Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • “This is how the line gets crossed”

    There’s a piece in Politico urging the media to stop normalising the far right.

    The BBC’s reporting style, for example, is all too often shaped by internal guidelines and a collapsing vision of performative neutrality. This was clearly demonstrated in coverage of the death of 23-year-old Quentin Deranque in France two weeks ago, with a report that described Deranque as a “far-right feminist” — a phrase that invents a political category no serious politics course anywhere in the world would recognize. Far-right politics and feminism come from fundamentally different traditions and pursue fundamentally different aims.

    The testing ground for this was the anti-gender movement, which is an anti-feminist movement against women’s reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy that came from the Catholic church. It may use the language of feminism to attack LGBTQ+ people (trans women first, but the entire rainbow is in its sights), but it’s not about protecting women’s rights; it’s about women as property. And yet the media has mainstreamed it as feminism. This is how the far right gets in.

    Politico:

    Every uncritical mention of far-right rhetoric is an editorial decision with political consequences. Every headline, every clip, every click adds weight. This is how the line gets crossed. And how some media are no longer just covering the far right but helping it speak.

  • The outrage factory

    Jessica Kant’s analysis of the anti-trans outrage factory is well worth your time.

    …any attempt at accuracy or veracity has gone completely out the window, with a chillingly familiar trend towards the bombastic that has led to pogroms at other times in history… why do conservatives believe that we’re everywhere, hiding in the bushes? Because powerful people won’t stop claiming it’s true, even if evidence to the contrary is everywhere.

  • Thousands of imaginary children

    In 2022, The Times reported that the Tavistock gender clinic was going to be sued by thousands of families whose children “claim they were rushed into taking life-altering puberty blockers”.

    The story, while widely circulated and repeated, was never true. It couldn’t be: that number would mean almost every young person referred to endocrinology at the Tavistock would be suing. In fact, the number of families suing the clinic through the law firm quoted in the story is zero, as a new freedom of information request reveals.

    This is just the latest in a very long list of stories that were clearly bullshit from the outset. I suspect the people who wrote those stories were well aware of that.

  • What happened

    There has been a flood of despicable reporting around the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal, much of it by people who clearly didn’t let a minor matter such as reading the actual judgement get in the way of publishing their pre-written pieces. This, by Rivkah Brown, should make them ashamed of themselves. It won’t, because they’re too far gone. But what’s detailed in the tribunal evidence bears little or no relation to what the majority of the press wants you to believe.

  • Criminal reporting

    The BBC’s coverage of the criminal Graham Linehan, who was convicted yesterday of criminal damage to a trans woman’s phone (but not of his years-long campaign of harassment against her, despite abundant evidence of that harassment), shows the reality of the supposed “pro-trans bias” of the corporation.

    The BBC news article about the court case has been repeatedly edited and now describes the young victim as “a biological male who identifies as a woman”. That’s language straight out of Sex Matters’ anti-trans activists’ style guide, and it flouts the BBC’s own style guide. The latter says:

    Transgender, or trans, is an umbrella term for a person whose gender identity differs from their sex recorded at birth. A person born male who lives as a female, would typically be described as a “transgender woman” and would take the pronoun “she”. And vice versa. We generally use the term and pronoun preferred by the person in question, unless there are editorial reasons not to do so. If that’s unknown – apply that which fits with the way the person lives publicly.

    There’s definitely bias at the Beeb. But it’s not in favour of trans people.

  • A state-sanctioned witch hunt

    The EHRC, which hates trans people, has leaked its trans guidance to The Times, which hates trans people, in an attempt to bully the Equalities Minister into approving it. But no amount of positive spin can hide the fundamental point: the EHRC wants trans people’s rights to access spaces to be dependent on how they look, and enforced by the public.

    They’re demanding a permanent, state-sanctioned witch-hunt by sour-faced curtain twitchers and SAVE ARE KIDS roundabout painters for whom anyone tall, butch, unconventional, not pretty enough, not white enough is Goody Proctor dancing with the Devil.

    Séamas O’Reilly wrote about this in the Irish Examiner earlier this year. As he says today, “Trans people and their cis women allies have been sounding these alarms for years. It now seems clear that the UK government took all these dire warnings as policy proposals.”

    We might also consider what this means for the millions of cis women who do not fit the standard, sexist notion of “femininity” which logic dictates they must be checked against… Too tall, perhaps, too strong-jawed, or short-haired — anything that one patron, one witness, one supermarket or leisure centre security guard might consider cause to question their femininity.

    And how might they prove their “real” gender?…The only way any of the absurdities of this ruling make sense, is if its aims are exactly what they appear to be: A punitive attack on the rights and dignity of trans people divorced from any real-world concern about safety or women’s rights, designed to demoralise and punish them simply for the crime of existing.

    This, despite the abundant and obvious evidence that it will lead to more harm and distress for all British women, cis or trans, as a consequence. We must surmise that the pain and humiliation of all people is worth it, so long as trans people feel it most fiercely.

    This is the world view of the people popping champagne outside the courts, or cackling with glee on their superyachts, rejoicing as Keir Starmer says “trans women are men” while demanding he roll back trans rights even further, and apologise for ever advocating for them in the first place.

    The same people who’ve so thoroughly debased this debate that sensible moderates can profess nothing but mealy-mouthed agreement alongside quiet calls for “calm” and “dignity”, without realising this is offering us a choice between those who light cigars as they legislate trans people out of the public square, and those who say they’re awfully sorry while they do the same.

  • Hearsay

    The BBC has been captured by the sinister trans lobby, a new report being pushed by the right-wing press claims. The report, by Michael Prescott, provides no convincing evidence of that – because of course it isn’t true. The BBC is one of the main vectors of anti-trans propaganda, taking its cue (and many of its contributors) from the right-wing press. And it’s been doing it for years, laundering the bigotry of genital-obsessed weirdos as “reasonable concerns”, publishing and then defending groundless stories such as claims by sexual predators and anti-trans activists that trans women are rapists, and adopting the language and dog-whistles of the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade, such as “biological women” and “sex-based rights”. The brief window when trans people could get a fair hearing or accurate, informed coverage from the BBC closed a long time ago.

    Prescott’s view of trans people and the wider LGBTQ+ community is clear from his report: he reports as fact unsubstantiated and frankly ridiculous claims that there’s a rogue unit of LGBTQ+ people censoring the BBC’s news output; a feature about a trans wrestler is described as “gushing”; he claims there are too many stories featuring drag queens; and he is irate that the BBC dared to include a trans woman in a discussion about the Cass Review. He says that “too many of its staff have never considered the idea of “gender identity” to be either spurious or offensive to many people.” Those “many people”, of course, are the genital-obsessed weirdos.

    It’s not a report, it’s a whinge by someone who believes the BBC simply isn’t vicious enough towards marginalised people. And it’s being used as part of a culture war campaign to push the BBC even further to the right.

  • Fill the page with rage

    I came out as trans nine years ago this week, and I think it’s interesting to look at the transition – not mine, but the transition in the Scots press’s reporting on LGBTQ+ issues and trans people during that time.

    Here’s a fairly typical piece from The Herald in the summer of 2016, which covers “culture war” issues but makes it very clear that the anti-LGBTQ+ voices are an unrepresentative minority; it gives more space to the people trying to make the world better than to the ones determined to make it worse.

    Today, The Herald (and The Scotsman, and most of the wider media) is editorially anti-LGBTQ+, its columnists rabid and its online comments cesspools.

    What’s changed? I’d argue that a big part of it is because the ad money and profit that used to keep newspapers publishing now goes almost entirely to Google and to Facebook’s parent, Meta. Online ad revenues are in freefall, with more and more outlets competing for less and less money. And many newspapers are now owned by companies that care little for journalism, companies that consolidate and cut until all that remains of once-great publications is their masthead.

    That has left newspapers, already experiencing plummeting circulations as print media dies, desperately trying to attract online page views by any means necessary.

    The Herald doesn’t publish ABC circulation numbers any more, but in 2023 its circulation was just 12,928 – down from 28,900 in 2016. The Scotsman is similarly reticent, but in 2022 its average circulation was under 9,000 people – only half of which were over-the-counter sales; many copies are given away for free in hotels and airports.

    Many newspapers have pivoted to a digital-first strategy based on turning journalists into “content providers” and “more closely mirroring social media” (in the words of the chairman of The Scotsman’s parent company) rather than traditional journalism.

    This is something I wrote about in Small Town Joy in the context of local papers not covering local music any more (with some exceptions): local newspapers in Scotland will barely or rarely cover local artists but will publish online articles about US pop star Taylor Swift in the hope of attracting rogue Google traffic.

    There was a particularly ghoulish example of that this week when the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, a very small circulation newspaper only covering the north west coast of Ayrshire in Scotland, was publishing agency stories online about the terrifying hurricane in the Caribbean, which is quite some distance away from readers in Kilbirnie.

    As the gutter press has long demonstrated, one of the most reliable ways to make money from journalism is to make people angry and confirm people’s prejudices. That’s particularly true online. A nice article won’t have people battling in the comments section all day long and won’t be shared in furious Facebook posts or excerpts on X, but one demonising asylum seekers or trans people or the “woke” will. The newspapers know this, which is why they have embraced a business model I call The Three Cs: clicks and comments from… you can guess the third c-word.

    It’s an evolution of the old mantra, “if it bleeds it leads”: fill the page with rage.

    This is doing terrible damage.

    Those papers may not be bought by many people, but they are read religiously by the researchers and producers at the BBC, who scan them for stories to fuel that day’s phone-ins and magazine shows and who have their writers in the “usual suspect” database of rent-a-gobs (a database I was also on for over two decades: once you’re on it your phone rings regularly). And they are read religiously by politicians, and by the people who want to influence those politicians, and shared by the people on social media who want to make you furious and hateful. So they’re a central part of the outrage industry that gives disproportionate attention to some of the very worst people and helps push their agendas.

    The outrage industry is most damaging to the people being demonised, of course. But it also damages wider society.

    We are becoming an angrier, less tolerant, more selfish country. And our newspapers and broadcasters are playing a huge part in driving that change.

    If you want to worry about transitions, worry about that one.

  • The dolls

    There’s a nice piece in Glamour featuring nine “ground-breaking” trans women from the worlds of fashion, music, publishing and activism as part of their Women of the Year special.

    I think the photography may be as important as the article, as it helps disperse the pervasive myth that trans women are “hulking” and highly masculine (not that there’s anything wrong with being big or masc-looking. But it’s a trope the genital-obsessed weirdos want to push: the whole “scary man in a dress” image they love to repeat).

    Shon Faye:

    […] trans people – and especially trans women – are facing a committed attempt from anti-trans pressure groups and right-wing politicians to make exclusionary policy the default across British public life including toilets, changing rooms, leisure facilities, workplaces, hospital wards and crisis support services. The intention is clear: to drive us out of public life to repress, then deny our existence. This political attack on trans lives comes alongside rising hate crime and increasingly poor healthcare access for trans adults, with a blanket ban on access to medication for trans people under 18. With trans women widely vilified in mainstream media on both sides of the Atlantic, the misogynist violence we experience – often at the hands of the same men who desire and objectify us (‘trans’ is the fifth most popular porn category in the UK) – is driven further underground.

     

  • Ammunition for your enemies

    Today’s “completely manufactured anti-trans bullshit” takes us to Dundee, where an anti-trans activist has taken great exception to a Hobbycraft shop assistant’s “no TERFs, no Tories” badge to create predictable media outrage. It’s yet another example of DARVO – the abuser’s creed of “deny, attack, reverse victim and offender”, where members of a movement that demands the oppression and elimination of others claim victimhood – and the fact it’s so predictable is why I’m more annoyed at the badge wearer than the bigot.

    The last thing you should be doing when you’re under attack is give ammunition to the people attacking you.

    I don’t think people shouldn’t wear political badges. My everyday bag and most of my guitar straps are covered in them. But what’s absolutely fine when you’re on a stage, off duty, or if you run your own business – your bar, your bookshop, your coffee shop – becomes something different if you’re an employee of someone else’s business. Especially a larger business with a fairly high profile and no doubt a detailed uniform policy. I can’t think of any retailer with a uniform policy that allows staff to wear badges telling specific kinds of customers to fuck off.

    There’s hypocrisy here, of course. There always is with the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade, who like their Christian Right pals want the freedom to abuse others in public and in the workplace without consequences. But it doesn’t matter, because this is not about anything other than the genital-obsessed weirdos looking for easy PR wins. And that’s exactly what they’ve been given here.

    This is going to play out like every other such case. We’ll get crybully op-eds slagging off Hobbycraft for being “woke”; we’ll get Hobbycraft issuing a grovelling apology; we’ll have more articles implying that trans people shouldn’t be hired by anyone; we’ll have increasingly emboldened genital-obsessed weirdos going to various customer-facing businesses looking for trans people to abuse. So things for trans people become just that little bit worse than they already were.