The proposition – that many mainstream Australian journalists might be less intelligent than a lot of their readers – got a bit of a workout yesterday, when the New Yorker Festival cancelled the appearance of Breitbart culture warrior and former Trump consigliere Steve Bannon, after a storm of protest and withdrawals. The move coincided with an entire Four Corners program devoted to the man, something the show rarely does.
“You can’t ignore Steve Bannon,” the Four Corners publicity said. Many begged to differ, just as they did with Leigh Sales and Katherine Murphy, who berated the New Yorker Festival for “surrendering” to the mob, and then felt the fury turned on themselves. In the middle of it all, Tonightly, decided to trash some of its goodwill with a less than sparklingly original comedic disquisition about how left identity politics made Trump possible.
More on Tonightly below, but what was common to the journalistic interventions and the festival was a naïve reflectionism. We don’t make people important, they say. We simply cover people the public think are important. Rubbish, of course, obviously so to anyone with the most basic introduction to a bit of material political theory. But most of our journos skipped so many classes, and spent so much time in the bromide camera room huffing chemicals, that they know nothing, and may have cognitive impairment, and are thus liberals.
Can’t ignore Steve Bannon? The only reason Four Corners could get him is because he’s a broken down political hack, whose White House internal power play failed, leaving him to wander among the nativist-ethnonationalist sects scattered across the West, trying to foment right-wing revolution in countries he doesn’t understand. The interview was pretty interesting actually, but had he the sort of power that gave his words weight, we never would have heard it. Four Corners, meanwhile, got an ABC twofer – high profile, and a right-winger allowed to speak at length.
The New Yorker was clearly after something of the same. The issue has little to do with free speech – a magazine’s adjunct publicity festival, who cares? – and more to do with the lack of confidence The New Yorker has in its own standards. Bannon isn’t someone like, say, Roger Scruton (hardly an exact opposite, being an ex-tobacco industry shill ‘n’ all, but y’know), with some of the same ideas; Bannon is a propagandist and low-blow political fighter, whose tracts would never find their way into the magazine. Why invite him to such a festival? For the same reason other fests have animal churches, and wellness centres – because there is such an oversupply of the middlebrow that it has ceased to enervate, and so non- or anti-culture must be brought into it, to remind people of the feelings culture once gave them.
The same might be said of Jazz Twemlow’s – it takes skill to have a name that white, with the word “jazz” in it — bit on how the identity politics left produced Trump. Well, yeah, point taken in 2016. But the division and elitism of a lot of gender and race identity politics – knowledge-class values imposed by a rising class with the power to enforce them – only helped Trump, it didn’t make him. If that were possible, Pauline Hanson would be PM here, so annoying is our left identity politics. But we haven’t had a decade of no-recovery, and the US and the UK have. If the identity-politics left have slipped up in this regard, it’s in turning “whiteness” into such a concrete, crudesced thing, that people eventually take it on with pride, because there is no other way to live a concrete identity without going nuts.
Identity politics used to be of the right, while the left appealed to universal human values. For a while that reversed; now, as part of that process, identity politics has returned to the right. If you find it surprising that media etc figures show such tolerance for someone like Bannon, it is because culture has stopped doing the job of giving meaning, and kultur is taking over. If the media is history’s seismograph, mainstream journos are the pinheads recording the shock waves.
So many journalists who won’t dare to engage with their audience or give them a platform to reply (especially progressive or left wing people), but thinks it’s a terrible thing if a man with a thousand megaphones isn’t handed yet another one.
Saying people want “silos” or “enclaves” if they don’t want to see Bannon give his umpteenth chance to spout his rubbish, while doing nothing to give such chances to people on the other side of the spectrum, and doing nothing to say wait a minute, it’s not like Breitbart or even Fox are exactly giving a fair crack of the whip to left wing people! No no no, it’s just evil left wing people who want to censor the right!
I had zero respect for a lot of these journos anyway, and now it is going negative. Their appalling coverage of Australian politics has been a big part of our terrible politics in the past decade; the hatchetting of Gillard, the hagiography of Abbott until it was unsustainable, then Turnbull until he got rolled from the right while all his media supporters sat stunned that the work they’d done to sell him to the left and centre had been for naught and lashed out at News Corp for their bias against a LIBERAL PM – truly a shakr-jumping moment.
Anyway, not content at saddling Australia with two terms of incompetent government because of their conviction that the Liberal Party is the true party of government if only it will take advice from the press gallery on how to govern, they are intent on normalizing the far-right out of their conviction that “lefties” are the real evil around here.
The trouble is, I suppose, with media a dying industry, what genuinely intelligent and insightful young person would go out there and say they want to grow up to have Mark Kenny’s job or Katharine Murphy’s job or Leigh Sales’ job? At least Leigh is on TV I guess. So we’re stuck with the public agenda in the country being shaped by people who are simply not up to the job.
Thank you Arky. It’s so good to read a *coherent* rant for a change.
The great unhinging of the “serious” wing of the MSM in the last 24 hrs has been rather depressing.
Good stuff, Guy. While I think that works completely as an argument for why the New Yorker should never have invited Bannon in the first place (as well as an explanation of why they did), I don’t know that it justifies disinviting him in response to public pressure once the mistake had already been made. Your thoughts on that?
Interested to hear Guy’s take on that too, actually.
It’s a slightly more difficult call, since hey, once you HAVE done the idiot thing by handing him the megaphone in the first place, taking it back makes him look like a martyr and feeds this stupid media narrative of the “intolerant” left. So, with the original mistake made and locked in, it is arguable that it’s a further mistake to then disinvite him – just getting the invitation and being treated as a worthy figure by a “respected” organisation is at least 80% of what Bannon would get out of this anyway, so since he’s already got that 80%, getting a bonus out of the disinvitation means he’s arguably doing better than he would have if they just went through with the invitation.
But make no mistake, inviting him in the first place was a huge mistake for which the New Yorker was rightly castigated and which the journos defending are being foolish about.
Rather as the Germ & usedCarr were disinvited from some other limp lettuce yak-fest for having upsetting views.
In the interest of balance I tried to watch Ferguson’s Bannon interview but his dogmatic manner & raised voice speaking over the interviewer made his ideas even more repellant than usual.
Bannon, this useless double-shirt-wearing blubber sack, has been totally irrelevant since Trump turfed him – went back to Breitbart, got canned there, went to Europe to rabble-rouse all the Wilders-style nativists, got owned, slunk off. Now he gets a platform on 4 Corners which could be addressing any number of actual issues relevant to this country! Razer’s column today addressed him as the bag of shit he is.
“We simply cover people the public think are important.”? And how do these hacks gauge that, do they actually mix with us pleb rubes?
They edit what we get to see and hear.
Look at the way they act – they’re more concerned with what other hacks think and say.