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Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe said in a new interview that the expansion of tabloid journalism into traditional news operations, along with social media, played a role in adopting a ‘hunt to kill attitude’ around reports and comments.
“We’re just emphasizing that this ultra-violence in our society,” Crowe told The Hill during a question-and-answer session on Zoom ahead of the release of his new film, “Unhinged”. “My theory, when you talk about social media, in the 1970s the language of the tabloids started to drift into the big national newspapers. He started to drift into the TV news. It started to be part of everyone’s mornings when they woke up. These extreme reactions and we are talking about any particular event that has happened in such an extreme way. And that kill-hunting attitude of tabloids when they believe they’ve found someone who’s committed a sin in quotes. And then this inability of the same tabloid language to apologize to this person when they say: “Oh dear, we have the wrong target”. “
“This kind of language has entered social media, where people feel the need to have this extremely angry response right away,” the 56-year-old actor said. “Or they think the way to fix this is to have the neatest, zappest, pungent crackdown that deconstructs someone else’s image of themselves.” And all of this is getting us nowhere.
“The problem is actually the argument itself,” Crowe added. “The fact that we feel the need to have such a strong opinion on things, when if in reality we have broken it down, we have an opinion on something that has already been told to us as a biased opinion.”
“Unhinged” hits US theaters on August 21, marking Hollywood’s first theatrical release since the coronavirus pandemic closed theaters in March.
The film about an unstable man driven to the brink of road rage comes in a year when Americans are angrier than ever before, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted earlier this summer. Overall, 71% of American adults said they were angry with the state of the country, while 66% expressed fear.
A 2018 study by Pew, meanwhile, found that people struggled to tell the difference between fact and opinion. Those who participated in the Pew study received five statements, of which “Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending make up the largest portion of the US federal budget” and five opinion statements, of which “Democracy is the greatest. form of government ”. According to the study, only 26% of adults surveyed correctly identified the five factual statements as factual.
“Unhinged” comes as US movie chains suffered unprecedented losses from the coronavirus pandemic, with AMC reporting a loss of $ 561 million in the second quarter.
Enthusiasm for the new content is strong, however, according to Adam Aron, CEO of AMC, who said on a earnings conference call last week that he was optimistic for his business and the industry “for the long term”.
A recent survey of US moviegoers by the US digital ticketing platform Atom Tickets found that 77% of those polled said they were ready to return to theaters once they reopened, and only 1% said that they never planned to return to theaters.
Crowe, considered one of the best actors of his generation, was nominated three times for the Oscar for Best Actor and won the award in 2000 for “Gladiator”.
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