Why Pewdiepie?
Last week The Wall Street Journal published a misleading hit piece on the most famous and most subscribed to YouTuber in the world: PewDiePie.
PewDiePie has nearly twice as many subscribers as the next most famous YouTuber, and his videos have been watched almost 15 billion times, the most on the website. 78 percent of his viewers are under 20 years old. Last year PewDiePie made almost 15 million dollars, and also raised over one million dollars for charity.
I am no major PewDiePie fan. I think he is funny, but I have only ever seen a few videos. Regardless, when I read the Journal’s piece I could instantly tell he was being misrepresented.
The article by the Journal presents PewDiePie as an anti-Semite who regularly incorporates “Nazi imagery” into his videos. The Journal then contacted Disney and YouTube, the two major corporations PewDiePie works with, showed them the videos, and cornered the companies into severing their ties and cancelling agreements with the comedian.
Even JK Rowling retweeted an article about PewDiePie’s “anti-Semitism” and called him a fascist.
You might be thinking that you don’t care about this Swedish YouTuber, and that’s fair enough. But you should be concerned when a well-respected major news source is blatantly trying to ruin someone because the reporters don’t agree with the jokes.
The entire situation is ridiculous and infuriating. Not because I feel bad for PewDiePie, even though a part of me does. He makes millions of dollars every year by making YouTube videos. He will be just fine. But the fact that the media sees no problem in taking someone’s jokes out of context and then trying to ruin their reputation is truly frightening.
I care a lot about anti-Semitism; I wrote an article in December about how serious of a problem I think it is. But the problem involves hate crimes and hate speech, not jokes.
It is ok to joke about anything. Literally anything. You don’t have to find it funny, but satire is perhaps the most important form of free speech there is. In every joke PewDiePie made, the context makes it clear he is not a hateful person. Yet the three authors of the article in the Journal still sifted through hundreds of his videos looking for more “evidence” to publish this piece without acknowledging context. Why?
Some people believe that politically incorrect jokes normalize hate. But hatred is what normalizes hate, and jokes are not hatred. Normal people are not going to become Nazis because a YouTuber made a Hitler joke; that’s insane. We should not filter our comedy to avoid controversial topics. PewDiePie shouldn’t have to change a joke for his 54 million subscribers because of the 5 Nazis that might be watching.
The media is being labeled “fake news” more and more nowadays, (particularly by our president) and reporting like this makes me understand why people are losing trust in the mainstream media. Although what the Journal wrote about PewDiePie was technically factual, it was still dishonest and obviously meant to damage his reputation. Don’t believe the mainstream media is fake news, but don’t believe their headlines right away either.
It is true that the U.S. Constitution and First Amendment guarantee a free press, and not a fair one, but that doesn’t mean blatantly unfair reporting like this should be considered acceptable.
