BY MORGAN KILGER, NEWS ASSIGNMENT EDITOR
“You’ve been canceled.”
The words nobody wants to hear — especially celebrities. With social media spreading every ounce of information, cancel culture has become the biggest enemy of celebrities. Especially celebrities with something to hide.
Cancel culture, withdrawing support from a specific group or person based on what they negatively did, has had some wins in the past few years. Examples of this include, Try Guys’ Ned Fulmer being canceled for cheating on his wife, Colleen Ballinger allegedly being canceled for grooming minors and J.K. Rowling being canceled over making transphobic comments on Twitter.
All of these examples are “wins” for cancel culture because these peoples’ cancellations were just. However, cancel culture is doing more bad than good.
There may be near consensus that cheating celebrities should be caught and that the family who exploited its adopted son for money deserves to be publicly shamed. But few consider the innocent bystanders.
The 2023 Blind Side scandal is a prime example of why cancel culture does more harm than good.
In August 2023, it was revealed that the Tuohy family never adopted retired NFL player Micheal Oher. This was shocking since the story of Micheal Oher and the Tuohy family inspired the 2004 movie “The Blind Side” starring Sandra Bullock.
Since Oher was already 18 at the time of the alleged adoption, he was tricked into signing a conservatorship that allowed the Tuohy’s to have any press gain from Oher. Oher gained nothing from The Blind Side. Oher said he just learned about this in February 2023.
This scandal outraged the media. The public started demanding Sandra Bullock have her Oscar stripped for her role in the movie. Bullock had no idea any of this was happening; she found out about the scandal with the rest of the media. She is on a horrible receiving end of cancel culture for a scandal she didn’t even cause.
This was one of many scandals that tried to ruin the careers of innocent bystanders. Even though cancel culture is prevalent in our society, it’s not beneficial for society. In more recent years, it has gotten more out of control with each cancellation.
kilgermi22@bonaventure.edu
