Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

A sinister agenda

One of the most widely circulated anti-trans stories is that Soham child murder Ian Huntley is trans. The Star reported it 10 months ago, and it’s regularly trotted out by anti-trans groups and repeated in newspapers.

Look what Jeremy Vine posted today.

It’s from yesterday’s Star.

Like the vast majority of such stories, it was a complete fabrication. Good luck waiting for the retractions from The Guardian’s Hadley Freeman, The Sunday Times’ Janice Turner, The Telegraph, Fair Play For Women, The Spectator’s James Kirkup…

The point here is not that bad people cannot be trans, or that trans people cannot be bad. The point is that some newspapers, journalists and celebrities are not objective or ethical when it comes to writing about trans people, and will print pretty much anything if it supports the narrative of a sinister transgender agenda. The Huntley story was always, obviously dubious, and yet none of the people who wrote about it bothered to do the simplest bit of journalism: get on the phone and find out if it was true.

This is happening far too often for it to be anything other than malicious. UK newspapers have repeatedly had to retract stories about trans people because the stories were untrue. Those stories have been used by anti-trans bigots to campaign against trans people’s rights, and to spread fear and hatred of trans people. This particular story produces 95,000 Google results and is used so frequently that ten months since publication, anti-trans activists were posting about it on Twitter this morning – just before Vine posted the photo of the retraction.

The stories, and the fear and hatred they engender, live on long after the inevitable retractions.

For frack’s sake

The Times, on Twitter:

Almost 50 geoscientists have urged the government to commission an urgent review of the fracking earthquake limit, which they suggest should be raised to allow the industry to expand

Sam Knight, a writer, also on Twitter:

Of the 48 people that signed the letter, I could not confidently identify 9. I think one works for BP and another works for Shell. Many are not experts in any recognisable way. But it doesn’t really matter. Because, of the remaining 39, all have links to gas and oil companies.

…Several signatories openly brag about their industry funded research. Many used to work for oil and gas companies. Quite a few still work for those companies. And others are not even practising scientists, but directors of a business in the energy sector.

This isn’t just yet another example of how The Times and its sister titles often publish advocacy and rarely bother to check credentials. It’s part of a wider problem where supposedly independent experts are nothing of the sort.

The Taxpayer’s Alliance is a good example. It keeps its funding secret because it doesn’t represent the ordinary working stiffs it claims to; it’s an advocacy group for the super-rich, who fund it out of their very deep pockets.

Whether it’s the super-rich pretending to be ordinary people, religious fundamentalists claiming to be ordinary parents or anybody else with an agenda pretending they don’t, every time they’re given a platform the platform provider is failing its viewers, its listeners or its readers.

This is what bias looks like

This is the latest story in the Times and Sunday Times’ ongoing campaign against trans people. Even by those low standards, it’s a pathetic attempt at turning something innocuous into a hit piece.

The tweet in question was posted in November. Here it is:

It’s a thoroughly unremarkable bit of political social media, and the supposedly inflammatory poster – the fourth image in the tweet – is a pretty innocuous “don’t be a dick” poster suggesting that it’s possible to be pleasant and respectful to trans people. It’s worth pointing out, because the Times never does, that the major women’s groups in Scotland – Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid, Zero Tolerance, Close The Gap, Engender and Equate Scotland among others – are proudly trans-inclusive.

“Pro-trans bias”.

Lets unpick that, shall we?

“Pro-trans bias”. Bias is a negative word; it means to be inclined or prejudiced for or against a particular group, usually in an unfair way.

To put it in this context is to say that to be pro-trans (or as I’d put it, pro-not being a dick to trans people) is a bad thing. The entire article is based on the flimsy premise that to post something mildly supportive of trans people is somehow shameful and something a politician shouldn’t be doing. It implies that by suggesting we should perhaps not be bastards to trans people, the politician is biased against non-trans people.

The headline’s doing a lot of work, isn’t it?

As ever, you can illustrate the point by changing the words. Swap “trans” for “catholic”, “jewish”, “Asian”, “black”, “gay”, “disabled”.

As I say, bias is prejudice for or against a particular group. It’s something you’d be guilty of if, say, you accused a politician of “pro-trans bias” over an innocuous, two-month-old tweet but failed to report (let alone criticise) the UK government officials who repeatedly meet with rabidly anti-trans groups (Transgender Trend and Fair Play For Women twice and A Woman’s Place three times, with FPFW invited to a further two “round tables” to discuss limiting trans people’s rights) or the MPs who post anti-trans sentiment to social media.

It’s the kind of thing you’d be guilty of if your columnists were activist supporters of anti-trans groups but failed to declare that in their regular anti-trans columns.

It’s something you’d be guilty of if you repeatedly ignored the medical consensus on trans people in favour of scaremongering from activist groups.

It’s something you’d be guilty of… you get the idea.

Anti-trans bias in the press is so commonplace that to simply detail it would be a full time job, but the Times/Sunday Times has become so blatant it’s almost a parody of itself. If you buy these titles you’re helping to fund this bullshit.

The Sunday Times printed nonsense? Time for my shocked face

What’s that? The Sunday Times has printed a load of old bollocks again? I’m shocked! Shocked!

My lecture yesterday was about calls for internet regulation, and I mentioned the media panics over “suicide sites” in 2001, 2006, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016… you get the idea. We’re in the middle of another panic now.

Enter the Sunday Times, which this weekend claimed we are raising a “suicidal generation” and that it’s all social media’s fault.

Tom Chivers isn’t impressed:

This is – and I don’t want to get too technical here, but bear with me – absolute bollocks from top to bottom.

The truth is that while there are certainly tragedies, the actual number of teenagers who kill themselves is very small – and because the numbers are so small, even the slightest change can be made to look like a dramatic shift.

Especially if you cherry-pick the numbers, as the Sunday Times did.

The ST compared the most recent figures with 2010, which had the lowest rate of teen suicides since 1981. Chivers again:

You could, if you wanted to, use the same trick to tell the exact opposite story. Facebook was first released in 2004, when the suicide rate among 15- to 19-year-olds in England and Wales was 4.7. But after six years of social media being available, it had dropped to 3.1! It’s a life-saver, no?

The Sunday Times piece suffers from two key problems. One, social media isn’t causing a suicide epidemic among teenagers. And two, there isn’t a suicide epidemic among teenagers.

If you look at 10- to 29-year-olds, it’s gone from a consistent plateau of about 15 per 100,000 from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, down to about nine per 100,000 by about 2004, and that’s where it’s stayed, pretty much. There’s a similar story among the population as a whole.

Every suicide is a tragedy, but to peddle myths isn’t helping anybody. In fact, it might very well be letting the real culprits off the hook. As Natasha Devon MBE, who works with teenagers, posted on Twitter, the top reasons teenagers tell her their mental heath is suffering don’t include social media at all. They are:

1. Academic anxiety;
2. Lack of community support;
3. Problems at home;
4. No one to talk to;
5. Loss of activities which helped them cope (eg sport/music);
6. Worries about future.

That doesn’t make for such an exciting headline. Reality rarely does.

Turning hate into hope

Harris Brewis just did something amazing.

Brewis is a gamer, known online as hbomberguy, and he decided to annoy Graham Linehan. Linehan is famous for co-writing Father Ted and Black Books a couple of decades ago, but in the last few years he’s done little of note beyond spending pretty much all of his time spreading hate about trans people on social media.

Linehan’s most recent activities have focused on the Mermaids charity, which supports the parents of children who may be trans. He spearheaded a campaign to try and get the Big Lottery Fund to cancel its grant to the charity, so in response Brewis decided to try and raise a bit of money for Mermaids by playing the Donkey Kong video game online for hours.

The goal? A few hundred dollars.

The result? Three hundred and forty thousand bucks.

It’s not just the money. It’s the joy. Twitter users posted their support for Mermaids and for trans people under the ironic hashtag #thanksgraham as the total soared, and various celebrities – such as Cher! – tweeted or retweeted in support. Gaming legend John Romero (creator of Doom, Linehan’s favourite game) joined Brewis live, as did inspiring US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes and a host of other prominent figures. For more than 48 hours, thousands of people hammered the message home: “trans people, we’ve got your back.”

It won’t stop Linehan and his enablers; it’ll probably make them worse. And no doubt the usual suspects will write yet more fact-free op-eds about the sinister transgender agenda. But this feels important. Imagine what such positivity and support must feel like to a confused, closeted trans kid who sees trans people demonised online and in their parents’ newspapers every weekend.

Sage advice

Women are being warned not to put herbs in their vaginas after a Marie Claire article suggested that they should use parsley to “kick-start” their periods.

It’s easy to laugh, but it’s actually quite a serious problem: time and again magazines and online magazines aimed at women print deluded and sometimes actively dangerous health advice from people who haven’t got the faintest clue what they’re on about.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop site is a good example: it urges women to do all kinds of dangerous things to their genitals and weasels out of taking responsibility for any resultant injury or infection with a disclaimer effectively saying that “the products or procedures mentioned on the site are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.” Some of Paltrow’s fact-free tips have appeared in supposedly reputable magazines such as Women’s Health.

A few years ago, one study looked at the articles about complementary medicine in a range of women’s magazines. Of the 150 articles studied in 15 women’s magazines, 131 “were written by non medically qualified contributors”. Of the 150 articles, 95 made unsubstantiated claims about herbal “remedies” that can be very dangerous for some people.

I’m surprised Marie Claire slipped up, because as magazines go it’s one of the better ones. But it’s an industry-wide problem. Between “alternative” medicine, dangerous diets and cheerleading for cosmetic surgery, women’s magazines are often really bad for women’s health – and the more magazines move online and become low- or no-paying content farms, the worse the problem is going to become.

The kids are alright

Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of the thinky thoughts of anti-trans columnists, we had some actual research into children, gender dysphoria and gender identity?

Look what The Atlantic found!

Since 2013, Kristina Olson, a psychologist at the University of Washington, has been running a large, long-term study to track the health and well-being of transgender children—those who identify as a different gender from the one they were assigned at birth. Since the study’s launch, Olson has also heard from the parents of gender-nonconforming kids, who consistently defy gender stereotypes but have not socially transitioned. They might include boys who like wearing dresses or girls who play with trucks, but who have not, for example, changed the pronouns they use.

I’ve been a fan of the author, Ed Yong, for a long time: he’s a very talented and conscientious science writer. This is typical of his work: he’s taken Olson’s study and looked into it in some detail.

Unlike newspaper columnists, who offer zero evidence with 100% confidence, Olson offers detailed evidence but is also quick to point out the limitations of the study. Nevertheless, it’s interesting: children’s gender identity appears to be a pretty good predictor of whether they’ll turn out to be trans. From the article:

Charlotte Tate, a psychologist from San Francisco State University, says that this quantitative research supports what she and other transgender scholars have long noted through qualitative work: There really is something distinctive and different about the kids who eventually go on to transition. From interviews with trans people, “one of the most consistent themes is that at some early point, sometimes as early as age 3 to 5, there’s this feeling that the individual is part of another gender group,” Tate says. When told that they’re part of their assigned gender, “they’ll say, ‘No, that’s not right. That doesn’t fit me.’ They have self-knowledge that’s private and that they’re trying to communicate.”

This bit is key:

Olson’s team also showed that those differences in gender identity are the cause of social transitions—and not, as some have suggested, their consequence.

In other words, children are not coerced into having a particular gender identity: you can put Jimmy in as many dresses as you want but if Jimmy isn’t trans, he won’t suddenly become trans or develop gender dysphoria.

Older trans people are going “no shit, Sherlock” at this point: if it were possible to persuade people to change their gender identity, there wouldn’t be any trans people. You can’t talk people into or out of being trans any more than you can pray the gay away: some of us tried not to be trans for decades, and will spend decades trying to deal with the damage from that.

Once again there are very strong parallels between today’s harmful anti-trans bullshit and previously harmful anti-gay bullshit. That’s something the Atlantic article makes explicit, describing the work of American psychologist Evelyn Hooker.

In the 1950s, when many psychologists saw homosexuality as a mental illness (largely because they had only ever worked with gay people who had records of arrest or mental-health problems), Hooker surveyed a more representative sample and found that gay and straight men don’t differ in their mental health. That was instrumental in getting homosexuality removed from a list of mental-health disorders in 1987. “We’re sitting in a similar moment today with transgenderism,” says Devor. “The mental-health issues that we see are largely the result of living a life that blocks your expression of your gender. My view is that the work coming out of Olson’s group will have an Evelyn Hooker effect.”

I’m not naive enough to think this will have any effect on the mainstream media coverage of trans people in general and trans kids in particular: the moral panic is too well established. But it’s yet more evidence of the growing gap between the reality-based community and the commentariat. All too often, the you-couldn’t-make-it-up brigade are doing exactly that.

Screens are not safe

A new study from Oxford University has been making waves today: it apparently demonstrates that despite much publicity over the dangers of screen use for children, screens are no more dangerous than eating potatoes.

Inevitably, that’s not what the study actually says. In one of the few sensible reports, Techcrunch explains:

the study does not conclude that technology has no negative or positive effect; such a broad conclusion would be untenable on its face. The data it rounds up are (as some experts point out with no ill will toward the paper) simply inadequate to the task and technology use is too variable to reduce to a single factor. Its conclusion is that studies so far have in fact been inconclusive and we need to go back to the drawing board.

“The nuanced picture provided by these results is in line with previous psychological and epidemiological research suggesting that the associations between digital screen-time and child outcomes are not as simple as many might think,” the researchers write.

The confusion is partly due to the university overselling the study, and largely due to crap reporting by people who just regurgitate the press release instead of actually reading the report. It’s quite impressive to see “study shows that knee-jerk articles about screens are based on shit science” reported as “screens are safe, says science!”

The snowflake generation

The world is full of snowflakes, we’re told. Thin-skinned, easily triggered and constantly seeking innocuous things to be outraged about, they’re the enemies of intelligent discourse. “Don’t like that thing because it’s baaaaaad!” they bleat, immediately leaping to the worst possible take on whatever it is they’re manufacturing outrage about today.

No, not millennials. Middle-aged straight white media guys.

Today’s gammon with attitude is fake-photo publisher and dead-children’s-phone-hacker Piers Morgan, who appears to have exhausted his outrage over vegans being able to buy tasty food in shops. Today he’s railing against Gillette over an advert that isn’t being broadcast here; in order to be outraged about it, he’s had to actively seek it out in order to upset himself. It’s quite a good ad, incidentally, but it dares suggest that old-fashioned masculine stereotypes aren’t brilliant. Cue well-paid outrage from well-paid stereotype peddlers.

The profile of people like Morgan – or rather, Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan; he doesn’t like people using his full name because it somewhat undermines his man of the people schtick – demonstrates that punditry is the very opposite of a meritocracy. “The thing you think is good is bad” is the laziest possible take on anything, and it’s something most of us grow out of in the playground: the charm of hearing “it/she/he/they is/are shite” as a nuanced critique of your favourite film, artist or band palls somewhat after the age of seven or so.

I took my kids to the zoo a while back, and one of the unexpected delights was the sight of an angry monkey furiously masturbating at the visitors, much to the delight of sniggering schoolkids. Morgan should be worried. If it works out how to use Twitter, it could be coming for his job.

New York, London, Paris, Munich, everybody’s talking ’bout… stochastic terrorism

Do you know what stochastic terrorism is? It’s a fairly obscure term, and it describes making the bullets for other people to fire.

Stochastic terrorism is when you demonise a particular group of people and violence ensues. You aren’t directly responsible for the violence, because you’re not the one actually perpetrating it. But you made it happen.

We know the power of words. Hate speech is the precursor to hate crime, from Nazi Germany to the genocide against the Tutsi of Rwanda. In that latter example, Tutsi men, women and children became “cochroaches” to eradicate (a slur recently revived by loathsome troll Katie Hopkins to talk about immigrants to England; that was part of a climate that’s seen a surge in anti-immigrant violence in the UK).

If you demonise Catholics, anti-Catholic violence will follow. It’s the same with immigrants, Poles, muslims, LGBTQ people.

Writing in the Media Matters blog, Brynn Tannehill accuses right-wing media of a form of stochastic terrorism against trans people, with multiple examples.

The conservative tabloid the Daily Mail in the U.K. recently introduced a new line of attack against transgender youth based on an anonymous “whistleblower” teacher who claimed that older transgender students at an unnamed British school “groomed” young autistic students to trick them into believing they are transgender. This narrative of contagion, “grooming,” and recruitment is exactly the same approach used for decades to stir up suspicion and hatred of gay men. For instance, Helen Joyce, the finance editor at The Economist, recently wrote an article at Quillette baselessly asserting that the transgender movement has advanced the interests of pedophiles.

These messages trickle down to the base. Stories of communities banding together to abuse and discriminate against transgender children have been in the media for years. Last year, parents in Achille, OK,communicating in a Facebook group for students’ parents suggested telling their children to beat a 12-year-old transgender girl and threatened to castrate her. As a result, the girl’s family made plans to leave town.

Transgender students are being physically assaulted in school for their gender identity as well. The FBI reported that in 2017, anti-LGBTQ hate crimes rose for the third consecutive year.

…

In 2012, legal scholar Tobias Wolff predicted in his paper “Civil Rights Reform and the Body” that transgender people would become a target and that many of the attacks would center on fear and disgust directed at transgender bodies. He correctly noted that this directed angst would manifest itself as labeling transgender people as sexual predators.

Wolff also drew direct parallels to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, when fear of Black bodies was channeled into calls to protect white women and children from sexual predation at swimming pools. Violence directed at Black people during that period was undeniably a direct result of this stochastic terrorism and prejudice. Today, we are seeing the same tactics toward transgender people, used to similar effect, and they are protected by the same case law.

The people who write these snide, malicious little articles are the worst kind of coward: the kind who stands behind the bully, telling them who to hit.