Journalism, radio and stuff like that
Sky News was very proud of its exclusive last night: an interview with former EDL leader and Nazi poster boy Tommy Robinson. Don’t do it, they were urged. All you’re doing is giving fascists the oxygen of publicity they so crave, and helping create the impression that they’re a legitimate group with legitimate concerns. He’ll use the slot to get his talking points aired and then tell his followers how he outsmarted you.
Robinson on Twitter today:
The Times has carried out an investigation into Twitter.
References to child sex abuse, taunting of rape victims, disturbing messages from stalkers, homophobia and transphobia all stayed on the site after Twitter reviewed the content and decided that none of it breached its terms.
Examples of the hate speech include attempts to link LGBT people with paedophilia and the deliberate abuse of trans women.
This, from a newspaper whose UK edition repeatedly runs articles claiming that trans people are ‘sacrificing our children”, that trans women are predatory men, that the LGBT “lobby” is abusing children.
Maybe the Irish edition didn’t get the memo: abusing minorities sells newspapers.
No, not its boss, Jack Dorsey. This guy.
Twitter doesn’t want to move against hatemongers such as Alex Jones because if they do, it begs the question: why not Trump?
The short answer is: $2 billion.
That’s how much the Trump account is believed to be worth to Twitter, which is why it hasn’t blocked him despite him frequently posting abusive and threatening tweets and occasionally making nuclear threats to world leaders. That’s all fine, because Trump is “newsworthy”.
Dorsey mouths platitudes about freedom of speech, but his only concern is Twitter’s freedom to make money.
Even by the Daily Mail’s low standards this is shocking, disgraceful stuff.
Accuracy is important in any kind of journalism, of course, but it’s particularly important when you’re covering topics such as race relations and immigration.
According to this furious Twitter thread by Marwan Muhammad, hardly anything in Malone’s article is true. It starts with confusion between a city and a province, pulls in completely invented statistics from far-right websites and prints outright lies. If Muhammad is correct, and his detailed, source-quoting thread suggest that he is, the whole thing is more like a racist pamphlet than anything you could call journalism.
As I’ve said before, if a newspaper is lying to you about something so easily fact-checked – what else are they lying to you about?
Update, 6/8: Mail Online has taken down the article and the author has suspended his Twitter account.
Two days ago, the Daily Mirror ran a horrifying story of video game addiction. “Fortnite Made Me A Suicidal Drug Addict”, the headline screamed.
It was harrowing stuff describing “video game hell” that led to an abortive suicide attempt.
Was it exaggerated? It certainly looks that way. Eurogamer is on the case.
There’s no evidence to suggest the Mirror’s Fortnite story was fabricated. But when you pull back the curtain and discover how these types of articles are put together, when you understand how some mainstream journalism works, it’s hard not to wonder about the motivations of the parties involved.
Just when you thought mainstream media couldn’t get any more stupid…
Sarah Cruddas is a science journalist. Today, she was asked to take part in a TV debate about whether or not we landed on the moon.
As she put it on Twitter: “It is not okay to debate science fact.”
There is no debate about whether or not we landed on the moon. There is the fact that we landed on the moon, and there is the fact that a handful of tinfoil-hatted fuckwits who shouldn’t be left alone with sharp objects post stupid shit on the internet. The existence of the latter in no way casts any doubt on the former.
The way to deal with these people isn’t to give them airtime. It’s to give them Buzz Aldrin. You may recall that when moon-conspiracy documentary maker Bart Sibrel approached the astronaut back in 2002 with allegations of fakery, Aldrin punched him.
Other science facts it’s not okay to debate include whether climate change is real, whether people of colour are physically or genetically inferior, whether vaccines cause autism, whether the world is flat and whether trans people are legitimate. If you’re commissioning “debates” on those issues or others like them, you’re a disgrace to your profession.
A poster on Twitter reminded me of this 2016 story about the evangelical Family Research Council. It’s about the FRC’s five-point plan describing how to demonise trans people and make it impossible for them to live their lives.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s on the FRC website, with the usual widely debunked nonsense.
The points were:
As the Twitter user pointed out, it’s kinda difficult to tell the difference between that plan, current US policy and the “talking points” of anti-trans campaigners both in the US and in the UK.
As the article, by Brynn Tannehill, put it:
Stop for a moment here, and imagine a world where you can’t get an accurate government ID. A world where you can’t vote, can’t drive without risking arrest, and can’t get a job. You cannot prove that you are who you are, because no one will believe your ID is real. You will never be treated as your correct gender by any government agency. What ID you have will constantly out you as transgender, inviting discrimination. Perfectly legal discrimination, if part two of their plan succeeds.
Now imagine being constantly outed as transgender in this world where the law explicitly states that you are a target. Imagine having that scarlet A on every ID you possess making it clear that the bearer of this card is sub-human and has no rights: fire them, kick them out of their home, refuse to serve them, take their children away, verbally abuse them for your amusement at work—it’s all good.
This is all because in the eyes of the anti-trans crowd, trans people were born a certain way and must not be allowed to change it. If we try, we’re subhuman.
Imagine if they said the same things about infertile couples taking IVF.
Sophie-Grace Chappell writes for the American Philosophical Association and compares the treatment of trans people to that of adoptive parents.
Nobody sensible thinks that it’s all right, when you find out that someone is an adoptive parent, to get in her face and shout “Biology! Science! You’re running away from the facts! You’re delusional! You’re not a real parent!â€
…Nobody sensible thinks that it’s an infraction of Jordan Peterson’s human rights to impose on him a social, ethical, and sometimes even legal requirement that he call adoptive parents “parents.â€
…Nobody sensible thinks that adoptive parents are, typically and as such, a threat to other parents. Or that they only went in for adoptive parenting as a way to get their hands on vulnerable children or vulnerable parents.
Of course, organisations such as the FRC are against same-sex adoption and lesbian couples having IVF too, but the difference is that their views are not presented as mainstream and echoed every single week in major newspapers and all over social media by people who claim to be feminists.
The FRC is a US organisation but its hands reach across the Atlantic in the form of the Hands Across The Aisle Coalition, whose founder is regularly and approvingly quoted by UK anti-trans activists on social media. The coalition lists the UK groups Fair Play For Women and Transgender Trend among its members.
TT is the group responsible for the anti-trans materials sent to UK schools, and it and Fair Play For Women are the source of much of the anti-trans rent-a-quote stuff you see in the Mail on Sunday and other newspapers. TT’s crowdfunding campaigns are promoted by right-wing sites such as Breitbart.
It’s very odd to see supposed feminists becoming best pals with virulent anti-abortionists and conservatives who hate women.
Brynn Tannehill has written about that too, in the aftermath of the anti-trans disruption of London Pride:
These right-wing organizations don’t try to hide their relationship with so-called feminists. Indeed, they proudly display it in order to create the illusion that both the left and the right oppose inclusion of trans people in society. In reality, only one side’s interests are being represented here ― the radical religious right.
…They are all anti-choice. They all want to ban access to birth control. They universally want to overturn Lawrence v. Texas and allow states to make homosexuality illegal again. They want to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, and Roe v. Wade. They want to ban same-sex adoption. They all are hostile to fair-pay-for-women laws. They oppose women working outside the home. They are all hostile to the Women’s March and Me Too. They are fake medical organizations and anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice hate groups. They have cheered the assassinations of abortion providers. They are publications that have published horrible things about women, such as “Does Feminism Make Women Ugly?â€
This isn’t a choice between transgender people and women. This is a choice between trans people and right-wing organizations pretending to represent women.
Some of the anti-trans activists on social media hate trans people because they’re bigots: many of them have espoused straight-up racism and antisemitism too. But many of the people calling trans-inclusive women “handmaidens” are apparently unaware that they’re doing the work of the US religious right.
Evangelicals’ bigotry didn’t go away when the battle for equal marriage was won. They just changed tactics and went looking for new friends. Sadly, they seem to be finding an awful lot of them.
When it comes to conspiracy theories, there are two kinds of theorists: the batshit insane, and the people who genuinely believe they’ve stumbled on a conspiracy.
There was a good example of what I assume is the latter last week in The Observer, which published an astonishing piece about the link between mobile phones and cancer. It turns out that mobile phones really do cause cancer, and there’s a global conspiracy to cover it up.
No they don’t, and no there isn’t.
This is something I know a fair bit about, because I’ve covered the subject a lot over the last two decades. Whether it’s phones or wireless networks, every now and then someone comes along and misunderstands the science to conclude that our brains are being cooked and there’s a conspiracy to cover it up.
Part of the problem is the word “radiation”. We assume that all radiation is ionising radiation, the kind that gives you skin cancer. But radiation also includes the radio waves that bring you Radio Scotland and the light waves coming from your light bulbs.
The radiation from phones and wireless routers is very low powered, non-ionising radiation. As far as science is aware, there is no possible way the radiation from these devices can cause cancer.
The Observer has run a follow-up piece this week, this time by somebody who knows the science. It gives the authors of the previous article a very polite but very thorough kicking.
That the authors attribute this lack of evidence for their claims to the machinations of a nebulous big telecoms is indicative of a mindset more conspiratorial than sceptical… Scaremongering narratives may be more alluring than the less sensational, scientific findings, but they are not harmless. We need only look at any vaccine panic to see the cost in human life when superstition outpaces science. In an age where misinformation can perpetuate rapidly, it can be difficult to parse fact from fiction, but it’s imperative that we hone our scientific scepticism rather than succumb to baseless panics – our very wellbeing depends on it.
If you’re a journalist considering writing an “ordinary thing causes cancer!” piece it’s worth applying Occam’s Razor, which suggests that the simplest explanation is the most likely. Which is more likely: a) there’s a global conspiracy that’s willingly sacrificing thousands or even millions of lives and which has operated for decades without leaving any evidence whatsoever, or b) you’ve got it wrong?
A journalist’s job is to report what the evidence says, not to cherry-pick the evidence to support the story the journalist wants to tell.
Dr Louise Raw on Twitter:
Every time @DailyMirror reports a domestic violence murder I have to @ them about their repugnant coverage.
A FLING DID NOT DESTROY THIS FAMILY. A FLING DID NOT KILL ANNE SEARLE. HER HUSBAND DID. A woman died in terror- this is a tragedy, not a sexy romp.
This is an example of something that’s very common in newspaper reports, especially reports of domestic violence and other violence against women. These are real examples:
BBQ dad “killed 6 over wife’s affair” (The Sun)
Breakup Ignited Dad’s Deadly Rage (Seattle Times)
Dad Killed 5 Kids Because Wife Was Leaving (Yahoo News)
and from BBC Scotland News today:
Jealous Kilmarnock husband’s ‘frenzied knife attack’ on wife
These are just randomly chosen examples, but they all have the same thing in common: the implication that if it weren’t for the woman’s behaviour or decisions, the crimes wouldn’t have happened. Similarly in the Mirror example above, the implication is that if the wife hadn’t had a “fling”, her husband wouldn’t have killed her.
You’ll see similar headlines about rape, where the crime is framed in terms of the victim’s behaviour, dress or sobriety. And you’ll often find the subtext carried across to the body copy, which goes into great detail about what a nice guy the man was.
The reality is that very many abusers and murderers are nice guys. The majority of violence against women is perpetrated by their current or former partners. The majority of abuse of children is perpetrated by relatives or step-relatives.
We don’t want to think of our neighbours, our cousins, our partners as potential criminals because it’s too terrifying – so when it is a perfectly ordinary guy, we attempt to explain it away instead. There are some fascinating studies into this, and the concept of the “ideal criminal” as a complete stranger.
Jane Gilmore’s #FixedIt campaign attempts to highlight the problem. She corrects “Belfast man to spend three years on probation for Lagan Towpath Sex Assault” to “…for sexually assaulting a woman”; “staff subjected to abuse” becomes “man chokes woman”; man “planning sex with 2yo” is corrected to “planning rape and sexual abuse of 2yo”, because of course raping a toddler isn’t sex.
Gilmore is a journalist, and she wants her peers to do better.
…it is not our job to erase the truth so our audience is not made to feel uncomfortable. Our job is to describe what is happening in our society. And the sad truth is that around 90 percent of violent crimes are committed by men. Avoiding this fact doesn’t make it less true but it does make it much more difficult to address the underlying cause.
Here’s a fascinating piece by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post: her (white, male) friend Tom felt that white men were vanishing from TV, so she sent him links to evidence that they weren’t. “I felt Tom was watching TV from another planet,” she recalls. Hesse tried to prove that Tom was wrong with easily verifiable statistics.
It didn’t work.
Tom diligently read these stats but was convinced that they didn’t represent what he saw.
“I’ve noticed it,†he told me. “I’ve noticed white men aren’t there. I’m not making this up.â€
If you’ve ever debated anything on the internet you’ll be familiar with this: the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that somebody is wrong, but they refuse to accept that the evidence is accurate. That’s because we’re not as rational as we think we are.
As Hesse notes, “Our worldviews are shaped by our experiences. We all obsess over our own scars until we start to think they’re symbols for broader injustice. We believe what we feel. And then we believe our feelings are facts.”
There’s also the issue of investment. It’s much easier to fool somebody than to get someone to admit they’ve been fooled. There’s a point in many debates where one party will simply shut it down and refuse to engage any further.
As Hesse writes:
How do you address beliefs when they’re not rooted in reality? How do you tell someone, I’m trying to treat your fears seriously, but your facts don’t exist? How, as individuals, and how, as a country?