Last monday, the New York Film Critics Circle came to the conclusion to expel City Arts editor and film critic Armond White (and suspended New York Post’s Lou Lumenick for unwarrantedly disclosing 2013’s NYFCC award winner vote tallies) due to allegedly calling Steve McQueen, the director of 12 Years A Slave (a film White declared “torture porn”), “an embarrassing doorman and garbage man” capped off with “fuck you. Kiss my ass.”

White formally went on the Slashfilmcast and squashed the above claim, initially reported by Variety, calling it a “smear campaign.” White is adamant about his innocence (and who wouldn’t be?) but when asked by host David Chen if jeering is “acceptable behaviour”, White answers affirmatively prefacing that with the note that it’s also “typical behaviour”.

I can only speculate, but throughout that podcast White takes us on a bit of a merry-go-round argument, going in circles about the decline of journalism (which I’m inclined to agree with) that you can read about in many of his reviews, especially the one of Room 237. But when Chen asks particulars about what happened that night at the award’s ceremony, White’s voice becomes diffident and he starts to contradict himself. He also tries to get semantical about the definition of “heckling”, a classically sneaky argument by a defendant to invalidate his/her contestant’s claim. And oftentimes it works.

But the point of this article is not to (over)analyze the details of that podcast, or the slew of articles that have been written on this recent cause celébre. In fact, this article is primarily self-reflexive: it aims to critique, or really dismiss the output of all this press coverage, and also the NYFCC’s decision to ban the City Arts critic.

Did White heckle McQueen? Maybe; there’s at least audio to confirm that something was shouted and it wasn’t “sotto voice” (soft voice) as White suggested. Should the NYFCC have disqualified White from the circle? Absolutely not, but at the same time I think it was sort of meant to be. White is widely known as a pariah in the film critic profession (he’s normally referred to as a “contrarian”, a term I totally reject), going against movies – with usually sound reason – like 12 Years A Slave that most of his colleagues greatly admired.

But White isn’t new to leaving popular circles or groups. In late 2011, he vanished from Rotten Tomatoes. It was first believed that he was booted by the RT team, because White asserted that he was kicked out because of his positive review of the Adam Sandler vehicle, Jack and Jill. RT’s editor-in-chief, Matt Atchity, responded that White left because he changed publications and chose not to reapply. Okay, no harm really done. Similar to last week’s conflict, it came down a few he-said-she-saids. Only harm was done.

White, as I mentioned, was kicked out of the NYFCC – there was no contention there. However, his rebuke to both incidents is the same: he was betrayed by a coterie of critics who are Armond “haters”, who did not have the “intellectual capacity to argue with [him]”, thus alluding to his point about the gradually corrupted nature of contemporary entertainment journalism and its clientelistic relationship with major studios.

While White’s views here are certainly alarmist, there’s truth to them as demonstrated with his recent expulsion from the NYFCC. While discipline is important, the NYFCC proved itself rash and almost laughably idealistic in its decision. After White’s expulsion, NYFCC’s new chairman, Stephen Witty, publicly stated that “the [NYFCC] deeply regrets any embarrassment caused to its guests or honorees by any member’s recent actions.” He then continues: “disciplinary measures had to be taken to prevent any reoccurrence.”

Witty’s statement is full of banalities, borderline absurdist in nature. On one hand, the “embarrassment caused” was primarily precipitated by the excess of articles that reported the incident – apparently McQueen didn’t even hear the jeer, or at least had the good judgment to ignore it. On the second hand, Witty seems convinced that banishing White will “prevent any reoccurrence.”White said on the Slashfilmcast that hecklers, say what you want about them, are commonplace. As commonplace, I’d add, as the average schoolyard bully. It “happens all the time”, he emphasized, and I agree with him. The NYFCC’s decision is thus akin to the school principal who decides to expel a student for name-calling (for words, I might add, as innocuous as “garbage man” – what the heck does that even mean?).

You may find that comparison absurd, but I think this is merely one absurd hand washing the other. Ultimately, the NYFCC has confronted a member who used bully tactics (one of the least severe kind of bully tactics, I might add) at a ceremony and in return bullied him back. What did Gandhi say about the two eyes?

The NYFCC has isolated an easy target (a target of the media more specifically), i.e. White, and ostracized him for reasons that are quite frankly bullshit. Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman wrote a fairly good article on the issue (and about White in general), but took a misstep by writing “Armond brought it on himself.” Gleiberman seems to suggest that White was tugging on the NYFCC’s collar for awhile and that this incident was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

To me, there’s something uglier going on. The NYFCC resorted to “disciplinarian measures” because they could, because Armond is the little guy, a minority (not talking about his race, but his critical sensibilities) and the media’s blasting against him prompted NYFCC’s feelings of embarrassment and brought about their harsh decision.

Marshall McLuhan famously said “the medium is the message”; it’s one of the most misunderstood popular quotes out there, but let me decode it and apply it in this context. The saying essentially means that it’s not about what is being reported, but the manner in which it is delivered. It is the medium itself that creates social change and that’s what has happened here. Whether White made those strange remarks is moot; what it comes down is that it was reported on – aggressively, one-sidedly, and relentlessly.

If White was only suspended like Lumenick, this article may have been written with different words. But it is the emphasis on expulsion that makes NYFCC’s decision on monday less a measure and more of a craven counterattack to an equally craven initial action. White dismissed the NYFCC’s measure with embitterment: “They’re lousy critics and worse human beings. I am relieved of their horrific company.”

A harsh and tactless reply to a harsh and tactless penalty.