Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • Come on in, the water’s lovely

    Glasgow Life has issued a statement regarding the scaremongering articles about its changing rooms policy.

    You will be shocked to discover that the articles weren’t true.

    Glasgow Life’s staff guidance on accessing sports facilities and services by transgender people was produced and distributed in 2015. Since then, we have had more than 20 million attendances across our sport facilities and no reports of inappropriate behaviour in regard to trans customers. Trans men and trans women have been using our facilities for many years without incident.

    About those women-only gym sessions:

    Contrary to reports, Glasgow Life does not run any ‘women only gym sessions’ – our gym sessions and classes are open to all, regardless of gender.

    And those women-only swimming pool changing rooms:

    Our venues provide a mix of changing room facilities. A significant proportion of our changing facilities are unisex and open to all, with secure, private cubicles. Where facilities have male and female changing facilities, private cubicles are provided, where possible. Our staff are happy to assist with any requests in regard to provision of private changing facilities. If anyone, at any time, feels unsure or uncomfortable in using our services, they should immediately contact a member of staff for assistance.

    The Herald, The Star, The Scotsman and The Sun all ran the original scaremongering, and yet I can’t see any sign of a correction, let alone one with equal prominence, today.

  • Singal minded

    There’s an interesting piece in The New Republic by Josephine Livingstone, who analyses the idea that debate is always a good thing. She begins by looking at a US journalist called Jesse Singal, who’s notorious in LGBT circles for what appears to be an ongoing campaign of damaging misinformation about trans people and trans teenagers in particular.

    When readers get angry with him, which happens often, he sees them as curtailing a productive conversation that he has prompted in the spirit of a free and vigorous exchange of ideas.

    …Singal and others who are critical of the social justice left—a group that ranges across the ideological spectrum and includes Bari Weiss, Ben Shapiro, Daphne Merkin, and Katie Roiphe—accuse the left of being footstampingly insistent on their views, to the detriment of healthy debate. In fact, it is the “debate me, coward” crowd that has made it impossible to have arguments in good faith, because they demand, unwittingly or not, to set the terms.

    Livingstone rather brilliantly describes this as “vacuous fight-picking” and “a howling canyon filled with misdirected energy”, using the familiar idea that we must hear both sides of any story in order to form our own opinions.

    But these people are not interested in letting people hear both sides. They want you to hear their side and only their side, and if you disagree with them they’ll shout you down and accuse you of trying to silence them.

    It is telling that critics of the social justice movement are obsessed with free speech and debate: It is the one inviolable principle they can fall back on when argument on the actual issues fails.

    All too often, the argument being made is based on (deliberate or accidental) misunderstanding, or straightforward bad faith: so for example many so-called debates about trans people simply ignore decades of research or dig up long-debunked talking points. Again and again demonstrably false claims are presented as incontestable fact: the number of trans people who detransition, the medicine given (or not given) to young people, the content of existing and proposed legislation.

    And it’s usually asymmetric. Journalists have power that other people do not; a journalist or public figure with tens of thousands of social media followers has a disproportionate amount of power compared to the people they may write about. For example, the supposed quality press in Scotland and elsewhere consistently regurgitates the claims of extreme anti-trans activists about legal or medical issues but never asks legal experts or medical experts whether those claims are true and certainly doesn’t give trans people the right of reply.

    The truth is out there, but too many journalists prefer “truthiness”: what feels true to them, not what’s actually true.

    People like Singal can bang on about free speech and debate endlessly without ever conceding a) that the deck may be stacked in their favor, and b) that certain ideas may be beyond their understanding.

    And this is why marginalised people can become so angry. Singal’s work, and similarly distorted reporting, has often been comprehensively demolished by people with a greater understanding and a less blinkered view of the things being written about. But they aren’t the ones given the column inches to fill.

    Livingstone:

    The exhaustion that comes of teaching something over and over again, only to witness people re-educated by poorly-read journalists, is profound. Exhaustion makes a person angry. Anger makes a person seem like a hyperzealot. You cannot believe that somebody is asking you to go around the same block—the very same block!—yet another time.

  • Trans people don’t swim

    Today’s Glasgow Herald has an offensively framed, scaremongering article about trans people in council swimming pools causing an invasion of “cross-dressing males”. It’s labelled new and exclusive, but it’s neither. As Duncan Hothersall put it on Twitter:

    Not exclusive. Not new. Simply the result of an active anti-trans campaigner seeking out the most scaremongering situation possible and pitching it to a newspaper desperate for clicks. We need to talk about these issues and resolve them; this sort of coverage doesn’t help.

    I wrote about the reality last year: people like me don’t use public swimming pools because we’re scared of people like you.

    I’m not scared of much any more, but I’m scared [of] public humiliation. Scared that someone will be scared of me. Scared that even in gender-neutral changing facilities where the only time I’m naked is in a locked, private cubicle, someone will loudly object to my being there and claim I’m somehow dangerous.

    Dangerously clumsy, maybe. But dangerous? The only risk from my presence anywhere near a swimming pool is if I fall on you or belly flop nearby.

    Two weeks ago, I swam in a hotel pool. It’s the first time I’ve been swimming in three years, and it was wonderful. Maybe next year I’ll go on holiday and be able to swim again.

  • Intolerance dressed up as concern

    It’s not surprising to see yet another anti-trans op-ed in The Scotsman; once again it portrays all trans people as abusive internet trolls in killer heels, trampling on the anti-trans women who are just lovely people who care about all kinds of stuff.

    But even by those low standards, it’s galling to see the horrific practice of female genital mutilation being used to demonise trans people.

    [one woman’s] life was destroyed by female genital mutilation (FGM), an unspeakably cruel practice that regards female biology as “unclean” and “unworthy”. In far too many cultures, men still decide what is a “real” woman.

    Leaving aside the sheer offensiveness of the argument (and the framing: “men still decide what is a ‘real’ woman” is a dog whistle: it’s meant to characterise trans women as men), it’s perfectly possible to support trans rights and fight against horrors such as FGM.

    It’s also possible to campaign against trans rights and also campaign against FGM. So you’d expect the “protect women” crowd to be doing just that.

    So let’s talk about the anti-trans crowd, the ones who only care about protecting women and girls and definitely aren’t motivated by transphobia when they hold meetings where speakers call us “bastards” and “parasites”.

    Let’s focus on the examples of horrors detailed in the Scotsman article.

    How much time and money do the anti-trans “feminist” organisations, the ones raising money with crowdfunding campaigns and t-shirt sales, spend campaigning against female genital mutilation?

    Zero.

    How much time and money do they spend on fighting domestic violence and other forms of violence against women and girls that leaves 140 women murdered by men in the UK every year?

    Zero.

    How much time and money do they spend on fighting against poverty wages for women, the gender wage gap and the underrepresentation of women in STEM subjects?

    Zero.

    I’ll add a few the writer missed. How much time and money do they spend on campaigning to end the systemic, endemic abuse of women in prison by other inmates and even staff, or the system that sends a disproportionate number of women to prison for minor offences?

    Zero.

    How much time and money do they spend on campaigning for equal marriage and women’s reproductive rights in Northern Ireland?

    Zero.

    Can you see the pattern emerging here?

    It’s almost as if this isn’t about protecting women at all.

  • The violence causes silence

    I didn’t know Lyra McKee, the extraordinary young woman shot dead by terrorists in Derry this week, but some of my friends did. They’re devastated. The loss of a friend is always a tragedy, but to lose them in such circumstances is particularly horrific.

    McKee’s death has been marked by some fine, angry, fearless writing. This, by Paraic O’Donnell, is one such tribute.

    ‘The violence causes silence’ – ‘Zombie’, by The Cranberries, gave us one of the most dreadful rhymes in rock music, and one of its starkest truths. When a journalist is murdered, as Lyra McKee was, we see the dark corollary of this truth, the viciousness of the circle. In the North, as she knew better than most, it was never a secret. The Provos used to put it on their trashy posters, next to a sniper in a gimp mask and baggy army surplus: ‘Whatever you say, say nothing.’

    In the North, the silence isn’t even silent. It’s violence taking you aside, wanting a word with you. It’s violence saying the quiet part out loud.

    …Lyra McKee was one of us. She was our people. She didn’t think she was, not at first – Belfast isn’t the easiest place in the world to grow up gay – but she found a way to belong here, a way to tell her story. She was our people because that includes a lot now, and it included her. It’s not like it used to be. But it doesn’t include them, not any more. Whatever you say, say that.

  • The problem isn’t us. It’s them

    It’s interesting to compare the media’s treatment of extremely rich far-right ideologues who want to watch the whole world burn – reasonable people with legitimate concerns, as the papers might put it – with environmental protesters trying to raise awareness of the very real and present dangers of climate change. They’re loonies, terrorists, privileged middle-class sandal-wearers who ought to get a real job.

    One of the familiar allegations repeatedly thrown at this week’s Extinction Rebellion protestors is that they’re hypocrites: some plastic water bottles have been spotted and Emma Thomson was in a plane, therefore their entire argument is bunk.

    On Twitter, Rosie Swayne explores that argument.

    [they] are NOT protesting about individual consumer behaviour, so however satisfying it feels to point out they prob drive cars/their superglue is prob not vegan/weed lamps are prob CO2 intense etc etc, it’s not actually relevant to their objective.

    The whole point of the protests is to raise awareness of the way in which the media and successive governments have painted climate change as something only individual actions can fix – so there’s no need to regulate big business until every one of us rides a bike and drinks only from containers made from hemp.

    Whereas the reality is that individual action is utterly meaningless for as long as giant corporations continue to trash the planet without fear of consequence. Just 100 companies are responsible for nearly three-quarters of global carbon emissions. Whether you or I drive cars or ride bikes is irrelevant in that context. It’s better if you cycle, of course, but the problem isn’t us. It’s them.

    As Swayne says, the protests are about “GOVERNMENT inaction on climate change. Carping at personal habits has been the RW [right-wing] tactic against environmentalists for over 30 years.”

    Enviro/ist: global warming will kill us
    RW: ahh! but your Citroën 2CV runs on PETROL so your point is INVALID!

    The newspapers picking on environmental protesters aren’t exposing hypocrisy. They’re defending corporations’ rights to put profits over human lives.

  • “Stop Pretending the Murdochs Are in the News Business”

    Writing in The Nation, Eric Alterman isn’t pulling any punches.

    one family has been able to use the power of the press to subvert democratic norms, misinform citizens, undermine governments, and fill our national debates with lies, misogyny, racism, and ethnocentrism while calling it news.

    Nothing in the article is particularly new: Murdoch’s power over politicians in his native Australia and in the UK is well-known and well documented. But in the age of Brexit and Trump that power is becoming even more malign – and it is power aided by the actions of a group of people who rarely get named in articles about Murdoch’s malevolence.

    …the greatest shame of this story goes to people who receive no mention at all. It belongs to the journalists who, against all evidence and to the detriment of their profession and their nations’ democracies, continue to participate in the charade that what the Murdochs do is journalism and that, therefore, their dishonesty, provocation, and propaganda deserve to be taken seriously as news.

  • Free speech snowflakes

    There are two pieces in the Guardian about a growing trend: people arguing that criticism is “silencing”. First up, Jack Bernhardt on comedy.

    we witnessed another great moment in comedy this week, when the BBC’s head of comedy asked the question we didn’t realise needed to be asked: is comedy dying because the internet is turning people into Victorians?

    …[such comments perpetuate] a culture war based on ignorance, allowing rightwing newspapers to paint a dystopian caricature of social media, where white men are oppressed with terrifying phrases like “check your privilege” and “identity politics”, and opinionated children burn effigies of John Cleese.

    Elsewhere in the paper, Dawn Foster takes historian Niall Ferguson to task for his persecution complex.

    I would pause, for at least a few seconds, if I found myself arguing that my freedom of speech was in a state of extreme jeopardy in this, my column in a national newspaper.

    Of all the tired tropes trotted out by the quick to whinge and slow to think, the “I’m being silenced” one in national, sometimes global media is one of the most tiresome. To hear handsomely paid, high profile media voices claim to be an oppressed minority would be laughable if it weren’t so serious.

    As ever, the problem isn’t that anybody is being silenced. It’s that powerful people are being criticised.

    You’d think academics such as Ferguson would know the difference between censorship and criticism.

    Foster:

    the Venn diagram of men arguing that freedom of speech is the central, precious tenet of “western civilisation”, and those who scream bloody murder the second they are subject to any criticism, or are forced to bear any responsibility for their speech, is a single perfect circle.

    Free speech does not occur without responsibility: to use the traditional metaphor, if you scream “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, you will be culpable when a stampede ensues. If your arguments are racist, sexist or homophobic, the people you attack will rightly point out your prejudice and query whether your professional position is compromised by holding such prejudices.

    This isn’t difficult. Freedom of speech means the government can’t put you in prison for having an opinion. What freedom of speech does not guarantee is freedom from criticism.

    Time for this cartoon again.

    This isn’t about censorship. It’s about ego and status preservation. People who are used to having their words taken as gospel are suddenly hearing people disagree with them, and they don’t like it.

    For years, privileged men have been able to frame themselves as agents provocateurs – often spouting the kind of opinions a roaring, angry drunk on the night bus might, but with a plummy accent, an Oxford degree, and an overreliance on antiquated vocabulary – in columns in national newspapers. Their fury is not that they have been silenced – they have not – but that their victims have argued back, and they have been forced to bear responsibility for their words.

  • Friends in the media

    It’s just another week on the internet, with yet another bunch of women experiencing massive campaigns of online abuse for having the temerity to say they don’t think trans women are monstrous predators. Singer Lisa Moorish is currently under siege and receiving dire threats and abuse from the “protect women” crowd, while comedian Janey Godley made a video after several days of ongoing harassment:

    Sally Hines, a professor of sociology and gender identities in the University of Leeds, has long been a target of the anti-trans crowd. She describes what it’s like:

    So… You’re in a (supposedly) feminist thread. There is disagreement around sex/gender. You reply briefly (its Twitter not a publication, lecture or an irl sit-down chat). The reply may – though often not -have a little irony, a tad of sarcasm, a bite of humour.

    The tweet is taken out of the thread – divorced from its context – and retweeted *multiple* times. People notify others and a pile-on starts. Things very quickly become nasty. Personal and professional attacks escalate.

    In the midst of this you are *bombarded* with demands to a)expand and clarify b)answer countless questions on issues aside to the original tweet c)send reading lists d)divulge personal aspects of your life. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Per minute. Per hour. For days. On end.

    So there’s the bombardment but there’s the *demand*. Not an invitation or even a request. A hostile insistence to engage NOW. Hostility is key. As is belittlement. It intensifies. Faster. Nastier. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Minute. Hour. Days. On end.

    Here are *some* personal examples from the last TWO days. You: shouldn’t have your job; are retarded, crazed, delusional, sick; on drugs; a woman hater; a man; responsible for brain washing/grooming young people; removing women’s rights; aiding the genocide of women and girls.

    And *always* the handmaiden. The cock lover. Patriarchy’s slave. The traitor. The female cuckold. The feminist pussy. Be shamed. I *will* shame you. Shaming is the game.

    You don’t respond. It multiples. People notify others. It becomes a circus-people trying to please with wit. Trying to impress their own/ please let me make you laugh. Who can be the nastiest? Who can be the one who will WIN? As bullies bond in a playground. Dirt turns to filth.

    And the media is @ in to complaints about you. Your funding body and employer are repeatedly @ in. People who liked one of your tweets are targeted insesiently. People who follow you are rounded on. Threats are made.

    And on still. More minutes. More hours. More days. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

    And some of those people are the very journalists whose names appear on supposedly unbiased articles about trans people.

    Many of the people reporting on trans issues have picked a side, usually against trans women. For example, writers for The Herald, The Spectator and The Times/Sunday Times make no secret of their support for anti-trans pressure groups with opaque finances and links to US anti-women, anti-LGBT evangelical groups.

    The idea that journalists should be objective seems to have got lost somewhere. Of course journalists have opinions, but their job is to leave those opinions at the door and report the facts. A journalist should not take part in activities or support organisations that limit or affect their ability to be objective and independent.

    We all know this. If a writer is being paid by company X, they can’t be trusted to report objectively on issues that affect company X. If a writer is a member of UKIP, they can’t be trusted to report objectively on Brexit. And if a writer makes no secret of hating LGBT people or a subset of LGBT people, they can’t be trusted to report objectively on LGBT issues. By employing propagandists rather than journalists, news media is hammering more nails into its own coffin.

  • Not a jolly good Fellow

    You can tell a lot about the UK newspaper industry by the people the Society of Editors chooses to garland in its annual UK Press Awards. This year, as if anointing the Mail on Sunday’s Sanchez Manning “specialist journalist of the year” for her ongoing campaign of anti-trans scaremongering and vilification wasn’t bad enough, the creator of this repellent cartoon was made a fellow of the Society of Editors.

    Now you might think that showing sinister, hook-nosed figures marching over borders and depicting foreigners as vermin is a chilling echo of the Nazi propaganda cartoons of the late 1930s. And you might think that a political cartoonist with five decades in the newspaper industry might have at least a working knowledge of the history of political cartooning. But you’d be wrong, because Mac just happened to replicate Nazi propaganda by accident.

    He had quite a few accidents, it seems. One cartoon, in which Mac responded to the NHS recruiting overseas doctors by showing a black immigrant “witch doctor” frightening a white NHS patient, resulted in an apology from the Daily Mail to the British Medical Association. Many others portrayed black people as big-lipped, boggle-eyed, loincloth-wearing savages. In 2010 Mac illustrated “multiculturalism” by showing a man marrying a farm animal, and in 2015 he depicted the newly deceased entertainer Cilla Black being forced to wait at the pearly gates because “there are thousands of illegals trying to get in.” In 2017 he equated refugee boat people with monkeys.

    There’s an irony here. The society of editors, which claims to represent the very best of the UK newspaper industry, has missed a very important piece of news: it isn’t 1971 any more.

    Update

    The thing about diversity is that without it, you can be blinkered. I’ve seen many white, cis, straight men defending Mac’s worst cartoons on the grounds that they don’t think the cartoons are racist, or homophobic, or offensive generally. And with the greatest respect to those people, if you’re not a member of a minority group then you don’t get to say whether it’s offensive to that minority or not. Just because something doesn’t affect you doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect people who are different to you.

    Despite some positive efforts, the British media remains overwhelmingly white: while the population is only 80% white British, the media is 94% white; muslims account for 5% of the population but just 0.4% of journalists; 3% of the population is black but only 0.2% of journalists are. It’s sexist, too – women are outnumbered by men and paid significantly less than their male peers.

    Ironically enough, that lack of diversity was demonstrated last night by the inaugural diversity award. It went to a white man. A gay white man (the excellent Patrick Strudwick of Buzzfeed), admittedly, but hardly a sign that the media establishment values writers from other ethnic backgrounds. As someone pointed out on social media, there were more people of colour serving wine than sitting at the tables, let alone being nominated for any awards.

    Writing on Gal-Dem, Micha Frazer-Carroll writes about the British media’s diversity problem.

    The awards have been running since 1962 and are some of the most prestigious in the industry – but not one black woman or non-binary journalist featured on the list of 157 entrants this year. To add insult to injury, just three people of colour’s names made the cut.

    …If people of colour only scrape into the lowest positions in news and media organisations, it’s naturally less likely that our ideas will ultimately get airtime… this is a problem that can’t be radically overhauled by simply appealing to “diversity”, particularly if it’s only in the lowest ranks of an organisation. Meanwhile, actively harmful coverage of marginalised groups within the very same papers doesn’t create an environment that feels safe for us. That includes the rampant transphobia that’s swept the mainstream press in recent years and seen the likes of Janice Turner – who claimed that children had been “sacrificed” for trans rights – up for journalism awards.