Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • “We are living in Bigot Christmas”

    Ellie Mae O’Hagan writes about the “anti-woke backlash”. She argues that in the 1990s and 2000s socially liberal values became the “new normal”, with even the Conservative party becoming nicer and introducing legislation such as equal marriage. It seemed unimaginable at the time, but that consensus is unravelling very quickly.

    …as the tide of 90s social liberalism has ebbed, it has also revealed another group of people (primarily older, white homeowners and pensioners) who had never bought into the consensus in the first place, and are aggressively hostile to its newer, more radical iteration.

    We all know a member of this demographic: alienated by the modern world and displeased by change, they are fond of complaining that “You can’t say anything any more!” – even as their opinions are widely reproduced in the nation’s print media.

    And the nation’s print media are happy to pander to them, not least because they’re the demographic that still buys the nation’s print media and that advertisers most want to reach.

    Having spent so long feeling silenced by the liberal consensus, people in this group have been given a new lease of life by the right’s new insurgents. Not only were they correct all along; they were actually victims, zealously persecuted by an oversensitive and censorious society. It is this righteous indignation that lends their antipathy to wokeness a defiant and almost celebratory quality. As a friend of mine puts it, we are living in “bigot Christmas”.

    As O’Hagan points out, if this group’s claims of persecution were really true the country and the world would look very different. But just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean people don’t believe it.

    O’Hagan’s piece isn’t an attack on those people. It’s a warning to the rest of us, because the so-called anti-woke are often “parroting arguments that are largely advanced by the far right”. And they’re winning.

    Progressives need to wise up to the fact that they are losing this argument and decide what they are going to do in response. If they don’t, they may soon find that the future they always assumed was theirs is being made without them.

  • “Who is this all for?”

    Yomi Adegoke writes about the increasing use of polarised, gladiatorial “debates” to try and get social media attention.

    The BBC has said it will no longer have climate change deniers in debate with climate change activists, as it’s a “false balance”. Yet the topic of racism is handled in the same way a TV programme might treat the topic of extraterrestrials; punctuated with a large question mark.

    Lecturers, authors and professors for whom this is their life’s work and personal experience, are pit against talking-heads whose qualifications to discuss racism appear to be the fact that they’re white, pissed off, and more often than not, perpetrators of the very racism they’re discussing.

    It’s not just race. I can very much relate to this:

    as the conversation surrounding race in the UK becomes more toxic, I’ve received more requests to partake in this type of debate on TV more than ever. And like several other black journalists I know, I have been immediately sceptical about the motivation behind this newfound eagerness to debate topics the media has historically sidelined.

    The UK media had absolutely no interest in trans people until 2017. We’ve had so-called self-ID in law since the 1970s and in practice since the 1940s. The original Gender Recognition Act, which enables us to change our birth certificates and HMRC details, passed without fuss in 2004. The Equality Act, which gives us protection from discrimination and legislates about access to single-sex spaces, has been law for a decade.

    And yet again and again we’re seeing trans people and allies being put up against people who are the gender equivalents of anti-vaxxers or climate change deniers: denying science, demonstrating profound ignorance of the law, claiming that the medical establishment is part of a conspiracy and that trans people are some kind of sinister lobby hell-bent on destroying civilisation and stealing your children. Repeatedly platforming them is either due to incompetence – there’s a distinct lack of fact-checking around these so-called debates, with complete fabrications often being aired unchallenged – cynical traffic-chasing or malice.

    There are not always two sides to a story; differing positions do not always have equal weight. To pretend otherwise in the hope of generating social media traffic is despicable and dangerous.

  • Faking the news

    Writing in The Guardian, august journalism commentator Roy Greenslade writes about a crisis that never existed: the supposed immigration crisis facing the UK.

    “It never was news. It was a wholly media-manufactured ‘crisis’,” he writes. Editors “readily published evidence of individual misbehaviour as if it was a universal problem”, published “dodgy figures, as if plucked from mid-air” and ignored facts “in favour of appealing to public prejudice.” They published endless streams of thinly-veiled bigotry from their columnists. They were guilty of “ignoring rational arguments that exposed their distorted agenda” to inflame their readers against a group that in reality is a persecuted minority.

    And it worked, because these papers also drive the wider news agenda: what they print is then picked up by the likes of the Today Programme and discussed on Question Time. It gets circulated on social media and regurgitated on talk radio.

    At the peak of the anti-immigrant newspaper scare, 60% of people thought immigration was the most important issue affecting the country. Now the papers have largely stopped their scaremongering, that figure has dropped to 20%.

    As Greenslade put it, the newspapers manufactured the so-called crisis “through repetition, disinformation, misinformation… and the omission of any positive material.”

    The papers stopped demonising immigrants because it no longer sold copies. That has created a vacuum – when your newspaper’s editorial policy is to scare your readers every day, you still need an enemy.

    The papers haven’t stopped trying to scare their readers or abandoned their dirty tricks. They’ve just chosen a different minority to demonise.

  • The tedious mediocrity of the “anti-woke”

    Novelist and journalist Huw Lemmey asks why the UK media is so obsessed with demonising the “woke”.

    The English media is in the middle of a full-throated culture war, from bendy bananas to woke snowflakes, Stormzy to burqas, trans rights to free speech on campus. It seems like over the past decade the intensification of that journalism, combined with the exaggerating effect of social media on editorial choice, has created a print and TV comment culture dedicated to creating a popular spook or ogre, then to ripping it apart. The English press has developed into a unique combination of bullying and blackmail, where a relentlessly vicious tone of mockery and enforced conformity is policed with the justification that either the enemy is at the school gates, or that their furious mockery is “only banter”. In the process, from sheer incuriosity, a whole generation of journalists have confused disagreement with taking offence, criticism with trolling.

    …if you want to know what “woke” means, and why a “woke elite” are trying to shut down all criticism, why not read Andrew Doyle’s new book, ‘Woke’, in character as Titania McGrath, with glowing reviews from Rod Liddle, Sarah Vine and Ricky Gervais? Why not read Brendan O’Neill’s spiked editorial on Markle, “A woke Wallis Simpson”? Why not read Rod Liddle’s latest on the “wokeplace romance”? Why not check out Toby Young on how the Labour Party got woke and broke? Why not see what Sarah Vine likes so much about Ricky Gervais, “the Wokefinder General”? Why not read Helen Lewis on the superwoke elite, or listen to Helen Lewis on the News Quiz, supposedly the country’s leading news satire radio programme, where the assassination of Soleimani revolved around a joke that the Left wouldn’t have criticised the attack if the Iranian general had misgendered someone.

    As Lemmey points out, the attack lines and tropes are so lazy that last week, Rod Liddle and Giles Coren wrote almost identical articles with almost identically unfunny jokes. I guess it makes a change from using pseudonymous social media accounts to post racist or antisemitic messages.

    I thought this bit was interesting.

    We are reaching the culture war singularity. To all intents and purposes, in terms of England, the right have won the culture war on most fronts. But now they’re left with a problem — they need an enemy. After we leave, and Francois has had his bongs, what replaces the narrative of EU tyranny that has driven English Euroscepticism?

    We’re starting to see the answer to that. It’s the blacks, and the gays, and the trans, and the young, and the feminists, and anyone else who can be dismissed as “woke”. It’s no coincidence that the people spearheading this backlash are white, straight, cisgender, middle-aged and largely male; the people who applaud them on social media are from the same demographic.

    The thing about being “woke” is that being woke is a good thing. It means being aware of injustice in society, particularly racism.

    The Guardian:

    Criticising “woke culture” has become a way of claiming victim status for yourself rather than acknowledging that more deserving others hold that status. It has gone from a virtue signal to a dog whistle.

    What we’re seeing here is exactly what happened with political correctness: the perversion of a term by right-wingers in an attempt to claim that the real victims are the people who have all the power.

    Comedian Stewart Lee skewered that one a decade ago.

    The only time you ever see PC mentioned is when people are complaining about PC. For money. And usually on the very publicly funded radio stations that these dicks believe are involved in a politically correct conspiracy to silence them.

  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Bigots

    Today’s story of JK Rowling and an anti-trans tweet is a good example of how lazy reporting reinforces bullshit.

    If you missed it (and you probably didn’t; it’s been all over the media today): last night, the author tweeted in support of the anti-trans activist Maya Forstater, claiming that her defeat in a tribunal was an attempt to “force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real”. #IStandWithMaya, she wrote.

    That’s been reported as Rowling supporting free speech, but it isn’t.

    It’s Rowling telling her 14 million followers to support a bully.

    Forstater wasn’t forced out of her job; her employer chose not to renew her fixed term contract. She wasn’t told she couldn’t state that “sex is real”; she was told that she didn’t have the legal right to create a hostile and humiliating environment for her co-workers.

    Forstater has said publicly that her case was intended to establish a legal precedent: the precedent she wanted would give anti-trans activists the legal right to be as abusive as they liked towards trans colleagues without consequences.

    That isn’t how this is being reported. It’s being reported as “cancel culture”, the sinister “woke mafia” picking on a national treasure.

    But Rowling has form for this. She was an unapologetic follower of anti-trans activist Magdalen Berns, who claimed that there was a Jewish-funded conspiracy to turn the world trans and that trans women are “fucking blackface actors” who “aren’t women” but “get sexual kicks from being treated like women. Fuck you and your dirty fucking perversions… you pathetic, sick fuck”. She’s publicly liked anti-trans tweets claiming trans people are “men in dresses” and when called out on it, she had her PR team claim that it was a “clumsy and middle-aged moment” because she doesn’t want to upset her significant LGBT+ fanbase.

    By misrepresenting what the Forstater case was actually about, Rowling is fuelling anti-trans sentiment. The reporting over this is perpetuating the myth that women are being silenced by the sinister trans lobby while giving those women global press coverage for their supposedly silenced views.

    Here’s journalist Laurie Penny.

    Trans people, and trans women in particular, have for years been under attack by dedicated cohort of the British press, egged on by a small group of transphobic extremists. Transphobic views have been normalised in Britain. That’s the context for JK’s comments today.

  • When the media promotes conspiracy theories

    Conspiracy theories aren’t just the preserve of cranks. The Sunday Times ran a long campaign claiming that AIDS was the invention of a “gay lobby”; as recently as 2009 The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson claimed that the link between HIV and AIDS was contentious and that “debate” on the subject was being silenced by a “strong and vociferous lobby”.

    In the late 1990s and early 2000s, much of the UK press chastised those who sought to “silence” Andrew Wakefield’s discredited and dangerous claims about the safety of the MMR vaccine, coverage that brought a fatal, preventable disease back into our classrooms.

    Just this weekend, The Sun published a far-right conspiracy theory claiming Jeremy Corbyn was part of a shadowy network of hard-left extremists – an article it quickly and quietly unpublished.

    So we’re hardly in uncharted territory if sections of the media promote conspiracy theories today. They do, particularly around trans people. This week, they’re claiming that Big Pharma is paying the Liberal Democrats to force gender recognition reform into law, thereby turning all our children trans, because reasons.

    This isn’t just cranks on social media. It’s Radio 4’s Today Programme and the Murdoch Press.

    Here’s the Sunday Times’ explanation.

    Ferring Pharmaceuticals donates to the Lib Dems.

    True. It’s done so for years, to the tune of about £1.5m.

    It markets the drug Triptorelin

    Also true.

    “which is used to block puberty among adolescents”.

    That’s a deliberate distortion. Triptorelin is not primarily prescribed as a puberty blocker. It is a cancer drug, and it’s used overwhelmingly for cancer patients – thousands of them, compared to the few dozen for whom it’s used to treat precocious puberty or as a puberty blocker.

    Now, Ferring doesn’t appear to be a very nice company. Pharmaceutical firms rarely are. But it’s not mainly in the puberty blocking business. It’s in the cancer business, which is much more profitable. The entire market for puberty blockers in the NHS is worth around £90,000 a year, but it spends more than £2 billion on cancer treatments.

    Let’s think for a moment. Which is more likely: a corporation that makes cancer drugs spending £1.5m as an insurance policy for a market sector worth £2,000,000,000 per year, or a corporation that makes cancer drugs spending £1.5m to make all the children transgender so it can bring in £90,000 a year?

    Aha, the anti-trans lot say. But the market will grow. There are so many people trying to access gender clinics that the market for puberty blockers will soon be worth, like, lots and lots and lots. Maybe eleventy billion pounds a week.

    More referrals does not mean more prescriptions. In 2014-2015, the number of under-15s referred to the UK’s only gender clinic for adolescents rose from 46 to 52 – but the number of people prescribed hormone blockers dropped from 41 to 32. Puberty blocking remains exceptionally rare. These drugs aren’t and won’t be handed out like sweets.

    And remember, the alleged plot here is that the money from Big Pharma is going on lobbying for reform of the Gender Recognition Act, which has no connection with trans healthcare of any kind, let alone adolescent healthcare.

    The argument, then, goes something like this.

    • Cancer drugs firm donates not to the political parties that will win the election, but to one that won’t
    • Political party that won’t win the election will somehow force the other parties to make paperwork slightly easier for trans adults, which they’d promised to do anyway
    • Something something something think of the children

    Not mad enough? On social media, high profile figures with tens of thousands of followers decided to add yet more skulduggery to the equation.

    • Vladimir Putin wants all UK children turned trans, because reasons
    • Putin gives a gong to the boss of a cancer drugs firm, possibly with mind control technology inside it
    • Cancer firm donates not to the political parties that will win the election, but to one that won’t
    • Political party that won’t win the election will somehow force the other parties to make paperwork slightly easier for trans adults, which they’d promised to do anyway
    • Something something something think of the children

    How did we end up with Vladimir Putin? Well, the boss of Ferring, Frederick Paulsen, has been awarded the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation. What more proof do you need?

    Of course, Paulsen has been given some other honours. Maybe if we looked into that we could see just how big this international conspiracy really is.

    Paulsen’s honours include:

    • The French legion of honour.
    • The Order of the Druk Gyalpo of Bhutan.
    • The Order of Merit Class I by Germany.
    • The Cross of the Order of Chivalry by Denmark.
    • The OBE, the Order of St John Service Medal and Freeman of the City of London.
    • The Scottish Geographical Medal.
    • The Companion of the Royal Aero Club of the UK.
    • An honorary professorship of the University of Dundee.

    Now, I don’t want to alarm you, but clearly it isn’t just Putin. The international transgender conspiracy goes much deeper and includes President Macron of France, Angela Merkel of Germany, Queen Margarethe II of Denmark, King Wangchuck of Bhutan, The Queen of England, the Scottish Geographical Society, The Royal Aero Club of the United Kingdom and the entire University of Dundee. Together they are united with a single goal: to get the Lib Dems into power to turn all your children trans.

    Either that, or sections of the mainstream media will happily promote unhinged conspiracy theories that help create fear and distrust of trans people.

    One of these possibilities is much more likely, and much more frightening, than the other.

     

  • A dangerous obsession

    Let’s compare two numbers.

    In a typical year, the UK Gender Recognition Panel will grant around 320 gender recognition certificates to trans people.

    Over the last year, the UK press printed more than 6,000 articles about trans people, most of them negative, many of them scaremongering about the imagined dangers of letting trans people get those certificates in slightly less expensive, time-consuming and humiliating ways.

    As the analysis notes, much of the coverage is carefully worded: there’s been a shift from obvious abuse to “reasonable concerns”, although the message and the negativity remains the same.

    As of last summer, the UK government had issued a total of 4,910 GRCs over a period of fourteen years. The UK press printed that many anti-trans articles in less than one.

    If the trend continues, the UK press will soon be printing more pieces scaremongering about trans people than there are actual trans people.

  • A song about friends and allies

    This is Loving Me Is A Political Act, from our Bring The Good Times Back EP.

    I write a lot of autobiographical stuff but it tends to be quite oblique. This is unusually direct for me, and it’s about my experience of being out in the world. To be visibly different is to attract attention, and that attention is also directed to the people who hang out with me whether it’s the guys in the band or my friends.

    I’m no fool, I know you see
    the looks you get when you are with me

    The title is a simple statement of fact: in a world that often fears and hates trans people, to be an ally is to make a political statement. Simply by walking with me, my friends are being forced to take a side. The friends who support trans women online are accused of hating their sisters; the friends who hang out with me in the real world are judged in other ways.

    I don’t have a choice about being trans, but my friends choose to be with me and I love them deeply.

    Your heart is bigger than the sky
    Your love gives me life

     

  • “A fatberg in the river of Scottish public conversation.”

    I don’t normally link to The Scotsman, but I’m a big admirer of its columnist Laura Waddell. Today, she’s writing about the so-called debate over trans rights.

    For the sake of trans people, for women, and for the state of our public discourse, enough of the bad faith actions. The Women’s Pledges which have recently sprung up to sit vulture-like on SNP, Labour and Lib Dem fringes are not party affiliated and further single-issue interests under the guise of speaking for all women; the trans-exclusionary alliances with Facebook pages run by young American men attached to Trump, anti-choice, and other pages designed to stoke political fallout from culture wars; the politicians who use the deeply irresponsible, imflammatory, and dishonest phrase ‘war on women’ about the policy consultation and who’ve let the idea they are leading the charge go to their heads.

    Enough of those who direct online mobs to harass trans-inclusive Scottish women’s charities, shelters, libraries, and bookshops, weakening public faith in these important feminist organisations who’ve work with determination and grit over the decades for everything they have. Most of this doesn’t even pertain to the proposed policy which has attracted like a magnet a collected debris of homophobia, misogyny, men who’ve never taken an interest in women’s rights in their puff, conspiracy theorists and party agitators, condensed like a fatberg in the river of Scottish public conversation.

  • Money for Mermaids

    Mermaids, the charity for trans kids and their families, is trying to raise money to better help people. The video above does a really good job of demonstrating just how toxic things are at the moment: I thought I was pretty much desensitised to the constant barrage of anti-trans articles, but it turns out I’m not – to see the onslaught on-screen is still horrifying, especially when it only represents a tiny, tiny proportion of the newspaper scaremongering and online abuse.

    The Mermaids crowdfunder is here. I don’t agree with everything they’re raising money for – I think their planned billboards, which they hope will raise positive awareness of trans kids, are going to be completely ineffective; when you’re up against the overwhelming majority of the UK media and much of the political class too, having a couple of billboards is like taking a pea-shooter to a nuclear war – but they’re also raising money to fund more helpline volunteers and improve the information on their website, practical steps that will genuinely help people.

    And while they’re hopelessly outgunned, the point they’re making with their #IfIHadAVoice campaign is an important one. What’s missing from the so-called debate about trans kids is the voices of the children and of their families (and the medical professionals who are active in this field), all of which are drowned out by ill-informed, self-proclaimed experts. For example, the right-wing press’s favourite  “expert” on trans kids is a former religious cult member whose expertise is in sculpture, not medicine; their go-to anti-trans transsexual “Dr” isn’t a medical doctor but a physics teacher; many of the voices given airtime are simply bigots.

    Mermaids:

    the amount of negative coverage of transgender kids over the last 8 years has grown massively. The press and a small group of anti-trans campaigners have decided to make transgender children – and the few organisations supporting them – the target of deliberate misrepresentation.

    While transgender children and their families feel increasingly afraid to speak out, some of the country’s most influential speakers are content to speak about them, speak for them and speak over them.