The New York Times: What's All This Fuss I Keep Hearing About Saving Soviet Jewelry?

David French, Part Two.

Back in the Pleistocene, a Saturday Night Live character named Emily Litella had a running bit in which she was very very angry about something she hadn’t quite heard correctly:

So. Before an op-ed columnist can tell you his opinion about a thing, he has to tell you what “the thing” is. He has to start with some exposition and framing, a paragraph or two to orient you to the topic he’s going to opine about. So here’s David French, yesterday, telling readers what he was going to talk about:

If you follow right-wing media at all, you know that two of the biggest stories of the last month involve completely frivolous and meaningless cultural disputes. First, at the end of July, a few voices online criticized an ad campaign by American Eagle that featured Sydney Sweeney, an actress and model.

And second, Cracker Barrel had the audacity to change its logo, replacing the older version that featured a man (Uncle Herschel, in Cracker Barrel lore) leaning against a barrel with a new logo that simply featured the words “Cracker Barrel” in a plain font.

That’s it: Cracker Barrel merely made a little change to a logo, and then suddenly a bunch of right-wing media figures started pretending that it meant something, because they’re all a bunch of outrage farmers who just go looking for things to pretend to be upset about.

But the new logo appeared in a crushingly obvious context, as Cracker Barrel very publicly and explicitly announced a significant rebranding effort. A 700-store chain announced a $700 million plan to change the entire look and feel of their restaurants. To learn this, you would have to spend maybe thirty seconds on the Cracker Barrel website, where the company just tells you that they intend to undertake a major “strategic transformation.” I just wrote about this, with screenshots of their presentation to investors on the major transformation plan.

The 93 year-old founder of the company blasted the rebrand in an interview, calling it “pitiful” and describing it as an attack on the core identity of the restaurant:

The biggest part of the rebranding plan — the center of the $700 million thing — is an effort to completely change the way the restaurants look, throwing out a bunch of old countrified junk and making the interiors more sleek and modern, by which I mean more plain and generic:

crackerbarrel

A post shared by @crackerbarrel

Now, let’s do the “Control-F” test. Go read what David French wrote about Cracker Barrel. Look for the $700 million figure, or any mention at all of the physical remodeling of the actual stores. Go look for a mention of the “strategic transformation” that the company has signaled in the loudest possible way. Look for any discussion at all of the fiery debate over the future of the brand among the people who have invested in the company:

Ohh, they just changed the logo a little bit, and then people got mad for no reason.

It’s not that his opinion is wrong. The problem is that he has no idea at all what the very basic topic is. He’s not opining on the thing, because he doesn’t know what the thing is. Major investors, and the founder of the company, are deeply engaged in a significant public controversy over a plan from new executives to fundamentally change the core identity of the brand, while a columnist at the alleged newspaper of record babbles that what’s the big deal, they just changed the logo a little bit.

David French is non-comedic Emily Litella. How can the New York Times not be embarrassed by this?