Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • Hating for ratings

    How’s this for a TV show? We get a racist – a proper racist, ideally a knuckle-dragger from a really racist organisation such as the EDL or Britain First, someone who’s really loudly and proudly racist and spends loads of time being really racist to people on Twitter – and we pair him up with a nice middle-class Black woman. Then we get the two of them to sit down for a nice dinner and a chat and we film the whole thing.

    Good, right? It’s a social experiment!

    I haven’t even got to the best bit yet. It’s not just a chat. We give the racist guy a script of really racist things to say to the Black woman over dinner and we film her response. Maybe she’ll cry!  Maybe she’ll walk out! Maybe it’ll go viral!

    No? How about we pair a neo-nazi with a nice Jewish lady?

    Of course not. Trying to get a fight for ratings is disgusting, as we saw with the Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle shows. But that doesn’t mean TV production companies don’t keep trying to bring back the formula, which is essentially hating for ratings. For example, an Irish TV company is currently sending this to various trans women (and to other marginalised groups, such as members of the travelling community).

    As one commenter on Twitter translated: “We’re making a show where we have members of marginalised groups sit down with people who think they shouldn’t exist, for entertainment purposes. Also we’re suggesting that marginalised people are the enemy, in the title.”

    Earlier this year Evgeny Shtorn wrote about the importance of storytelling in regards to minority and marginalised people.

    Considering how powerful storytelling is, we cannot pretend that the infrastructure built around it by media and researchers is always ethical and respectful towards those who constitute those stories… journalists were rude to me, disrespectful and abusive. Using my words or ideas without quotes, giving erroneous interpretations and false promises. Trans and non-binary people, homeless people, other migrants, people of colour, people with disabilities and a lot of others who I shared my concerns with, told me that they often experienced similar treatment from journalists, but also from artists, researchers and other ‘supporters’. It is called ‘cognitive exploitation’, and this is exactly the opposite to the idea of the empowerment of the community through storytelling.

    …The problem is that after such an interaction most people retreat into their closet and don’t want to tell their stories anymore, despite those stories being so important to tell.

    There was an example of this in England the other day: trans person and poet Jay Hulme was invited on BBC TV to discuss the government’s response to GRA reform.

    I was going to be on the BBC today having a chat about the GRA – but I pulled out yesterday, having been informed that it’s BBC policy to have a cis woman invited to speak on any segment about trans ppl – I’m not going on TV to be yelled at by a transphobe from the Daily Mail.

    By “cis woman” the policy doesn’t mean a cisgender woman who’s supportive of trans people, even though such women are the majority (and were the majority in the GRA reform consultation too). It means the kind of woman trans commentator Shon Faye was expected to go on air with this week. Faye was one of several trans people invited on BBC Woman’s Hour to discuss gender recognition. At the last minute, the panel was expanded to include an anti-trans activist who has taken great delight in publicly misgendering her and who Faye says even shared a now-deleted defamatory petition implying she groomed children. Faye declined the invitation.

    I have some experience of this. I’ve refused to go on multiple programmes because the approach was clearly going to be gladiatorial, not editorial; other contributors were not people with concerns about specific bits of legalese but members of groups who peddle hatred on social media. Taking part is therefore a trap for marginalised people: if you don’t robustly challenge the other contributors they get to lie, lie and lie some more; if you do, and worse still if you also dare correct the presenter, you’re dismissed as unreasonable and aggressive. And even the most innocuous appearance will have bigots descending on your social media.

    It’s clear that the people commissioning and structuring these programmes are thinking about ratings, not the damage these narratives can do to marginalised groups. And they are doing damage. By presenting extreme views as mainstream, such as perpetuating the myth that the two sides of the trans debate are “trans activists vs feminists” rather than “most of the country vs a few well-connected bigots”, they’re fanning the flames of intolerance and positioning extreme views as if they’re mainstream. We’ve seen this before with the platforming of far-right views, of anti-vaxxers and of climate change denial.

    The problem yet again is that the people making these programmes have no skin in the game. Their human rights are not under attack. Their safety is not threatened by the rise in hate crimes. Their ability to participate in society is not something producers think should be up for debate. To them, it’s just another item. To marginalised and demonised minorities, it’s our lives.

  • “The out-group must be crushed”

    There’s a really good piece about QAnon in The New Republic.

    The “nocturnal ritual fantasy”—a term coined by the historian Norman Cohn in his landmark study of European witch trials, Europe’s Inner Demons—is a recurring trope in Western history. And it is often a politically useful one. Deployed by the Romans against early Christians, by Christians against Jews, by Christians against witches, by Catholics against “heretics,” it is a malleable set of accusations that posit that a social out-group is engaged in perverse, ritualistic behaviors that target innocents—and that the out-group and all its enablers must be crushed.

    …Q adherents are perfervid Trump supporters by necessity, as Trump’s valiant battle against ultimate evil forms the spine from which the many limbs of the conspiracy grow. But a recent wave of émigrés into the Q landscape consists of New Age moms and influencers with previously vaguer politics, whose interests, during the strained days of the Covid-19 pandemic, have migrated from crystals and wellness to taking down a world-straddling cabal of demonic pedophiles.

    The section on the “satanic panic” of the 1980s is particularly apt.

    It was gospel belief in the media and among ordinary citizens that rings of sex abusers were everywhere. Satan and his blood-drinking minions were peripheral players, but the panic is usually referred to now, through the mocking lens of self-assurance, as the “Satanic Panic.” We in the twenty-first century could never be so naïve.

  • Trans freedom fighters: a series

    The US edition of The Guardian continues to show how pathetic the UK edition’s coverage of trans people and trans-related issues has become. While the UK edition is still unsure about whether we actually deserve human rights, the US edition is running series telling stories like this one: ‘Our love is radical’: why trans activists lead the way in protest movements.

    Though their legacies have often been overlooked, trans Americans have been central to the country’s battles for justice, from racial equality to anti-fascism.

  • History reheated

    The Sun, 1984. Three decades later and it’s still singing the same song.

  • How social media makes people evil

    There’s an interesting piece in The Walrus about the radicalisation of “incels”, celibate men who increasingly turn to violence. Frustratingly the reporting of these men as mentally ill lone wolves disguises the fact that there’s something much more serious going on: the online radicalisation of angry young men on a very large scale.

    There are three pillars of radicalisation: needs, narratives and networks.  These are the critical drivers that can turn perfectly nice, normal people into something much more dangerous. And social media brings them together more effectively than ever before.

    Needs are people’s motivations: what drives them. That could be a need to feel special, or a need to feel part of something, or it could be a negative such as having experienced trauma.

    Narratives are the stories these people can become part of, and many of those narratives are conspiracy theories. They’re incredibly appealing because they tell you that you’re special, that you have knowledge that the wider population is too stupid, too brainwashed or too evil to see.

    And finally there are networks, which are the people who will give you the approval and status you crave and who will constantly reinforce the narrative of your particular group. These networks have always existed to some extent but social media has supercharged them and brought them into every home. As a result the time between someone, say, expressing doubts about the government’s COVID strategy and attending anti-mask, anti-5G marches because the Coronavirus is a global conspiracy can be measured in weeks.

    The Guardian:

    “QAnon feeds on widespread conspiracy theories, new age, and occult belief systems,”said Chamila Liyanage of the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right. “QAnon will not be able to influence UK politics right away, but it will first gain a foothold among the enthusiasts of fringe belief systems and conspiracy theories. This is metapolitics, changing minds, then cultures can be changed in the long run.”

    QAnon is still relatively small in the UK, but we shouldn’t be complacent. In a few years we’ve gone from laughing at American cranks to waving QAnon banners outside Buckingham Palace. From incels to anti-trans conspiracy theories to QAnon, social media is radicalising people like never before. It’s truly terrifying.

  • Breaking the news

    You’ve got to feel sorry for ageing conservative men who believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that while they have all the power in this country they are nevertheless an oppressed minority. The latest media outlet pandering to their victim narrative is the soon to be launched GB News, which has poached the loathsome Andrew Neil from the BBC to broadcast to people who feel “underserved and unheard by their media.”

    Not people who are unheard; people who feel unheard. People whose only representation is in The Times, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Express, The Spectator, The Sun, The Economist, Spiked, LBC, The Herald, The Scotsman, most of the BBC’s current affairs output, every bloody phone-in in the country, all the right-wing US news sites that dominate news sharing on Facebook and so on.

    I think it’s safe to predict that the dominant skin colour on GB News will be white and that its representation of minorities will largely be Eton alumni talking about how these days, right, if you say you’re English, they’ll arrest you and put you in jail.

    The New York Times famously promised “All The News That’s Fit To Print”. Perhaps GB News should adapt it: all the news that’s fit for pricks.

    GB News is the latest attempt to bring more Fox News-style partisan bullshit to UK broadcasting, and in a sane world OFCOM would make that very difficult. But this isn’t a sane world and the UK government has told The Sunday Times that it’s going to make Paul Dacre the chair of OFCOM. That’s Dacre of Daily Mail fame. If you haven’t already read it, this foul-mouthed evisceration of him in the London Review of Books by Andrew O’Hagan is masterful.

    As many people on Twitter have noted, putting Dacre at the top of OFCOM is like appointing Harold Shipman as chair of Help The Aged.

    But there’s more. The government also apparently intends to appoint former Telegraph and Spectator editor Charles Moore as head of the BBC. Moore is another loathsome figure with right-wing views; he has claimed for a long time that the BBC is packed to the gills with leftie agitators and he was famously fined in 2010 for not paying his BBC licence fee. It’s hard to imagine a worse candidate for the job except perhaps Paul Dacre.

    It’s possible that with these leaks the UK government is throwing two dead cats on the table to distract us from its woeful performance over COVID and the increasing evidence of corruption and incompetence on a truly epic scale; maybe the leak is to soften us up so when two slightly less appalling people are put in place we’ll feel we dodged a bullet. But it does seem to fit with the wider movement within the UK government to take us further to the right.

    For example, just this week it announced new guidance for schools that prohibited the use of resources “produced by organisations that take extreme political stances on matters”. One such stance is a desire to overthrow capitalism, something a certain Jesus of Nazareth had a few opinions on.

    The most chilling bit for me was in the section on knowing the importance of respecting others “even when they are very different… for example physically, in character, personality or background), or make different choices or have different preferences or beliefs”. That’s clearly intended to foster a climate of mutual respect for people of other religions and none, of people of different backgrounds, genders and sexual orientation, but the UK government has turned it into a Spectator editorial.

    Here’s the new guidance:

    Our entire democracy is based on seeking to have people removed from their position of authority because we disagree with them. It’s called voting.

    In that context, I’m disinclined to believe that Dacre and Moore are dead cats; I worry that instead, they’re dead certs.

  • Murdoch papers in “bullshit” shocker

    I don’t want to go on too much about the UK government’s pathetic response to its gender recognition consultation, but I thought it was worth drawing attention to The Times and Sunday Times’ assertions that the consultation was “skewed” by an “avalanche” of responses by “trans rights groups” who twisted the consultation to say 70% of people were in favour of self-ID.

    Here’s a blog by the GRA consultation analysis team.

    We spent a long time with the data and employed a number of advanced analytical techniques to investigate the influence of potential campaigns on the consultation responses. However, we have seen little evidence that supports the view that the results were “skewed” by an “avalanche” of responses from trans rights groups. Furthermore, we are not sure where the reported figure of 70% in favour of self-identification has come from. This question was not directly asked in the consultation and this figure does not arise from our analysis.

    What they did find, however, was that one anti-trans group was responsible for nearly one-fifth of all responses – and unlike the majority of responses from other sources, particularly trans rights groups, these were identical posts created by a one-click online form “which had a pre-populated set of answers”.

    We would like to acknowledge the amount of care, attention and often depth of feeling that went into the submissions that we read, from people and organisations taking a range of positions. There were some long submissions – some over 5000 words -  in response to one individual question, and it was apparent that a large percentage of those who completed the consultation spent a long time writing their answers. We were struck by many of the accounts that people provided detailing their personal experiences or those of loved ones. It is sometimes easy to lose sight, in the arguments that surround GRA reform, that at the centre of this are real people living real and often difficult lives. Due to the need to be brief in order to write a succinct report and the confidentiality required for ethical reasons, the specific stories that were contained within many individual submissions cannot be published. However, reading them, as we have been able to as a team, paints a nuanced and complex picture of the lived experience of people working through these issues in their own lives and the lives of their loved ones.

  • Gender Trouble trouble

    Interviewing isn’t always easy: if you’re poorly prepared or if you’re trying to lead the subject down a road they don’t want to go down, you can easily find yourself getting your arse handed to you on a plate. It happened to me once with Terry Pratchett, a brilliant author who taught me a valuable lesson about the importance of preparation for even the most trivial interview.

    That was mortifying enough, so imagine how it must feel to be publicly owned by an interviewee when you’re interviewing a major figure for a popular current affairs magazine. That appears to be the case in this New Statesman interview with Judith Butler, in which the interviewer attempts to tell Butler what her own work is about. It’s the kind of interview that, as a writer, you read from behind your fingers.

    It’s also really interesting in what it says about coverage of gender:  Butler is a key figure in third wave feminism and her 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity is considered a key text in feminist and queer scholarship. She has a lot of interesting things to say and a body of work going back very many years, but the interviewer seems determined to force her into the JK Rowling vs Evil Trans Activists dialogue so beloved of so much of the UK and US press right now. And Butler is having none of it.

    Butler:

    Let us be clear that the debate here is not between feminists and trans activists… So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people. It is not.

    …It is a sad day when some feminists promote the anti-gender ideology position of the most reactionary forces in our society.

    Interviewer: But people have been nasty to JK Rowling on the internet!

    Butler:

    I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person.

    I disagree with JK Rowling’s view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US.

    So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable.

    As Max Morgan put it on Twitter:

    If I was this interviewer I would have told my editor that the dog ate the emails and they’d have to run something else.

  • “Do they really believe this garbage?”

    Journalist Jane Fae writes on Medium about the bogeymen and women the press likes to call “activists”.

    Just last week, for instance, Gillian Phillip kicked off in the Mail about the “violent, hate-filled language that has become chillingly familiar to anyone who has had the temerity to question the prevailing orthodoxy of the transgender activist brigade”. Meanwhile, over in the Times, James Kirkup contributed a piece that totally lived up to its headline: “Trans activists hate Rowling because she’s a woman”.

    Catherine Bennet was at it in the Observer this weekend too, arguing that anybody who criticised JK Rowling – a hugely significant cultural figure whose views are taken very seriously by very many people, and whose books were very important to many trans people  – but not the aforementioned Kirkup – an insignificant arse who’s made a career of having bad opinions for money – is a woman-hating misogynist.

    There’s no middle ground in any of this coverage. Any trans person with the slightest opinion on anything is portrayed as ISIS in makeup. Trans people aren’t allowed to talk about the vicious abuse they get simply for being trans, usually in the wake of yet another anti-trans blog post or column. Trans people as vulnerable? As victims? As too scared to leave the house because they’re expecting to see the transphobia from the papers reflected in other people’s eyes? That doesn’t fit the narrative. All trans people are violent, hate-filled activists. Never people.

    It’s the oldest trick in the book: portray the other as a monolithic bloc where the opinion or actions of the very worst extremes are presented as the opinions and actions of all. It’s known by many names, but the one I think suits it best is the Klan Fallacy: because one black person committed a crime, all black people are criminals and it’s okay to be a racist piece of shit.

    Why do they print this stuff? For starters, it allows commentators to put the boot into minorities without appearing to do so. Who us? Having a go at trans people? Or black people? Or any other sort of people? Nah. We’re just calling out the bad ones.

    The definition is infinitely flexible.

    If you want to demonise a whole group of people, you can absolutely go on Twitter and find some hothead. That hothead might not even be trans – the person behind the supposed bomb threat from trans activists, a story Fae writes about in the article, was a right-wing cisgender teenage gamer from the US trying to stir some shit against trans people – but that doesn’t matter. The columnist’s feelings don’t leave any room for facts.

    Trans activists: the “trans lobby”, cabal, ideology; these all furnish a target and an enemy to fight against. Much easier than owning to the fact that your own position is itself fundamentally ideological — often evangelical Christian, occasionally a reductive and back-to-the-stone-age feminism. Sexier, too than admitting that your primary goal is to resist minority demands for basic civil rights.

  • A tweet is not a war

    Director of British Future, Sunder Katwala, has posted an interesting twitter thread about whether the UK is undergoing a culture war.

    One of the points he makes is that a great deal of culture war stuff in our media is manufactured by the media. For example, a few weeks ago there was a kerfuffle about the singer Adele’s hair: was it cultural appropriation? Most people couldn’t care less, but it was puffed up by a media that thrives on reporting conflict – and which will create conflict if there’s nothing to report. Katwala:

    Almost nobody in Britain thought there was any issue with Adele’s hair. Broadcasters had to get some muppet from Philadelphia on to pretend there was a controversy.

    This happens all the time, and it’s getting worse: some media outlets deliberately trawl social media for the most extreme opinions they can find and pretend that they’re representative of a wider group or movement. They file their non-story and the rest of the media picks up on it – so other newspapers will rerun the story and the BBC will get a bunch of people into the studio to discuss it. Cue endless column inches and broadcast hours about a movement that doesn’t exist.

    Most of the time these supposed controversies don’t reflect public opinion, but people largely agreeing with each other doesn’t make for dramatic conflict on radio or TV. I know from experience that contributors to discussions are sometimes asked to take a particularly extreme point of view in order to make the debate more spicy (I’ve refused to do so; I’m not asked to go on those programmes any more). This is why contrarians get so much airtime.

    So I’m not sure I agree with Katwala on this:

    The media should be less credulous in reporting every tweet as if it reflects a movement

    I don’t think much of the media is credulous; I think it knows exactly what it’s doing and it gets what Katwala brilliantly describes as a “sugar rush from platforming conflict, however trivial”. It knows that the voices it platforms are extreme. That’s why it platforms them.