Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • The quiet part

    One of the not-too-hidden secrets of the anti-trans movement is that their goal is the total elimination of trans people. As with the forced birth movement, activists are very careful to disguise their goals, to self-censor and say only what they know they can get away with when they talk to the media. Hence “pro-life” instead of “forced birth”, “reasonable concerns” instead of saying the quiet bit out loud. But in their own events and their own social media, the masks come off.

    The strategy is gradualism, or a wedge strategy: you start small and use your win as a wedge for your real agenda. The US forced birth movement was a fringe movement for decades, but with cynical and significant help from the US GOP it began decades of gradualism to build the foundations for what we’re seeing now: the revocation of Roe vs Wade and moves towards the ultimate goal, which is to prohibit abortion without exception everywhere in the US (and elsewhere too). But even now they continue to pretend that their goal isn’t really their goal: again and again, forced-birther Republican politicians say the right thing about exceptions for rape, incest and medical emergencies before either removing those exceptions or, as ProPublica reports, making those exceptions almost completely inaccessible. The horrific case of Kate Cox, forced to flee Texas in order not to die after the Supreme Court said her life was worthless, shows how hollow those promises are.

    These extreme anti-women laws were always the goal, but the forced birthers pretend otherwise. And the anti-LGBTQ+ eliminationists are doing the same. Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law was initially pitched as for children from kindergarten to third grade, which means kids up to the age of nine; a year later it was extended to twelfth grade, which is 17 and 18-year-olds. Bans on LGBTQ+ books have pretended to be about pornography and protecting children, but explicitly targeted any books by or that mention LGBTQ+ people. Similarly the push for bans on trans healthcare on both sides of the Atlantic initially claimed only to be about protecting pre-pubescent children; the same activists are now pushing for a complete ban on healthcare for trans adults and the removal of all their legal protections too.

    It’s not that they don’t want us to be in sports. They don’t want us to be anywhere. One of the leading voices of the UK anti-trans movement says that trans people’s numbers should be reduced; our equalities minister, who has communicated and met extensively with anti-trans bigots but not LGBTQ+ organisations, claims that we are an “epidemic” and that “predators” are “choosing to exploit rights given to transgender people”, dogwhistling that “I’m not saying that transgender people are predators, but there are more people who are predators than there are people who are trans.”

    This is elimination by a thousand cuts as set out by the Christian right back in 2017: demonise trans people in every possible way. Go after trans people in sports, go after trans people’s use of public facilities, go after trans people’s healthcare, go after trans people’s protection from discrimination, go after trans people’s ability to live normal lives. Ban trans people who go through the wrong puberty; ban the healthcare that can ensure that they do not.

    You can see this in microcosm with Riley Gaines, the US swimmer who was beaten in a race by four other women and tied with a fifth. Gaines has since embarked on a highly lucrative campaign of revenge – not against the women who came first, second, third or fourth, but the trans woman who came equal fifth with her. It turns out that attacking trans people is much better for your profile and your bank balance than being a not-good-enough-to-win swimmer, a lesson other famous swimmers also appear to have absorbed.

    Remember the official line here: trans women must be banned from women’s sports because going through male puberty gives them a biological advantage. That claim is not necessarily true – while there are some sports where it may be a factor in some circumstances, it’s been used to demand bans on trans participation in snooker, darts, croquet and Irish dancing too – but that’s not the point: it’s the stated reason for anti-trans sporting bans. The post-pubertal body, they claim, is simply too powerful for fair competition.

    Except Gaines and the far right doesn’t want trans women to compete in anything at all, which is why she’s just turned the right-wing media machine against a teenage trans girl. The girl, who is 17, began transitioning before puberty and therefore doesn’t possess any of the claimed biological advantages. But the news that she had apparently been offered one of a dozen volleyball scholarships by the University of Washington was enough to set the anti-trans hate machine in motion. It now appears that the university has withdrawn the offer, depriving the girl not just of a sporting opportunity but an educational one too.

    This particular story appears to be another case of something we’re seeing a lot of in the US at the moment: bad losers (or their parents) invoking the spectre of trans people to harm their rivals. Sometimes it’s levelled at girls who are not trans but who aren’t pretty blonde white girls – something trans people and LGBTQ+ allies more widely have been warning about for years. Those warnings, like many others, were ignored – because the collateral damage is welcome too. Bigotry and intolerance run in packs, and they will not stop running when they’re done with us.

  • When left turns right

    One of the interesting and frightening things we’ve seen in recent years is people who would consider themselves left-wing not only turning right, but turning far right. Some of the most extreme examples do so after public humiliation destroys their credibility – Naomi Wolf is a good example of that – or after online criticism hurts their ego. Some do it after losing faith in specific institutions, or to seek the Murdoch dollar or MAGA votes. And often, they take many people with them.

    This excellent piece by In These Times looks at what happens when the left turns hard right.

    It’s easy to dismiss many of these high-profile defectors as crackpots or spotlight-seekers, as never truly serious in their political principles or as plain grifters. Because of course there is money to be made by saying, “Once I was blind, but now I see.” It permits the Steve Bannons of the world to affirm their political faith not as an argument, but just the truth. But, in some ways, the peculiarities of the celebrity drifters are beside the point.

    The point is who they bring along.

    One of the key points in the piece is that there’s a pipeline between being a controversialist and becoming a fascist, and it’s a pipeline we’ve known about for a very long time. “Strategic irony” is a well-worn tactic of the far right: what begins with “edgy”, taboo-busting humour or saying the supposedly unsayable soon becomes a lot less funny. As one of the people quoted in the piece puts it, you can only be ironic for so long; you can only post so many George Wallace memes before you start thinking that two sets of water fountains aren’t a bad idea.

  • It’s all connected

    Charles P Pierce is one of my favourite writers on politics, particularly US politics, and this piece on the links between US right-wingers and growing intolerance and violence in other countries is typically astute.

    As should be clear by now, this slouch toward authoritarian government is an interconnected, international phenomenon. It is a shadow government driven by conspiracy and empowered paranoia. It has power and reach. There is legitimate money behind it. If there is a central point, it’s probably in Russia, but liberal democracies have proven perfectly capable of ignoring the threat until it reaches full roar.

  • Be better

    Science writer Ed Yong’s coverage of COVID was superb, and his reporting of long COVID even more so. In a thoughtful piece for the NYT, he explains how journalists should and could do better: Reporting on Long Covid Taught Me To Be a Better Journalist.

    Covering long Covid solidified my view that science is not the objective, neutral force it is often misconstrued as. It is instead a human endeavor, relentlessly buffeted by our culture, values and politics. As energy-depleting illnesses that disproportionately affect women, long Covid and M.E./C.F.S. are easily belittled by a sexist society that trivializes women’s pain, and a capitalist one that values people according to their productivity. Societal dismissal leads to scientific neglect, and a lack of research becomes fodder for further skepticism.

    …How could so many people feel so thoroughly unrepresented by an industry that purports to give voice to the voiceless?

    As Yong explains, some of the defining characteristics of journalism can make it a powerful enemy of people who are suffering.

    many journalistic norms and biases work against us. Our love of iconoclasts privileges the voices of skeptics, who can profess to be canceled by patient groups, over the voices of patients who are actually suffering. Our fondness for novelty leaves us prone to ignoring chronic conditions that are, by definition, not new.

    …We are not neutral actors, reporting on the world at a remove; we also create that world through our choices, and we must do so with purpose, care and compassion.

  • Pain is privileged

    There’s a good piece in Nieman Labs about the biases, often unconscious, that mean journalists adopt the evangelical right’s framing when it comes to reporting on trans people.

    How else to explain the tens of thousands of words this year and last devoted to questioning whether trans people have too much access to health care, rather than to understanding the forces behind legislation to deny us that care? How else could a major news organization devote a major investigative report on the sliver of trans people who regret their transitions rather than on the many tens of thousands who don’t have the opportunity to transition to begin with? Or how else could an in-depth story about a clinic faced with an increase in trans minors question whether those minors really needed care rather than focus on how the healthcare system was failing them.

    One group’s pain is privileged; the other’s, invisible.

    The reporting over “detransitioners” is an excellent example of that. The number of people who detransition – that is, abandon their transition altogether and return to living in their assigned gender – is vanishingly small, and largely consists of people who found that prejudice, discrimination and bullying, and in the UK the decades-long waiting lists for even the most basic treatment, made their lives hell to the point they had to once again hide who they are in order to survive.

    Those stories should be told, but they’re not; instead, media focuses on the even tinier number of celebrity detransitioners, the three or four people touring the globe with the evangelical right who demand an end to all trans healthcare because they made bad calls as grown adults.

    Exceptions make the news. Of course they do: as the adage goes, dog bites man isn’t news; man bites dog is. But what the press is doing around trans people and detransition is to tell you that it isn’t safe to let your pets out of the house at all because the streets are full of rabid dog-biting hordes ready to chomp on your chihuahua, munch on your mastiff or chow down on your chow chow.

    The number of people who regret transition surgery are far fewer than the number who regret any other form of surgery; the number of people who regret transition are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction compared to the number of people who find that it improves or even saves their lives. But only the celebrity detransitioners get the column inches and the airtime, almost always unchallenged.

    The Nieman Labs piece uses an analogy:

    If you’re covering access to abortion care, do you sic your crack investigative team on the sub-1% of women who regret their abortions, or on the multiple attempts to deny them care?

    This is exactly what happens with trans people.

    I think there are two problems with the article, though. The first is that it doesn’t take into account how much journalism is actually churnalism, based not on reporting or research but on regurgitating press releases and talking points from pressure groups. Sometimes that regurgitation is down to pressure: in many newsrooms and production studios people are overworked, underpaid and don’t have the time to check whether a group is astroturfed, let alone whether the contents of its press release are factual. It’s why anybody with a logo, a Twitter account and an axe to grind can get on the BBC or in the pages of the press as a supposed authority.

    And the second problem is that the article talks about a particular type of journalist, the one who wants to do their job well, and I’m not so sure there are so many of those journalists left. Unfortunately with trans people, many of the people writing and speaking about us know exactly what they’re doing; the misrepresentation and disinformation is not accidental but intentional.

    How do you persuade journalists to report the truth when their social media followers, their book deals and their TV appearances depend on them doing otherwise?

  • Money for nothing

    There’s a fascinating article in 404 Media about the shameful shuttering of Jezebel, one of the most important feminist publications online. According to the CEO of parent firm G/O Media, which acquired the site from its previous publisher, “our business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s.”

    The audience here isn’t you or I. It’s advertisers. And those advertisers are worried about “brand safety”, which means in effect there’s no money to pay for anything potentially controversial.

    the advertising industry has singled out the issues the audience cares about most, like reproductive rights, as unsuitable to sell ads against, even though a ton of people want to read about them. This helps explain the precarity of publications like Jezebel, despite it being more vital to its audience than ever.

    Let’s see what sort of content is considered too risky for brand safety, shall we?

    words like “abortion,” “pro-choice,” “pro-life,” “wade,” “gay,” “transgender,” “sexual,” regularly show up on brand safety keyword blocklists, which four different industry experts told 404 Media are extensive, ever growing, and rarely updated.

    The goal, mostly, is to ensure that adverts are not placed next to abusive content – such as bigotry or conspiracy nonsense. But this broad brushstroke blocking means that adverts will not be placed next to legitimate content either, such as magazines for gay and trans people, or information about safe abortion. And it seems rather hypocritical when you see many of the brands who have brand safety divisions continuing to advertise on Twitter next to blatant homophobic, transphobic, racist and anti-semitic abuse and increasingly, illegal content.

    Blocklists are a fairly low-tech tool, and many advertisers are moving away from them to more sophisticated “sentiment analysis”. But that too can have a chilling effect:

    [one ad system giant says] advertisers can choose to block all sorts of potential topics, especially those that may elicit negative emotions as detected by its artificial intelligence: “Exclude content relating to negative news or sentiment around sensitive social issues such as immigration, abortion, euthanasia, vaccines

    As the advertising giant quoted above admits, that exclusion will also apply to:

    educational, informative, and scientific content related to the topic.

    In effect, then, online yahoos effectively get to censor what journalism is and isn’t funded: if it’ll get a bunch of far-right goons, Qanon reality deniers or other vocal minorities outraged, it won’t get funded. And if it won’t get funded, editors aren’t going to commission any more of it.

    This is the fundamental problem with an advertising funded economy. For decades, there was a wall between editorial and advertising, with the latter unable to influence the former. That’s because it was widely understood that the interests of advertisers and the interests of editorial often diverged and could even be in opposition. Now, though, advertising and editorial are linked – and because of this, many publishers are no longer in the business of telling, but of selling.

    The problem with that is by and large, it’s not a problem for right-wing media. The most rabid right-wing publications have generous funders with very deep pockets. It’s the publications on the left, which don’t tend to have billionaires backing them, that have the problem. If advertisers don’t want to be associated with potentially troll-attracting content – content such as information on climate change, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, vaccines and so on – then the only way to pay for it is to put it behind a paywall. And that creates an uneven playing field where the hate speech, misinformation and disinformation is free to read; the accurate stuff is locked away.

    As 404 Media puts it succinctly:

    there’s an entire advertising industry that has fucked the internet, and fucked society. 

    It’s hard to disagree.

  • Everyone isn’t everyone

    There’s an accidentally enlightening headline on the BBC report about blatantly obvious crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, who has been convicted of stealing billions of dollars by defrauding would-be crypto millionaires. The headline: “Everyone got duped by Sam Bankman-Fried’s big gamble.”

    But that isn’t true. There were lots of people pointing out that this emperor didn’t have any clothes for a very long time, but mainstream media chose not to listen to them in much the same way that most mainstream media was embarrassingly credulous about NFTs, most of which are now worthless. Long before the authorities moved in it was very clear to anybody with eyes to read or ears to hear that Bankman-Fried was as trustworthy as a three-dollar bill in an industry that’s an absolute paradise for fraudsters.

    Everybody got duped? No, a small section of people got duped because journalists didn’t do their jobs. As John Naughton wrote last year, “so many apparently serious media outfits let him get away with it… Some interviewers confessed apologetically that they knew nothing about the complex businesses he had run and allowed themselves to be bemused by the incomprehensible bullshit he was emitting.” All the signs were there, but supposedly reputable, authoritative news outlets didn’t want to tell that story because “the mainstream media were so invested in the founder-worship that is the curse of the tech industry, not to mention some of those who cover it.”

    All too often, journalists aren’t doing journalism: they’re doing PR. It may be PR for charismatic tech CEOs, or for the think tanks they and their cronies fund, or for more dubious attempts at controlling particular narratives. But it’s still PR. When “everyone” means “everyone who feeds me stories or makes me feel interesting and special”, many more people suffer the consequences.

  • AI won’t save publishing

    A wise post by Ian Betteridge on AI as a “burning platform moment” for publishing: publishers who see AI in editorial solely as a way of reducing costs aren’t seeing the big picture. AI reduces barriers to entry too: if you’re publishing “good enough” AI-written content, your rivals are everybody else with access to AI. And that access is cheap.

    You cannot gain competitive advantage at the cheap, low-cost end of the market. Trying to do so will not only make you vulnerable to anyone else with the same tools (at $20 a month) but also devalue your brand over the long term.

    As tech writers of some vintage, Ian and I have both seen many technological waves disrupt publishing: the move to digital, the pivot to video, the rise of search engine optimisation, the rise of reviews that aren’t reviews and many more. Each time, some publishers – including very big and successful ones – have sacrificed long-term credibility and ultimately viability for short-term returns, only to see those returns disappear as a new disruptor comes to town. There are countless formerly great publications that have lost significant readerships, or disappeared completely, because of that short-termism.

    And AI isn’t the only disruption that’s here right now: the current obsession with Google traffic and affiliate revenues that means everybody covers the same product stories and deals is running out of time too.

    As Betteridge rightly points out, publishers have assets that AI and cheapskate rivals don’t: “decades worth of experience, context, contacts and knowledge of audiences in your editorial teams.” Wise publishers will be thinking of how to empower and amplify them, not replace them.

  • Donating to hate

    The Huffington Post has a new article about another very rich American donating money to fund anti-trans groups. This one is Joseph Edelman, a billionaire hedge funder. He’s not alone: rich men’s money has been funding huge swathes of the anti-trans movement for some years now, and not just in the US and its UK affiliates: there’s a lot of Russian oligarch money in there too, especially in mainland Europe. You might argue that Paul Marshall, a significant funder of right-wing media in the UK including UnHerd and GB News, is part of the same pattern – the super-rich funding outlets that push division and portray the world’s most privileged people as victims of sinister, shadowy “elites”.

  • Now that’s funny

    From Popbitch:

    The intensity of internet discourse can sometimes create an overinflated sense of just how interested the general public is in certain stories.

    For instance, Graham Linehan’s new memoir Tough Crowd: How I Made And Lost A Career In Comedy sold 390 copies in its first week – including pre-sales. A figure that fails to place it in the Top 1000.

    To put that into context, titles that did crack the Top Thou include: a large print wordsearch book in at No.551, which sold more than twice that; and a colouring book called Dinosaurs Around The World, which sold over 2,000.

    He’s currently claiming to have sold tens of thousands of copies, apparently unaware that “ordered by bookshops who thought serialisation in two national newspapers would mean a lot of sales” and “actually bought by people” are not the same thing. Books not sold are returned to the publisher after a set period.

    Hilarious hubris aside, the opening paragraph of the Popbitch piece is key here: that story, and the trouncing of the Tories in last night’s by-election, are yet more evidence that the anti-trans culture war is an obsession of a very small group of people: newspaper proprietors, right-wing politicians and obsessive internet trolls.

    Update: in fairness, it’s worth pointing out that the figures won’t include pre-sales sold directly via the publisher, which is where the author’s biggest fans will have been getting their copies from. But that just further proves the point that the general public just isn’t interested.