“It was one of those things that are a little difficult to watch, but you can’t stop watching.”
Jude Brennan (Executive Producer, The Late Show With David Letterman)

Occasionally in pop culture and the media, we get to see little scandals that are symptomatic of the contemporary times – not just in the media attention or our interest in itself, but in the actual instances at the center of the media scandals as reflections of social and psychological trends. There’s an awful lot of hate being voiced in the world, at the moment – much more than we’ve had for a very long time. Some of it has been there, in essence, of course – it’s just that we’ve been repressing it. I’m the first to criticise so-called “political correctness”; but unlike the conservatives who resent the concept, I hate it not because it suggests I am wrong to hate or degrade something or someone, but because it suggests a false sense of freedom and acceptance for that subject of PC ideology. A lot of the hatred we see in today’s world has been recently “created”; but a lot of it was already there, in the first place. It’s just that it’s now been justified, politically and socially validated, and then amplified (or “grown”) by various new social dialogues that essentially center around fear and hatred of another group. We didn’t particularly love, or perhaps even acknowledge, Muslims (who we have no real contemporary history with – unlike the black or gay issue, or the role of women in our society), but they existed all around us without us ever really caring. For most people, Islaamophobia is quite new. The homophobia, the sexism, and various other racisms (though much of that included those who are now roped into Islaamophobia) were always there.