The most infuriating thing about Jubilee is how pretentious they are. Jubilee Media's website has this really high-and-mighty view of the type of content they produce, having the temerity to write on their front page: “We believe discomfort and conflict are pivotal forces in creating human connection.” This is a running theme in all their branding, with founder Jason Y. Lee stating that he wanted Jubilee to be a space for “empathy, dialogue and nuance,” something he feels didn’t exist in a post-2016 election world. All one needs to do to disprove this is have eyes that see and ears that hear, and go to their YouTube channel. Just by looking at the myriad of clickbaity, mind-numbing, worthless videos they produce, one can see how full of baloney Jubilee Media truly is.
The success of Jubilee has spawned a whole cottage industry of copycats borrowing from the numerous content formats Jubilee helped popularize. Our YouTube feeds have become inundated with video ideas originating from Jubilee, from “Spectrum” videos to “30 vs. 1 Speed Dating” videos amassing millions of views every day. This, in turn, has influenced other, trashier, viral video ideas like “Pop the Balloon.” Yet, if you were to strip Jubilee of their high-minded branding, they’re not all that different from their trashier counterparts. At least formats like “Pop the Balloon” do not pretend to be anything but a way for people to indulge their appetites for messiness and drama. The content is still mindless slop, but it’s honest about what it is. Jubilee is mindless slop that pretends to be something else.
It is one thing to watch Jubilee as something to fill up your time. At the end of the day, the average Jubilee video is still a well-produced, well-edited piece of entertainment. But when it comes to their mission — Jason Y. Lee’s ambition of Jubilee being this empathetic space for nuanced discussions of hot-button issues — Jubilee is a complete and utter failure. The idea that Jubilee actually fosters “human connection” is nothing short of laughable.
Jubilee is obsessed with making videos on every kind of hot-button issue under the sun, and that mentality poisons any possibility for productive debate. A basic presupposition of good public discourse, whether it is on CNN, Jubilee or someone’s dorm, is that we need to work under a common reality that everyone in a particular conversation shares. We, as a society, should encourage more open dialogue, but you cannot debate between sense and nonsense. There are some topics with no real possibility for reasonable disagreement that we should not open up to public discourse. There is no real contention over whether the Earth is flat. There is no real contention over whether men or women deserve equal rights. There is no real contention over whether vaccines save lives. Yet, Jubilee has videos of all these issues with both sides, sense and nonsense, presented on equal footing. This doesn’t de-radicalize people or move them away from harmful positions because Jubilee presents these issues as acceptable topics for reasonable disagreement, when anyone with common sense would know that isn’t the case.
Even if you think we should debate everything, Jubilee does not produce nuanced or thoughtful conversations on anything. A central conceit of Jubilee content, particularly in series like Middle Ground and Surrounded, is that they bring regular humans with opposing viewpoints together to discuss important issues. While this may have been true for earlier episodes of Middle Ground, Jubilee quickly shifted to bringing some of the loudest, most ignorant and most malicious voices in the modern day as substitutes for regular people. This was supposed to be the platform for empathetic and reasoned disagreement to arrive at some agreement, for “creating human connection,” as Jason Y. Lee would say. And instead, Jubilee brings “red pill” influencers to rave and shout about why women and overweight people don’t deserve rights. We have MAGA guests on a Surrounded episode telling Sam Seder that America should be for white people and Christians only. We have a guest on Surrounded who openly admits to being a fascist. If this is what Jason Y. Lee means by reasonable and nuanced dialogue, then I have a bridge to sell him.
That last example was from “1 Progressive vs. 20 Far Right Conservative (ft. Mehdi Hasan),” a prime example of how Jubilee actively launders the reputation of truly vile people. Mehdi Hasan, the progressive broadcaster and founder of Zeteo, came on this show expecting a debate with a bunch of Trump supporters, an opportunity to reach more people through good-faith debate. Little did he or we know that Hasan was instead surrounded by active white nationalists, fascists and antisemites, as The Guardian has reported. Jubilee did not inform Hasan about this, and so he had to sit there and engage with people who were acting in bad faith and knew it. And what incentive do these fascist morons have to engage in good faith? Jubilee has, through negligence or malice, handed over its massive platform to them, and now they have free rein to be as ignorant and malicious as they can. Through their terrible vetting system, Jubilee allowed for fascists to launder their reputations to millions of viewers. They may not have come off well to most people who watched the Mehdi Hasan video, but they’ve still managed to worm themselves into public discourse.
In every single way imaginable, Jubilee has failed at its original mission. Instead of fostering human connection, empathy and nuanced dialogue, they help promote bigotry and intolerance for the sake of clicks. It’s a death spiral of bad content; they’ll produce and create more debate formats with insane topic ideas and outlandish guests, contributing to this race to the bottom of rage bait. And at some point, it just becomes repetitive and boring.
Basil Bob is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at bob27@cornell.edu.
Hater Friday runs on Fridays and centers around critiquing media or culture.
