The Mighty Who Fell Never Were That Mighty
Abiy, Cuomo, Cosby and others: when we celebrate famous people we’re really celebrating ourselves
CNN is asking this morning just how the world could have been so wrong about Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed Ali, who won the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2109.
“The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2019 to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea,” an official Nobel Prize press release stated at the time.
CNN noted that Abiy, as he’s commonly referred to, was credited with “freeing thousands of political prisoners, lifting restrictions on the press, welcoming back exiles and banned opposition parties, appointing women to positions in his cabinet, opening up the country's tightly-controlled economy to new investment and negotiating peace with neighboring Eritrea.”
Sounds good, right? I’d give him the Nobel Peace Prize if it were all true. But, as the CNN online piece reveals, a few insiders always had their doubts, one describing Abiy as “power hungry” and self-serving, and today he’s heavily implicated in the ongoing violence and murder in provincial Tigray. Plus, he was a former ranking intelligence officer. (So is Vladimir Putin.) He’s now an international pariah. See the full article here.
People watching trends in cancer research long celebrated the young, intriguing and attractive Elizabeth Holmes, who constantly made claims about her progress in developing a cheap and simple blood test to detect all sorts of cancers. She was on the cover of magazines and the subject of many gushing interviews; now she is on trial charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and 10 counts of wire fraud. Recent news stories wonder how this could have happened. They’re astonished at how she pulled it off, exempting themselves from any culpability in the hoax.
Also close to home, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was lionized by many media outlets for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic in his hard-hit state in 2020, hosting feisty news conferences almost daily that were carried live by some national streaming services, and was largely given a pass when it was discovered that a large number of nursing home patients in his state died due in part or wholly to the virus and forced transfers from hospitals. He also received a handsome advance (low seven figures, according to various media accounts) for a book he published on the pandemic in late 2020. It sold poorly, but that’s another matter. Then came the revelations of bullying his staff and alleged sexual harassment of female staff, details that were long known in Albany, the state capital. Now he’s been cancelled, as it were.
Then there’s “America’s Dad,” Bill Cosby, one of the first nationally acclaimed Black stand-up comedians, then portraying a sidekick on the successful 1960s “I Spy” television program, then as Dr. Cliff Huxtable on this own, top-ranked TV show, then … uh, possibly a serial rapist by drugging women and having his way with them? Well, his conviction was recently thrown out but that’s not my point here; women had to complain long and hard before anyone listened to them and only then did the media begin to shun him.
The fact is I could make a much longer list of people celebrated in America and internationally who turned out to be real-life villains. Note, I do not mean their character deteriorated later in life, or that they drastically changed in some way after being genuinely good guys. I’m referring only to cases where there were warning signs and credible doubts early on – major flaws, not minor indiscretions or idiosyncrasies. I mean cases where everything was known by some people, at least. See the CNN article above for a nice explication of how the media’s adoration worked in Abiy’s favor, or think of the predatory Hollywood lotharios who could have easily been exposed years earlier than they were had anyone bothered to listen to women’s testimony and/or refused to turn a blind eye.
So, why were we celebrating these people in the first place? Because we are really celebrating ourselves when we celebrate any famous or heroic person. The media in particular are saying, “Look at us! We are the kind of people who know virtue and heroism and even greatness,” and lots of people in the public buy into such uncritical valuations because they want to feel good, too. When politics are at play, there is even more incentive for media elites to burnish their own image by supporting a person that everyone else seems to adore, just as they may go out of their way to show they despise or “see through” the bad politicians.
This phenomenon – promoting wonderful people (whether or not they’re really wonderful; sometimes they are, of course) when in fact the underlying goal is to show how wonderful the journalist or media outlet is – also extends to more ordinary media interviews. Next time you watch a televised profile or interview that is 100 percent legitimate – a rape survivor, an ordinary family who now live a in refugee camp in Turkey or Pakistan, or perhaps an autistic child who is doing really well in life – I want you to monitor the journalist doing the interview. In many cases the camera will make use of effusive and fawning, almost hagiographic imagery of the subject, and the video often will switch between the subject and the journalist who will be at pains to show how impressed and awed he or she is by the subject, how honored to be in the subject’s presence. Yet the real message will often be how wonderful and worthy the journalist is and what a wonderful media outfit he or she works for, one that is so committed to bringing you stories about the finest human beings.