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The nation just endured another round of cable spectacle as the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s passing became prime-time theater, with networks replaying every clip and pundit parsing every soundbite. Conservatives can recognize Jackson’s role in the civil-rights era while still calling out the media’s appetite for hagiography and manufactured viral moments that distract from bread-and-butter issues. Memorial events stretched from South Carolina to Chicago and were treated like rolling news events for days on end.
Jackson’s body lay in state at the South Carolina Statehouse, a solemn display framed by outlets as history in the making and as proof of his stature among the Democratic establishment. For many on the right, however, the pageantry read as political theater more than pure reverence, with officials eager to be seen at the rostrum. That contrast between the solemn and the staged is exactly what should make Americans skeptical of the media’s instincts.
In Chicago the “People’s Celebration” and homegoing services drew huge crowds to the House of Hope and Rainbow PUSH Coalition events, turning local churches into national stages streamed into living rooms across the country. Those gatherings gave the cultural elite and the political class another chance to parade virtues while the real problems of ordinary Americans—crime, jobs, schools—went unaddressed on nightly news cycles. Conservatives see a recurring pattern: grief becomes content, content becomes virtue-signaling, and Americans pay the price.
The services also produced the viral clips the networks live for, from emotional family tributes to moments like Stevie Wonder taking the stage to sing during a Chicago event, footage that dominated feeds and fueled endless commentary. Those are the same clips late-night and cable panels now chew on as if they’re national security crises, which reveals how shallow our media diet has become. Turning private mourning into a national spectacle is exactly the kind of media overreach that fuels conservative distrust.
Even the question of where Jackson should lie in honor became a partisan flashpoint when the family’s request to have him lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol was declined by House leadership—a decision covered by the press as an insult but defended by others as adherence to long-standing precedent. That dispute shows how quickly funerals of public figures are dragged into partisan scoring and national soap-opera coverage. The result is a country more interested in optics than outcomes.
On Gutfeld!, Greg Gutfeld and his panel did what conservatives expect: they called out the sanctimony and mocked the cable-created sacred cows, reminding viewers that much of the outrage economy is manufactured to pad ratings. There’s a lot to mock—celebrity cameos, political grandstanding, and endless replaying of the same few clips—but there’s also a serious point: grieving families deserve privacy, and the public deserves better priorities than daily media bread made from other people’s sorrow.
Hardworking Americans don’t need another televised sermon from coastal elites about who deserves our tears and who deserves our policy attention; we need leaders who will fix the border, cut inflation, secure our streets, and restore opportunity. Respect the dead, yes, but refuse to let the media and the political class convert mourning into a permanent left-wing infomercial. We can honor history without letting the television cameras rewrite our national priorities.
