"The Butler" Tops Box Office for 3rd Weekend

Kennedy Counters Anti-Affirmative Action Arguments

Randall Kennedy, the author and Harvard Law School professor, has written a new book that provides retorts to all of the anti-affirmative action arguments lobbed by critics.

"For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law" (Pantheon Books) even brings television news hiring into the argument.

"There are reasons to believe that affirmative action is not as stigmatically burdensome as certain anti-affirmative action detractors suggest," Kennedy writes. "Especially among racial minorities, relatively few complain about this cost, against the concomitant benefit. Some do, as we have seen. But most blacks and Latinos embrace affirmative action notwithstanding this drawback.

"One thing they recognize is the notable unevenness of attitudes toward different sorts of preferences. Racial affirmative action is said to be highly stigmatizing. But the stigma objection is advanced much less strongly when the preference in question has to do with geography (collegiate in-state preferences) or alumni status (collegiate legacy preferences) or preferences for the wealthy or for those with connections. A columnist sarcastically made note of this phenomenon in a piece about the emergence of Chelsea Clinton, Jenna Bush Hager and Meghan McCain as television journalists under circumstances that suggests that their familial prominence played an outsize role in their hiring," Kennedy continued, quoting Mary C. Curtis in the Washington Post.

"'That's the way it is in America. So let's just call it what it is: affirmative action. I know that term has been corrupted in the public realm as shorthand for being on the receiving end of unearned privilege. Someone beats you out for a job, a spot in Yale's freshman class? Blame affirmative action. The ones doing the blaming usually aren't referring to women or veterans or people with disabilities or students with a building on campus named for dad, mom, or other generations that made their mark. It's those minorities — you know, because minorities have always had it so great in America."

• Gerald Early, Washington Post: 'For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law' by Randall Kennedy
  
  
• Erin Aubry Kaplan, Los Angeles Times: Randall Kennedy targets affirmative action in 'For Discrimination'
  
  
• Stuart Taylor Jr., Wall Street Journal: Book Review: 'For Discrimination' by Randall Kennedy

MediaTakeOut: "Basically a Creative Writing Assignment"

Last month, the New York Times tried to describe the celebrity gossip site MediaTakeOut, but the result was a puff piece. Not so GQ's attempt, by staff writer Zach Baron.

"Like TMZ, MediaTakeout does occasionally break news: It was the site, for instance, that first outed rapper Rick Ross, author of 'Rich Off Cocaine,' as a former corrections officer," Baron writes. "This past spring, MTO posted photos of NFL cornerback Kerry Rhodes in a clutch with another man — 'This Ish Here Is Looking SUSPECT,' the site wrote — though tellingly, Rhodes went to TMZ, not MediaTakeout, for the exclusive interview to avow his heterosexuality.

"But MTO has also inaccurately claimed 'exclusives' on everything from suggestions that Beyoncé was faking her pregnancy (until she gave birth) to Lil Wayne's decision to cut off his dreadlocks (until another photo showed that the dreads were very much still there). In June, the site proudly proclaimed a 'WORLD SUPER MEGA EXCLUSIVE' on the name of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian's newly born child, Kaidence Donda West, and then, a few days later, quietly 'updated' the post to reflect the baby's actual name, which was and remains North. Other MTO stories seem essentially unverifiable but equally improbable: 'Beyonce Is Linked To Ray Lewis STEROID SCANDAL... And We've Got AIRTIGHT Evidence That Bey's ON THE JUICE!!!'

"After reading for a while, you get the rhythm of it — it's maybe one-sixteenth news and fifteen-sixteenths entertainment, more fun-house filter than reliable source. The in-vogue bit of slang ratchet— gleefully irresponsible, more than a little wild — was basically invented to describe MediaTakeout. The site, which updates just once a day, true to tabloid form, is alternately funny, outlandish, vulgar, bullying, and surreal; usually it's most of those things at the same time. MTO's writers (there are five, including [founder and editor] Fred [Mwangaguhunga], none with traditional training in journalism) are virtuosos of the caps-lock button, geniuses of ellipses, masters of the end-parenthetical: 'We Have CLOSE UP PICS... Of The Woman That Rick Ross Was In The CAR WITH... When He Got SHOT UP!! (Cute Girl).' There are days when it feels like the site gets as much mileage out of grammar and punctuation as it does from real people and what they do in the real world. There are also days when MediaTakeout doesn't seem to be describing the real world at all.

"Says one high-level editor at a rival, more established gossip magazine: 'At a certain point, if you're so far removed from the actual information, what you're doing is basically a creative-writing assignment.' . . ."

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