Breakfast All Day Podcast 1/15/21
In a week full of flux and turmoil, it’s nice to have some good movies to talk about on Breakfast All Day. Matt, Alonso and I review the covid heist comedy “Locked Down,” starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor; the swoony romantic throwback “Sylvie’s Love,” with Tessa Thompson and Nnamdi Asomugha; and the fascinating documentary “MLK/FBI,” featuring declassified documents from J. Edgar Hoover’s investigation of Martin Luther King Jr. There’s SO much news, including Trump’s second impeachment and continued fallout from the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, Armie Hammer‘s alleged cannibalistic tendencies and a “Sex and the City” reboot sans Samantha. Over at our Patreon, we recap the first two episodes of the gleefully nostalgic new Disney + series “WandaVision,” as well as episode 2 of “Bridgerton” on Netflix. And be on the lookout Monday for a bonus episode, where we’ll play catch up with a few more movies and share a bunch of marquees our listeners and viewers have sent. Thanks for sticking with us — we’ll get through this together!
On press coverage, or lack thereof, of MLK’s infidelities –
At that time the press had a well established process for dealing with this sort of thing. There was an “old boy’s club” unwritten rule that people had a public life and a private life. The gentlemen of the press (they were almost all men at the time) believed in generally letting other gentleman keep their private lives private.
So, FDR could keep his Polio relatively private. JFK could screw around all he wanted, as long as he exercised a modest amount of discretion. As long as you were relatively careful, and you were a “gentleman”, the rule was applied to your “unofficial” behavior.. MLK, in spite of being black, benefitted from the press’s decision to extend the “gentleman’s rule” to cover his extracurricular activities.
This understanding broke down around the time Gary Hart decided to run for President. He is now long gone and so is the rule. But Hart, and the decision to abandon the rule, came along much later than the events covered in the documentary.
Whether we are better or worse off as a result of all this, is for all of us to decide individually.