic. And the show seems to exist in a world where there’s no such thing as a bad police shooting like the ones we saw in the Los Angeles Police Department’s hunt for Christopher Dorner—Walter’s shooting of a suspect in the case that made him a hero was good, and as Commissioner, he tells a shaky female cop not only that “Preliminary investigations indicate it was a clean shooting in a difficult situation. In my view, that makes you a hero,” but that she should get all the PTSD treatment she needs before coming back to work.

This is an irritating enough framework. But Golden Boy, despite its innovative framing of police questions, falls into cliches in its execution. Initially, it looks like the show’s use of Chi McBride as Detective Don Owen, Walter’s older partner, is promising. When the two of them first go out on assignment, Walter leaving their office building through a haze of reporters eager to cover him as a tabloid-moving Hero Cop, Walter mistakes Don opening a car door as a courtesy. “Who am I, Morgan Freeman?” Owen asks him. “Open your own damn door.” And when Walter breaks into a suspect’s apartment to try to advance the case against him, Owen tells him that “All this information: useless. If this gets out, this guy is going to walk,” and points out that Walter’s endangered Owen’s prospects for a secure retirement, being careless with the man who is suposed to mentor him in an already-difficult situation. But he quickly devolves into aphorism, revealing himself to be Walter’s union delegate when he’s caught talking to a reporter, an event that apparently has no real effect on their relationship. Owen, it seems, is mostly there to admit minor personal flaws for the sake of drama and to steer Walter in the right direction.

Structurally, the show couldn’t have him reject his protege or really dislike him, but I wish it would at least engage with why someone like Owen couldn’t be police commissioner while Walter can. Is it race? Ambition? Does Walter’s willingness to bend the rules to bring in big collars and more media attention make him a more attractive candidate than someone who wants to do the job with integrity? Golden Boy would be a much more interesting show for posing these questions, and for offering up a different, but more discomfiting, end result.

Because I read everything that Film Crit Hulk writes, I was particularly eager to see his take on the debates about what makes something funny, or not, in the wake of Sunday’s Oscar-related controversies. I was particularly struck by this section, and the question Hulk poses in it, after which he goes on to discuss the creation of comedic personas and the balance of revelation and harm in individual jokes, but that I wanted to take in a different direction:

COMEDY CREATES INHERENT DIVISIONS OF THOSE INSIDE THE JOKE AND THOSE OUTSIDE. AND QUITE FRANKLY, YOUR REACTION LARGELY DEPENDS ON WHETHER YOU RELATE MORE TO THE MAKER OF THE JOKE OR THE VICTIM. OFTEN COMEDY IS CONSIDERED THE MOST PALATABLE BY SOCIETY WHEN IT’S IN THE FORM OF LIGHT RIBBING AND INCLUSIVE LAUGHTER, A COMIC RAKING OF THEMSELVES OVER THE SAME COALS AS YOU OR HULK. BUT ALSO WITH PURPOSE IS THE COMEDY OF SCATHING INDICTMENT, WHETHER DIRECTED AT SOCIAL MORES OR SOCIETY AT LARGE. BUT WHAT RESONATES WITH AN AUDIENCE IS LARGELY DEPENDENT ON THE COMEDIAN’S INTENT.

SO IN A WORLD WHERE WE ARE FREQUENTLY BOTH PERPETRATORS OR VICTIMS OF COMEDY DEPENDING ON THE IDEOLOGY, WHAT UNIVERSAL APTITUDE DO WE HAVE TO TELLS US WHEN A LINE OF COMEDY IS OKAY? HULK KNOWS WE CAN’T DICTATE THE TERMS OF “WHAT” CAN ACTUALLY BE SAID, BUT WHAT MAKES OFFENSE PALATABLE?

One thing I’ve been thinking about a great deal recently is the unique and contradictory ways in which we seem to react to jokes. I think we generally understand that there is not a normative definition of what is frightening and what is not because most of us have been exposed to the lessons of Room 101, the place in George Orwell’s novel 1984, where prisoners are exposed to “the worst thing in the world”—which happens to be different for everybody. When we look at paintings in a museum, no one has a problem with the idea that some of us are going to respond more strongly to Michaelangelo or to Robert Rauschenberg. And internet commenters aside, we tend to recognize that there are a lot of kinds of physical beauty it’s possible to respond to.

But we also recognize that if a movie, television show, or book fails to achieve what the author seems to have intended, including in cases where those pieces of art—be it intentional or unintentional—glorify sexual assault, racism, or violence, we’re allowed to critique its creator without being accused of violating the First Amendment. But criticize a comedian, whether he’s standing on a club stage, soft-shoeing in front of the Dolby Theater audience on Oscar night, or Tweeting from an institutional account, and a different set of rules seem to apply. The act of criticism is taken as proof that the critic speaking lacks critical judgement. We’re told that comedians get a pass because their job isn’t to make people comfortable, but to speak difficult truths—but if that is their privilege, we’re also not allowed to ask questions about whether or not they’re fulfilling that responsibility. Criticisms that suggest that jokes were cliche, ineffective, or fail to live up to the standards that are invoked to argue that comedians deserve special protection get recast as evidence of bias or humorlessness. A perfect example of this is how frequently feminist calls for rape jokes to be constructed precisely and their targets to be chosen with care are recast as evidence that feminists don’t understand comedy. Unlike every other form of pop culture, comedy seems to have a special status. At one stroke, the idea that people are allowed to have multiple opinions is invalidated, and replaced by the idea that there is an objective correct view of any joke—that it’s funny, and the comedian was correct to make it.

This is a rotten state of affairs for any number of reasons. It’s an incorrect and unproductive interpretation of the First Amendment, one that suggests that the right to speak also includes the right to be free from judgement and criticism, a profound distortion of the functioning of the marketplace of ideas. A related problem, as my friend, Salon TV critic Willa Paskin, put it a conversation between us, is the presumption in many of these discussions that it’s a normative good that we shatter all taboos, simply for the sake of shattering them. It’s an attempt to shut down discussion, which is always a sign of intellectual anxiety. And it denies people who are doing comedy a discussion of efficacy and joke construction that could help sharpen their material, which you’d think would be sad for them, or for any artist. Immunity is rarely a helpful state for people who want to grow in any professional capacity. And if we’re going to give a class of people extra credit for calling out societal hypocrisy and harm—an argument defenders of comedians under fire often employ—of course we have an interest in making sure that they’re actually doing that job, not just hiding behind the job description, and doing it well.
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The bridge is yours.

-”Your intentions are not more important than the effect they have.”

-Yes, it’s too early to talk about the 2014 Oscars.

-Connecticut lawmakers are holding a hearing today on whether or not to keep kids away from violent video games in arcades.

-Thank goodness Oscar season is over and it’s almost Game of Thrones o’clock again:

Reading through the Women’s Media Center’s latest report, The Status of Women In The U.S. Media 2013, which is really an invaluable compilation of the results from a host of media monitoring and academic efforts, I was struck less by yet another year of evidence proving that women are dramatically underrepresented in every sector of media than by a series of numbers that sketch out where women are working in media than on what.

In movies, for example, the report notes that:

“Traditionally, documentaries have been more welcoming of women and diversity in general because the (financial) barriers to entry are lower than they are in narrative features,” Lauzen told The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman in August. “That director role is traditionally the most male role,” Lauzen said. “With narrative films, whether they are independently produced or produced by a studio, there is still that celluloid ceiling women have to overcome.” Women were most likely to find work on documentaries, dramas and animated films. They are least likely to be hired in the action, horror and sci-fi genres.

I’d be fascinated to see someone take a look at how the presence of women in a genre impacts the other work by directors there. It doesn’t surprise me to see male directors like Kirby Dick making strong documentaries on issues faced by women, like sexual assault in the military, a subject he tackled in The Invisible War in the same way it was striking to see Steven Soderbergh make a female-oriented action picture like Haywire, because the mix of subjects and emphases in the genres in which they’re working. But that’s an impressionistic reaction, rather than a systemic one.

Similarly, I’d like to see some cross-referencing of the data on movies written and directed by women and the impact of their presence on the positioning of female characters on movies. As the report notes:

While female characters are on the rise, female protagonists have declined. In 2002, female characters accounted for 16 percent of protagonists. In 2011, females comprised only 11 percent. Female characters remain younger than their male counterparts and are more likely than males to have an identifiable marital status, according to “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: On-Screen Representations of Female Characters in the Top 100 Films of 2011.” And female characters are much less likely than males to be portrayed as leaders of any kind.

There are two reasons to want more women making popular culture (and to make sure they’re paid equally and have access to similar levels of support for their work): equality of opportunity, and the actual impact that their presence has on content. It’s clear, and it’s been clear for a very long time, that women are hired at lower rates in the entertainment industry, paid less, and have greater power on lower-profile projects. But the impact of female perspectives on end results (not to mention people of color or LGBT creators) is more a matter of anecdote at this point rather than established by data. I think we can make the argument that creators like Shonda Rhimes are valuable, both creatively and commercially, because they provide a perspective that’s utterly lacking elsewhere on television. But I’d like to have more data to see if I could argue that she’s an underacknowledged rule, rather than an exception.

If you get your internet through Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision or Time Warner, and you’re still downloading music, television, or movies without paying them, you may start feeling something in addition to your guilt. In collaboration with the Center for Copyright Information, a group that includes both those internet service providers, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, Independent Film and Television Alliance, and the American Association of Independent Music, the companies will let you know they’re watching what you’re up to:

As part of what’s known as the “six strikes” system, the ISPs will deliver to consumers a graduated series of six messages that starts with a warning and ends with some sort of action…While the first two alerts serve as warnings or reminders, the second two require consumers to confirm receipt of the message. The final two, called mitigation alerts, could result in some sort of action, like slower Internet connection or suspending service. The CAS doesn’t specify what consequences ISPs should impose on consumers and leaves it up to each ISP.

The Stop Online Piracy Act may have died last year, but it seems inevitable that internet service providers, as well as search firms like Google, would get into the business of trying to crack down on illicit downloads. Media consolidation means that cable and internet companies like Comcast have as part of their business model creating and distributing original content. An organization like Google seems to be gradually discovering that there’s more money to be had in distributing, if not yet creating, original content instead of merely showing other people where they can find other distributors. In other words, the interests of the people who make content and the interests of the people who help people get to that content are converging.

Whether this is a preferable turn of events for SOPA opponents is up to them. I certainly hope it becomes clearer which providers are levying which consequences as the system goes into place. And from both a business and consumer behavior perspective, it would be great for notices to include information about where consumers could get the same content licitly, though that would pose a formidable technical challenge, and it might feel too invasive to consumers for ISPs to be monitoring their activity at that granular a level. There may always be some consumers who have no interest in paying for certain content, or supporting it by sitting through ads, an attitude I think shows very little awareness of what it takes for that content to keep getting produced, and ISP warnings probably won’t do much to deter those folks. But helping consumers who do understand that nothing comes for free find ways to give their money or their eyeballs to the people who produce and distribute that content—or to let them know when they’ll be able to do so if something isn’t available legally yet—could help change practices. Then, government could be in the position of advocating for well-intentioned consumers, while still letting internet and content companies develop their business models in an organic way.

When news broke that the highly-publicized death of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Teo’s girlfriend had never actually occurred, and that the girlfriend herself did not actually exist, one of the first things many people asked was about his sexuality. ABC host Katie Couric asked Te’o whether he was gay in his first public interview after the story broke, to which he replied, “No, far from it, far from it.”

But now National Football League teams want to know the same thing of the projected first-round draft pick at the league’s annual scouting combine, according to NBC and Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio, who told radio host Dan Patrick that the issue of Te’o's sexuality has become “the elephant in the room” for NFL teams interested in drafting him. CBSSports.com’s Mike Freeman has the transcript, part of which is here:

“On the field, you still have to account for what happened in the BCS National Championship Game against Alabama,” Florio told the Dan Patrick Show. “Here’s the elephant in the room for the teams and it shouldn’t matter, but we have to step aside from the rest of reality and walk into the unique industry that is the NFL. Teams want to know whether Manti Te’o is gay. They just want to know. They want to know because in an NFL locker room, it’s a different world. It shouldn’t be that way.” [...]

Patrick interrupted Florio to ask: “You’re telling me that you’re hearing from teams who want to know this, but how do you ask it? Are they trying to find a finesse way to ask that question, or are they going to do investigative work on finding out if Manti Te’o is gay?”

Florio said: “It’s been described to me as the proverbial elephant in the room and I don’t think anyone knows how to solve this dilemma yet. It’s just that they want to know what they’re getting. They want to know what issues they may be dealing with down the road. We just assumed that at some point there would be an openly gay player in an NFL locker room and the team would have to work with the realities and make sure that everything’s fine.”

In 2011, the NFL and the NFL Players Association added sexual orientation to the league’s nondiscrimination statute, effectively barring NFL teams from using sexuality as a factor in employment decisions, so if NFL teams are asking Te’o about his sexuality, they could be in violation of that policy. But even if it isn’t, and even if that statute didn’t exist, NFL teams shouldn’t be asking that question. Though there are no openly gay players in the NFL, multiple former players have opened up about their sexuality after retirement. The teams have no right or reason to know about a player’s private life, especially when it won’t affect the way he plays the game he is being paid to play.

But the NFL teams who asked this question aren’t alone in being wrong. So is Florio. He insisted repeatedly in the interview with Patrick that “it shouldn’t matter” if Te’o is gay, and yet he passed on the fact that Te’o was being judged based in part on his sexuality, openly speculating that Te’o may in fact be gay while hiding behind anonymous sources to do it. Granting anonymity to those sources and their concerns about Te’o's personal life gave the queries an air of legitimacy, even though asking not to be named is a tacit admission that asking about Te’o's sexuality is something these sources would be embarrassed to do in public. In effect, they’ve persuaded Florio to do it for them. But if Florio truly believes “it shouldn’t matter,” he ought to treat it like that by condemning the questions instead of acting as a stalking horse for them. Instead, Florio painted Te’o's situation as a “dilemma” and a “distraction” that he and his future team will have to overcome.

Te’o, like every other player at the combine, should be judged on his performance, both on the field and in his interviews. But invasive questions about his sexuality shouldn’t be a part of that process, both because he has already answered them and because even if he (or any other player) were gay, it is his choice to decide whether, and how, he wants to open up publicly about it. One would hope that when a gay player does talk openly about his sexuality, he would be supported by his teammates, his team, and the league, and treated fairly and responsibly by reporters like Florio. Unfortunately, this episode makes it obvious that the NFL hasn’t yet reached that point.

Beasts of the Southern Wild star and youngest-ever Best Actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis is a lovely little girl who shows plenty of signs of turning into a reliable talent and a charming presence on the awards-season publicity circuit. And for some reason, she became the target of some of the most unpleasant jokes both during last night’s Academy Awards and in the commentary about them.

Seth MacFarlane cracked that “to give you an idea of how young she is, it’ll be 16 years before she’s too young for Clooney.” It was a line that could have been at Clooney’s expense, if it hadn’t seemed so congratulatory—both MacFarlane and Clooney have a tendency to date much younger women. And as I wrote earlier today, MacFarlane immediately defused any sense that he was going after Clooney by tossing him a mini-bottle. Mega-stars, it seems, must be protected from any hurt feelings or criticism, but little girls? Not so much. Things got worse later in the evening when the Onion’s twitter feed Tweeted, and subsequently deleted “Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a c—, right? #Oscars2013.” It was jarring and appalling to see that kind of language directed at a nine-year old girl, even if there’s a world where the concept of the joke could have been funny. Suggesting that a little girl who carries purses shaped like puppies and has a habit of flexing adorably on the red carpet or when the camera comes to her is secretly a Machiavellian schemer or a diva is a reasonable joke to me, and a similar schtick was a long-running and successful plot point on 30 Rock. It even could have been a riff on the irrational haterade directed actresses like Anne Hathaway. But the Onion’s choice of sexual, nasty language blew up that possibility: it was programming to the character length, not the actual quality of the gag.

To the publication’s credit, the Onion appears to have realized this. The company’s CEO, Steve Hannah, just published a Facebook post asking for Wallis’ forgiveness:

I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive—not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting. No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire. The tweet was taken down within an hour of publication. We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again.In addition, we are taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible. Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.

But beyond the Onion’s apology, it’s worth thinking more deeply about why the attempts at satire aimed at Wallis went so badly last night.
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