The Angle

The Angle: Real MVP Edition

Slate’s daily newsletter on the media’s gun-reporting failures, Trump News, and the persistent magic of LeBron.

LeBron James posts up against Steph Curry during Game 3 of the NBA Finals in Cleveland on June 8.

Jay Laprete/AFP/Getty Images

If the media wants to be a real voice in the conversation over gun control, Rachael Larimore writes, it should try harder to get the basic facts right. “The mainstream media lobbies hard for gun control, but it is very, very bad at gun journalism,” Larimore argues. “It might be impossible ever to bridge the divide between the gun-control and gun-rights movements. But it’s impossible to start a dialogue when you don’t know what the hell you are talking about.”

Even if Trump loses, we’re stuck with him, Jamelle Bouie writes in the wake of reporting in Vanity Fair that finds Trump is considering creating his own cable news network. After all, being nominated as the presidential candidate of a major party gives you a certain platform and credibility. “It’s too much to say that Trump, should he lose in November, will emerge from 2016 a kingmaker,” writes Bouie. But “there is every reason to believe he will linger as an inspiration to others who can polish his message of white reaction into something a little less abrasive, a little more respectable.”

Willa Paskin watched all of the fourth season of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black and found it “as good as any that it has aired, and good in ways that are fundamentally linked to our deep knowledge of the show’s characters and setting and tone.” OITNB’s writers bring a welcome degree of nuance to the table: “The season is an extended plea against snap judgments, against reducing tragedies to arguments. It could not be more timely.”

In an ode to the Golden State Warriors’ Steph Curry, G’Ra Asim writes: “I relish Curry’s rise because of its potential to illustrate that blackness contains multitudes.” Curry, Asim observes, “is a light-skinned creature of privilege who shoots threes in your eye and shimmies back up the court. He is a black man being credited for his work ethic at the expense of his God-given talents. He forces the basketball-watching public to confront the fact that the black experience is hardly binary—that an athlete’s appearance and his cultural allegiances don’t always correspond so neatly.”

On the other, obviously much better hand (let’s go, Cavs!), 31-year-old veteran LeBron James has been doing totally amazing things during this series, Jack Hamilton writes. Watching James in Game 6 “was like seeing the Golden State Warriors play basketball against every member of the X-Men rolled into one person,” Hamilton marvels. “James plays his sport with a combination of brilliance, beauty, and violence that’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

For fun: “No, I Don’t Dislike the New Ghostbusters Movie Because I Hate Women—It’s Because I Strongly Believe in Hollywood Finance Reform.”

Really!

Rebecca