Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • Victim shaming

    This is disgusting.

    The Yorkshire Evening Post:

    Robber carried out ‘humiliating’ sex assault on victim after discovering he had targeted transgender victim

    Awful, right? It’s something most trans women live in fear of: the violence of straight men who discover we’re trans, the subject of so many “trans panic” defences in courts. But while the crime is despicable, my disgust is also about the way this has been reported in the linked article.

    Here’s the subheading.

    A violent street robber sexually assaulted a student after discovering his victim was a man who identifies as a woman.

    We’re not even into the article and it’s already called the victim a man.

    First paragraph:

    Luke Anderson was jailed for more than four years after a court heard he humiliated and taunted the victim when he realised he had targeted a male dressed in women’s clothing.

    So let’s humiliate the victim again by calling her “a male”.

    The barrister said: “It was never intended to be a sexual assault. It has caused him considerable embarrassment.”

    Embarrassment?

    This isn’t a social faux pas. He has a record of attacking lone women, he was off his face on crack cocaine and he grabbed a young woman, threatened her, punched her in the face hard enough to make her bleed and forced her to the ground. None of that, apparently, would be cause for embarrassment. That’s just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill violent attack on a young woman. Who’d be embarrassed about doing that?

    No, he was embarrassed because it then became a sexual assault. When he discovered she had male genitalia – not guessed, or deduced, but discovered – he sexually assaulted her and didn’t stop even when the terrified woman, in fear for her life, stuck her thumbs into his fucking eyes. 

    Anderson continued the attack, saying: “You are a feisty one.”

    He was caught because he left his DNA on her clothing.

    Is that what he’s embarrassed about?

    The judge told the defendant he believed the sexual assault was based on hostility towards the victim’s gender identity. He said “You realised it was a man dressed as a woman and you began to humiliate her.”

    Misgendering again, and then an extra bit of dehumanisation by referring to her as “it”.

    Maybe this report is just demonstrating how a barrister, a judge, a journalist and a sub-editor need to go on more diversity workshops. Maybe the judge didn’t mean to misgender the victim, let alone refer to her as “it”. Maybe the barrister meant that the attacker was remorseful, not embarrassed.

    But it doesn’t read like that. It reads as if the barrister was trying to frame this as a “trans panic” case where the victim’s trans status should be considered an excuse for the assault rather than the entire motivation for it. In other words, victim blaming – and by repeatedly misgendering her in its report, the paper has added some victim shaming too.

  • Vexatious complaints

    Anti-LGBT+ activists try very hard to censor anything they disapprove of. So of course, they’ve complained en masse about a same-sex kiss in a BBC programme.

    Gay Times:

    In their statement, the BBC dismissed accusations that the kiss was inappropriate, saying: “The decision to include this moment, as part of a longer storyline throughout series 7 which has been tracking the development of a romantic relationship between two of the characters, Jude and Cleo, was taken very carefully and with much consideration, and came about after CBBC and Boatrocker (the production company who make the show) acknowledged that the series could and should do more to reflect the lives of LGBTQ+ young people.

    “This is an important part of our mission to make sure that every child feels like they belong, that they are safe, and that they can be who they want to be.”

    Which is, of course, the correct response. So it’s all the more puzzling that when similar vexatious complaints were made about linking to charities that offer information to help trans people, the BBC pulled the links.

    PinkNews:

    The heads of Britain’s biggest LGBT+ groups have united to demand the BBC reinstate trans-support charities onto its Action Line website and explain why they were removed.

    All trans-specific charities for England, Scotland and Wales have been removed from the BBC’s Action Line page, which the leading LGBT+ groups slammed as “deeply troubling”.

    …This move, which members of the BBC’s internal LGBT+ Pride network were told this week was because of “audience complaints”, has already seen the public-service broadcaster condemned for “bowing down to deliberate and orchestrated hate campaigns” against trans people.

    Imagine the outcry if the BBC removed links to charities offering advice on abortion or contraception because of audience complaints from forced birthers.

    The BBC in this context means the BBC in England. But of course many of its programmes, and services such as Action Line, are provided to the whole of the UK, so if there’s something rotten in the English operation it has an effect nationally.

    Here’s journalist Jane Fae:

    A couple of years back, anti-trans campaigners tried to set up a group within the BBC. Their aim was to roll back what they perceived as “too much trans rights”.

    Since then there have been numerous instances of what looks like an active network of staff members intervening to skew reporting of stories relating to trans people.

    I’m not privy to the inner workings of the BBC in England; I just talk about technology once a week as a guest of BBC Radio Scotland. But the picture emerging from the English operation is deeply worrying.

  • Here come the thought police

    A new report says that right-wing academics are being silenced by the thought police. Inevitably they’re talking about that silencing on the front pages of right-wing newspapers.

    Here’s Newsweek.

    There is an experiment of sorts taking place in American colleges. Or, more accurately, hundreds of experiments at different campuses, directed at changing the consciousness of this entire generation of university students. The goal is to eliminate prejudice, not just of the petty sort that shows up on sophomore dorm walls, but the grand prejudice that has ruled American universities since their founding: that the intellectual tradition of Western Europe occupies the central place in the history of civilization. In this context it would not be enough for a student to refrain from insulting homosexuals or other minorities. He or she would be expected to “affirm” their presence on campus and to study their literature and culture alongside that of Plato, Shakespeare and Locke. This agenda is broadly shared by most organizations of minority students, feminists and gays. It is also the program of a generation of campus radicals who grew up in the ’60s and are now achieving positions of academic influence. If they no longer talk of taking to the streets, it is because they now are gaining access to the conventional weapons of campus politics: social pressure, academic perks (including tenure) and — when they have the administration on their side — outright coercion.

    Surprise! The Newsweek article is 30 years old. It’s from December 1990.

    As media researcher Becca Lewis notes on Twitter, “it’s really incredible how identical the talking points are, thirty years later.”

  • “Be mindful of who is telling you what to think”

    Caitlin Logan in The National writes about how the US Christian Right ended up with uncritical coverage in Scottish newspapers.

    Somewhat unsurprisingly to anyone who has been paying attention to public debates over apparently controversial legislation in Scotland over the past two decades, Free To Disagree is a campaign led by The Christian Institute.

    The Newcastle-based institute was one of two Christian organisations behind the Be Reasonable campaign against the “smacking ban” which passed in the Scottish Parliament last year. It played a significant role in halting the proposed Named Person scheme which would have given each child in Scotland a single point of contact to safeguard their welfare. And it has thrown its weight behind numerous campaigns and legal challenges across the UK against same-sex civil parternships, marriage and adoption, as well as abortion and assisted dying.

    …That ADF International should now crop up in the debate over Scotland’s hate crime laws is, therefore, as predictable as it is ominous. It is also no surprise that it appears to be working in lockstep with The Christian Institute, given that the former describes the latter as its “allied organisation”, and the two previously worked together on a legal challenge on behalf of a registrar who refused to officiate same-sex civil partnerships.

    …Part of being organised, of course, means being astute communicators, and these organisations are getting better at this all the time; using respectable, legalistic language to make themselves more palatable, all while pouring money into socially regressive causes that would see the rights of women and minorities stripped away. This is why the ADF International columns presented the Hate Crime Bill as a threat to open debate among feminists; this was a cynical ploy to muddy the waters, while eluding the organisation’s own agenda entirely.

    …free speech means very little when organisations or individuals can spend hundreds of thousands of pounds to scare politicians out of backing legislation they don’t like. Whether the basis for their hostility is religious belief or financial interest, the end result is the same: democracy is demeaned and the voices of those without means are drowned out.

  • “Rowling’s essay is an ugly thing: bitter, accusatory, cruel.”

    There’s a very good (and very detailed) piece by Nathan J Robinson in Current Affairs about everybody’s favourite litigious author.

    How did we get from the one place to the other? How did we go from the “beautiful fantasy world” to this exhibition of fear and dehumanization? Was she always like this? Why is she doing this? People who always detested the books can give fans a satisfied “I told you she sucked,” but this is far too simple. Rowling’s fiction is complex, thoughtful, deeply beloved. That has to be reconciled with any explanation of her ignorance on gender.

    …Before all the online transphobia, Rowling herself was adored, in part because she seemed an example of a “meritocracy” actually functioning: a talented woman producing something actually good and then getting rightly acclaimed for it. Fans wanted to love J.K. Rowling. They did love J.K. Rowling.

    This is a critical part of why so many of her readers feel so betrayed to see Rowling devolve into a Twitter personality who regularly says offensive things about transgender people. To have invented all of this… and then to become that? How disappointing. How sad. How typical. How distinctly non-magical.

    One of the key points made in this piece is that Rowling is acting from a position of ignorance: she doesn’t engage with the arguments, but simply dismisses them.

    Rowling’s essay is maddening, in part because, a lot like “intellectual dark web” criticism of feminist and anti-racist politics (see, e.g, Steven Pinker), it pretends to be Reasonable and Empathetic but is nothing of the kind, distorting the opposing arguments and failing to actually engage with the other side’s writing or thinking. It is, as Dominique Sisley writes for Huck, “dogmatism dressed up as rationalism,” misrepresenting facts, making unsubstantiated claims, presenting unrepresentative anecdotes as data, and spreading pernicious myths

    …Rowling does something here that people often do when telling a story about the Social Justice Mob shutting down dissenting opinion, which is that she assumes that the critics must have been wrong without actually investigating what their criticisms were.

    …Rowling, then, is ignorant. She couldn’t be bothered to read an introductory blog post, let alone actually research the subject. Here she is explaining that while she has been begged repeatedly to actually talk to (and listen to) the people she’s talking about, she has made no serious effort to do so.

    …Trans writers have carefully explained why what Rowling said is objectionable. In addition to Montgomerie’s piece, Zinnia Jones published a three-part series citing tons of peer-reviewed scientific literature. Do I think Rowling will read Jones’ careful explanation of how Rowling is misrepresenting statistics in order to present a picture of some giant national trend of children becoming transgender? Do I think she will bother to investigate the abuse that trans writers receive (here’s journalist Siobhan O’Leary on what she gets in just 24 hours) so that Rowling can fix her misperception that the online trans community is uniquely hostile? No, I think she is going to conclude that the existence of disagreement with her essay means that she must be telling Unspeakable Truths that No One Dares To Say.

    The thing about transphobia is that in the same way many people who think or do racist things do not believe they are racist, many people who think or do transphobic things do not believe they are transphobic. Transphobic people are hateful, like the Westboro Baptist Church. They’re not people like you or like me.

    Except, of course, they are.

    People often do not notice their transphobia. They do not notice that they are applying different standards to trans people than they do to cis people.

    …A big part of racism, like transphobia, is the refusal to see certain people as human to the same degree you see yourself as human. They are talked about, but not listened to. I’ve written over and over and over for the last few years about the staggering fact that when critics of “social justice” and “identity politics” write about these things, they don’t seem to take the time to read a single book by the people about whom they have such strong opinions.

    It’s a really good article. You should probably read it before Rowling’s lawyers move in.

  • The people who love to hate

    Yesterday, the Scottish Daily Mail ran a front page story damning Scotland’s proposed new anti-hate crime legislation.

    The source of the story is Lois McLatchie, who the Daily Mail says “works with the UN Human Rights Council”.

    That’s a very clever way of implying she’s part of the Council. She isn’t; in fact, she is part of an organisation that represents pretty much everything the UN HRC stands against. McLatchie lobbies the UN Human Rights Council, because she’s the legal analyst for ADF International.

    ADF International is an anti-abortion, anti-LGBT hate group.

    Founded by some 30 leaders of the Christian Right, the Alliance Defending Freedom is a legal advocacy and training group that has supported the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S. and criminalization abroad; has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad; has contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia; and claims that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society. ADF also works to develop “religious liberty” legislation and case law that will allow the denial of goods and services to LGBTQ people on the basis of religion. Since the election of President Trump, ADF has become one of the most influential groups informing the administration’s attack on LGBTQ rights.

    It’s hardly surprising that the ADF is against any legislation that might suppress its ability to spread hate. And it’s also unsurprising that the Daily Mail would happily jump into bed with the Christian Right yet again: its anti-trans campaigning frequently platforms evangelical groups from the lunatic fringe, and might well fall foul of any anti-hate speech legislation. But giving the front page to the ADF is a new, chilling low.

    The US Christian Right operates globally, pouring its considerable resources into overt and covert campaigning against women’s rights and LGBT people’s rights. It’s connected to the violent anti-LGBT movements in Eastern Europe. It tried to influence the Irish referendum on women’s reproductive freedom. It’s trying to influence, and appears to be funding moves against, a whole swathe of legislation in the UK and in Scotland. And it’s increasingly indistinguishable from the far right.

    The Daily Mail, once again, is dining with the Devil.

  • Death by numbers

    On Twitter, Dan Barker has posted an interesting thread showing how terrible reporting becomes conspiracy theory nonsense.

    It begins with The Telegraph. Its science editor reported that lockdown could cause as many as 200,000 preventable deaths, and the headline was clear:

    The same claim was then posted by other news outlets citing the Telegraph. For example, Metro’s headline was “Coronavirus lockdown could cause ‘200,000 extra deaths’”.

    Remember, most people who share news stories on social media don’t read beyond the headline.

    This is important, because as Baker demonstrates, people are taking the headline and using it in anti-lockdown posts such as this one.

    First of all, that’s not what the article says. It is not a report about actual deaths. It’s a report about predictions of possible deaths in a very specific scenario.

    And secondly, the Telegraph has framed the story in what appears to be a deliberately misleading way.

    As Barker points out, the report this story is based on isn’t just about lockdown. The figures it quotes are from predictions based on “protecting the NHS” – that is, cancelling other healthcare to prioritise COVID-19 cases.

    The report asked the question: what would happen if prioritising COVID cases meant cancelling 75% of elective treatments, such as cancer treatments and other life-saving surgeries?

    That’s where the 200,000 figure comes from. It’s a worst-case scenario that says up to 25,000 people might die because their treatments were delayed; in the medium to long term, such delays could kill up to 185,000 more.

    So in this scenario, if we protect the NHS from being overwhelmed and have to do so for a long time it might – might – cost over 200,000 lives.

    And if we don’t?

    We’ll kill a million and a half.

    It’s there in the report, and in the Telegraph article, which notes that:

    …nearly 500,000 people would have died from coronavirus if the virus had been allowed to run through the population unchecked. And there would have been more than a million non-COVID deaths resulting from missed treatment if the health service had been overwhelmed in dealing with the pandemic.

    So protecting the NHS would kill 1.3 million fewer people than doing nothing.

    And yet this report is being used to fuel anti-lockdown sentiment when a second coronavirus spike in England, and the need for at least local lockdowns, is highly likely.

    Barker:

    In other words: The report implies lockdown could save hundreds of thousands of lives – the opposite of the headline.

    Newspapers are very keen to blame social media for spreading conspiracy theories, but many of those theories originate from newspapers and their online offshoots. Some of the most enthusiastic conspiracists are well known media figures: for example, one of the people currently pushing the “lockdown will kill 200,000 people” narrative is Toby Young.

    Many of the worst conspiracy theories circulating online originated in print.

    Here’s Marianna Spring from the BBC, who got chatting to two young men outside Topshop this week.

    Also an anecdote – while I was recording this on Oxford Street, two guys in their twenties started talking to me.

    Without me even explaining what the report was about they told me they wouldn’t be getting a coronavirus vaccine because it was a plot to microchip everyone.

    The roots of that conspiracy theory are in the anti-MMR vaccine scare, which predated Facebook and Twitter: it spread not on social media, but in the pages of the Daily Mail, The Sun, The Daily Express, the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. The anti-vaxx movement it spawned is already responsible for thousands of preventable deaths; as it evolves into COVID vaccine denial it could kill thousands more.

  • “We are weaker, more exhausted and more divided than ever”

    Nesrine Malik in The Guardian writes about manufacturing dissent for ratings and clicks:

    The forums in which we find ourselves debating issues – Brexit, immigration or “identity politics” – are structurally designed to exacerbate, rather than resolve or even explore, differences. Conflict is favoured over conversation, animosity over inquiry. Usually, disagreements that happen on social media are picked out and repackaged by traditional media outlets. We see it all the time: a public figure tweets a controversial statement, social media users come out for or against, print and online media amalgamates the content into 600 words, and perhaps “the debate” makes the six o’clock news. There may be a relatively small number of people actually online, and an even smaller number actively arguing, but their activity is magnified, consumed and, ultimately, monetised and pressed into the service of political agendas.

    … In these conditions, engaging in a back-and-forth with someone holding an opposing viewpoint is not a constructive act with the aim of reaching common ground, or at least an understanding of the other: it is to feed an insatiable appetite for public spectacle.

    … If the ultimate purpose of debate is to encourage pluralism and tolerance, we need to realise that these ends cannot be achieved when the means has been infected by bad faith.

  • Facebook is spreading hate

    Last year, Ofcom found that 49% of the UK population used social media to access news reporting; the Pew Research Center reported a similar figure, 55%, in the US.

    Much of the news people see and share on social media is highly partisan, and it’s often highly inaccurate too. Right-wing bullshit factories have come to dominate the online news sphere.

    A new study by Media Matters shows how that affects people’s knowledge and understanding of trans people.

    NBC News:

    Anti-transgender Facebook content shared by right-wing news sources generated more engagement than content from pro-transgender or neutral sources combined…

    “Facebook users are getting a totally biased and factually inaccurate understanding of the multitude of issues that impact trans people”.

    Sigh.

    Of the top ten sources of trans-related news, seven were avowedly anti-trans; of the 66 million shares, 43 million were of content from anti-trans websites such as the Daily Caller.

    This is an American study but the phenomenon is global: the vast majority of trans-related articles and opinion pieces I see shared by British people on social media, particularly Facebook, are from right-wing publications based either in the US or the UK.

    Gizmodo:

    we know from a 2019 Pew Research poll that Facebook has a nearly even split—35% and 34% respectively—between users that consider themselves some sort of liberal or some sort of conservative. But we know from other research that those with a conservative bent are more far likely to share (and fall for) news articles that reinforce their preexisting point-of-view, even if they’re sensationalistic or downright debunkable. 

    …because a good half of Americans get at least some of their news on Facebook, that means that the bulk of people are reading stories about the transgender community that, again, paints them as icky leches on society, instead of just normal people living their normal lives.

  • Paper money

    The Guardian is laying off 180 staff. Inevitably and horribly, some people on the internet are being dicks about it and celebrating the imminent unemployment of sales staff, junior editorial staff and so on.

    These people aren’t losing their jobs because of the paper’s content. They’re losing their jobs partly because of the paper’s business model. Like all similar media, the money tap has dried up because of coronavirus. But unlike many similar media operations, The Guardian is particularly exposed because of a serious of decisions it’s made in the past and because of its current business model: to give all of its content away for free and make money from selling ads and running events, the two things you cannot make money from during a pandemic.

    But the majority of discussion about this on social media is not on why The Guardian would rather lay off hundreds of people than introduce a paywall. It’s gone all culture war. I’ve lost count of the journalists who’ve essentially said that if you don’t want to take out a subscription to save the paper, you are an easily offended snowflake who hates journalism and is an enemy of democracy.

    Which is exactly the kind of attitude that makes some people unwilling to subscribe to The Guardian.

    Here’s publisher and commentator Laura Waddell, on Twitter.

    Readers are increasingly asked not to buy a product but to support a principle – that the paper should exist, why it should exist. An organisation – of any kind – cannot ask the public to donate to support their principles without having those principles scrutinised.

    The message being put across here is not “buy this product because it is good”. It’s “donate to the cause”. I don’t hate journalism and I’m not an enemy of democracy, but as I’ve written a few times in recent years I don’t feel that The Guardian is a cause I feel comfortable supporting.

    It’s not because it occasionally exposes me to a point of view that I disagree with. It’s that for nearly three years now it has taken a very clear editorial stance on trans people, a stance that has been publicly criticised by its US newsroom and 1/5th of its UK staff, a stance that I don’t believe is any different from or any less harmful than that of The Daily Mail.

    I don’t buy that paper either, and yet I don’t see any left-wing people claiming that people who don’t buy the Mail are easily offended snowflakes who are enemies of democracy.

    The Guardian’s preferred solution to its financial issues encapsulates the problem: it would rather destroy its superb arts and books coverage than cull the extremely well-paid columnists who write endless pieces about people being mean to their friends on Twitter.

    Waddell:

    You cannot say to the public – buy a paper to support these principles – its very existence, a free press, quality reporting – but criticise them for holding their own views as to what principles they will pay money to support or not support.