It’s been another year of big headlines and strong opinions, with vaccine mandates, international sports competition and celebrity court decisions all ruffling feathers.
Throughout the second year of the pandemic, GBH News editors and contributors continued to write, delivering their sharpest criticisms and joyful reflections on progress.
Below, we revisit some of 2021’s most popular columns.
Tucker Carlson is a white supremacist. And he's giving Fox viewers exactly what they want
For Tucker Carlson and Fox News, our media columnist Dan Kennedy writes, there’s no accountability for vitriol as long as cable TV customers subsidize the channel. “This is how it works if you’re Tucker Carlson: You can express vile, unadorned racist views. And as long as you say the equivalent of ‘I’m not being racist,’ you’re good to go. Or, rather, good to stay.”
Why are there so few Black competitive swimmers?
Simone Manuel won gold in the 100-meter freestyle at the 2016 summer Olympics, becoming the first Black woman to take first place in an individual swimming event. Watching from Massachusetts, GBH News’ Callie Crossley recalls that she was “frankly surprised when [Manuel’s] brown face popped up after touching the pool wall in victory.” Crossley looked back on the legacy of racism that keeps most Black kids — 64% — from learning how to swim in the United States, and her hopes that, as many tuned in this year to see Manuel at the Tokyo Games, she would inspire more Black swimmers.
What remains after the 9/11 attacks: Two Logan gates, still in service, are a quiet memorial
Ahead of the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, GBH News host Arun Rath penned a moving reflection on the attacks, memorialized by two American flags at the Logan Airport gates where the hijacked planes took off. Rath, who has visited Guantanamo Bay several times over the last decade, looked back on how the United States was changed, writing, “There’s no doubt that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his crew were evil. But what I came to feel, deep in my bones, on those trips to ‘Camp Justice,’ was how successful the attacks had been. They had brought out evil in us.”
The Black church helped R. Kelly avoid prison
After R. Kelly was found guilty of racketeering and sex trafficking, All Rev’d Up host Rev. Irene Monroe tried to answer the question: What took so long? One culprit in Kelly evading justice for so many decades, she says, is the Black church. “The Black church missed out on an opportunity to help those in need,” she writes. “Black Christian leaders have rightfully been called out on their self-serving defenses of Kelly, at times even using scripture to do it.”
No, vaccine and masking mandates are nothing like Nazi Germany
Anti-Defamation League New England’s Executive Director Robert Trestan and Massachusetts state Sen. Becca Rausch co-authored an opinion piece for GBH News addressing what they called the “sharp rise of antisemitism in the criticism of COVID-19 mitigation measures.” In their column, they write that any comparison to the Holocaust not only creates a false equivalency, pitting public health measures against the murderous edicts of Nazi Germany, but it also perpetuates lies about the genocide of 11 million people. Trestan and Rausch implore readers to call out such comparisons when they come from peers and community leaders alike.
