With the exceptions of arms dealing and music criticism, is there a profession that is less reputable than that of opinion columnists? They have been growing awfully defensive of late. The retraction of Julie Burchill’s attack on transexuals provoked a lot of chatter about the freedom of speech, while the abuse that thuggish geeks dish out on Twitter has inspired great consternation about “trolls”. I don’t disagree with any of this. While Burchill should never have been published, the erasure of her column is silly, and the calls for heads to roll over it are hysterical enough that one can imagine their being repeated to shout down more worthwhile arguments. As for people who compose pro wrestling promos over Twitter, well – they are indeed a pain.
Yet I am not going to defend the freedom of opinion columnists without observing how miserably some of them are wasting it; nor defend them from abuse without observing how some of them have encouraged the boorish narcissism they now decry. Burchill is a good example. I am sure that we are all growing tired of hearing about her so I will strive to dissect her body of work in a grisly enough fashion that no one can chirp bright-eyed platitudes about the “fearless opinions” that made her rich and “contrarian thinking” that placed her on the side of Margaret Thatcher, abortion and the Iraq War. Such courage.
It is not her opinions that make her so obnoxious but the means by which she arrives at and expresses them. She takes whichever views will satisfy her prejudices and then frames them in tones of unhinged hostility. This often leads her to be both flatly wrong and hateful. The Irish, for example, she defined as “Hitler-licking, altarboy-molesting [and] abortion-banning”. I suppose it made a change for someone to libel the people of Ireland without mentioning cider or potatoes but, still, that is shameful. “If one is a Catholic,” she wrote a couple of years ago, “Surely double-speak and duplicity are second nature”. Surely? No. My Granddad, for one, is a member of the Catholic Church and I am not sure he has ever been dishonest. I would not let someone get away with saying that in my living room; how she got paid to write it for the mainstream media is beyond me.
Burchill is not a thinker. She can think, I am sure, but she has been so fêted for mindlessness that she has never had to. The target that she defines herself as opposing, then, is hypocrisy: the dullest of vices to criticise because one is, in essence, issuing ad hominems. Admired though she is for her character assassinations, even these have struck me as inept; reliant upon the force with which they are expressed rather than the incisiveness of their content. George Monbiot, for example, she described as being “spoon-fed…and…having no idea what real life is about”. One might argue that a person who got into journalism in their teens and has subsisted off cocaine and bubbly since has as much right to brandish their working class roots as Snoop Dogg does to speak of life in the ghetto but one should also note that Monbiot has been attacked by gunmen in Maranhão; mutilated with a fencing spike at Solsbury Hill and afflicted with cerebral malaria in Lodwar. I am no great admirer of his journalism but “silver spoon”? That sounds far closer to “fearless”.
It would be unfair to treat her as an aberration. One could bring up the thuggishness of Rod Liddle, for example, who spent one blogpost describing Owen Jones as a “halfwit”, “pig-ignorant idiot” and, through the medium of a friend, “fucking…tosser” and followed it with another in which he expressed his wish that someone would collar George Monbiot “smash his spectacles and spit on his shoes”. One could speak of the indifference to the truth that Nick Cohen has displayed on multitudinous occasions. One could force oneself to think of Harry Cole, who unapologetically smears a fellow citizen as a terrorist.
I suppose columnists have to ask themselves what they exist to do. If it is merely to entertain none of the above should concern them. If it is to inform, edify and produce literature to rank alongside of that Orwell, Mencken and others, however, they should be ashamed of the tawdry and often unreadable obscurantism that characterises much of their professional class. This encourages censors and empowers thugs, and if we are going to aid them in facing either we should insist that they take a long, hard look at themselves.
January 16, 2013 at 10:30 pm
There used to be a different Burchill, many years ago now. The fact is that owners and editors create these mad creatures which are just on the edge of what the public will tolerate. They don’t do it because that is what people want but because their only other alternatives are a) very boring columnists or b) columnists who actually write substantive things: a) means that you lose readership and b) means that you lose advertisers.
January 17, 2013 at 1:15 am
Nicely put!
Yes, I’ve heard that there was a different Burchill. It has been long enough that I am afraid it has joined “different Adam Sandler” in my imagination.
January 17, 2013 at 11:18 am
It strikes me that with a lot of this there’s a real sensitivity to any kind of criticism which demonstrates in general, a lack of awareness of life in the 21st century. They seem happy to use the internet to promote themselves but also look down scornfully on anyone who dares challenge them via an online medium.
Thus journalists like Moore are happy to self-promote on Twitter but are incredibly touchy when challenged on anything they’ve written, and label almost all criticism as ‘bullying’ – usually in pieces they are paid very well to write. They are happy to write seriously bigoted, throwaway comments on Twitter but use the intemperate, throwaway lines on others as evidence of a deep-seated hostility to the concept of free speech.
Moore is an odd one – she’s been trying for a while to write about the need for unity in the face of Tory austerity, yet she can’t bring herself to say sorry for offending people and in fact seems happy with Julie Burchill’s bigotry. You surely can’t have it both ways, and this, for me, is something broader than just this little incident – Moore and her friends (and it is odd, I think, that everyone supporting her seems to know her personally) claim that we need solidarity in the face of X or Y yet they are the first to start insulting and smearing people who should be their allies, if those people have the temrity to say they’re not fully 100% right. Thus, to cite an example, Nick Cohen paints himself as a free speech zealot yet is happy to claim, repeatedly, that anyone who opposes Israeli military actions is an antisemite, and called anyone who marched against the Iraq war ‘pro-Saddam’. That is not how you make allies – it’s how you generate hits online. And that is now the true reason for opinion journos to exist. But with it comes a comments section which every single journalist advises their readers, er, ‘not to read’.
January 17, 2013 at 2:14 pm
…and it is odd, I think, that everyone supporting her seems to know her personally…
The Obs/Guardian commentariat are rather clubbish. I met or saw almost all of them at a Skeptics in the Pub event in London.
That is not how you make allies – it’s how you generate hits online.
Indeed! Appeals for unity are often appeals to be left alone. I am particularly amused by Cohen’s attempt to position himself as being disturbed by the judgmentalism that followed Burchill’s comments. Given that he accuses people of all manner of sins for throwaway comments or, indeed, things that they never said it is most ironic.
January 17, 2013 at 3:10 pm
Featherstone sadly gave Cohen et al the perfect excuse not to bother looking into Moore’s genuine anti-trans bigotry. But it’s depressing how that Guardian-Islington-writers crew end up claiming to be ‘silenced’ – see also the furore when Cohen claimed the Fabians hosted Islamists, where people saying ‘he needs to find another column to write’ while pointing out his myriad factual errors were somehow actually saying he should be sacked.
Cohen’s responses to this are pretty amusing anyway. He enthusiastically retweeted the most offensive line in the Burchill piece and initially told anyone who pointed out its bigotry to ‘read the piece’ – ie they were wrong – before then claiming he’d always known it was offensive!
January 17, 2013 at 3:12 pm
I reflected gloomily yesterday that Mo Ansar seemed to be more sympathetic to transexuals (at least judging by his tweets) than many people I generally see eye to eye with. I can understand if people are friends with Suzanne Moore that they want to show some solidarity, but in some cases this seems to extend to sneering at transexuals and firing off accusations that they are thin skinned, using phrases like ‘manufactured offence’ and so on. I was just noting on another blog that it never occurred to me (or anyone else as far as I recall) that there was a freedom of speech issue at stake when I reported that an antisemitic letter had been pulled by the Guardian following complaints.
http://hurryupharry.org/2012/04/19/guardian-limbo-always-a-new-low/
I think the Guardian has real problems/form with regard to this issue, and I don’t want to trivialise those, but they are not so luridly blatant as the Burchill piece.
I liked this Venn diagram on the topic.
http://dru-withoutamap.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/lobstergate-explained.html
January 17, 2013 at 4:12 pm
Opinion columnists of all stripes are very sensitive to criticism. I think it’s because they realise that their profession is an existentially dubious one and if too many people come to dislike them it might disappear.
Dealing with abusive people on Twitter must be unpleasant. Can’t say that I know how I’d react to having seven shades of shit poured over my virtual head. Still – I would have thought that they had been receiving similar letters/emails since the dawn of newspapers.
January 18, 2013 at 1:10 pm
“it never occurred to me (or anyone else as far as I recall) that there was a freedom of speech issue at stake when I reported that an antisemitic letter had been pulled by the Guardian following complaints.”
Yes – and it’s not like Cohen et al are innocent of trying to get media outlets shut down for causing offence.
Dealing with abusive people on Twitter must indeed be unpleasant, but you don’t HAVE to be on twitter (in fact, until his book came out, Cohen wasn’t). They’re all on it specifically to boost their profiles through interacting with readers. I said on Dorian Lynesky’s blog, and maybe I could have phrased it better but still, that people are only ‘mobs’ on Twitter if they’re being abusive. If an opinion journo gets a tweet telling them how good their article was, they retweet it. You have to take the rough with the smooth, surely.
you might well be right about this fear of ‘disappearing’ – I wouldn’t normally read Paul Staines but he suggests that Moore was openly badmouthing the Gurdian at a debate last night and they might well have told her to rein in the abusive tweeting – maybe this will have serious consequences – but she’s only got herself to blame. I’d also not though about Burchill for a long time til this piece appeared – and she genuinely seems to be finding it hard to get published, she’s even trying to crowdsource her advance for a new (awful-sounding) book.
January 18, 2013 at 1:40 pm
Just looked over Moore’s Twitter feed and she was, in all seriousness, calling her detractors ‘sad’, that they’re sitting around ‘in their pants’, and should ‘have a wank’ etc.
Either you’re on Twitter, and you write blogs, etc, or you don’t. You can’t soak up the adulation of thousands of followers only to then flounce off it temporarily, then reutrn and call anyone who’s on twitter and disagrees with you a lazy, unemployed saddo – also ‘insane’, from her column yesterday. It doesn’t work like that – only it does for Moore and her mates.
In the Caitlin Moran instance of this I could sort of understand why Moran did what she did – but Moore simply has no excuse.
January 18, 2013 at 1:52 pm
You have to take the rough with the smooth, surely.
You do, because the roughness is inevitable, but it’s still sad that it’s inevitable. In an ideal world the timelines of such journalists would be heaving with criticism and snark against their writing, but there would be less of the swearing and florid fantasies about death and pain.
Still, one does have to get used to it if one is going to be a commentator because it is not going to change. Someone like Laurie Penny has been getting worse than this consistently for years. Heck, while you will never find me praising Michelle Malkin as a writer the abuse that she receives makes Moore’s treatment look downright benevolent. I suspect that’s true for all the big-league bloggers.
This, by the way, is hilarious. I guess “Soho Skeptics” is as close as Nick Cohen gets to the real world.
January 18, 2013 at 3:27 pm
That’s partly it – Moore didn’t really get much abuse in comparison with some others. Equally one of the things she’s so incensed by – the ‘EDL supporter’ thing which she requotes ad nauseam – is based on an old column where her approach to them was, ahem, fairly appeasing.
you don’t need to swear to get your point across, but surely it’d be much better to ignore sweary insults than respond in kind? That’s what I don’t get about Moran either – both she and Moore seem to think they can do it cos they’re being witty while doing it, but it just doesn’t work.
that Cohen tweet is pretty funny. ‘an audience who’d decided some time ago to come to see Suzanne Moore speak offered her a round of applause! Proof, if any were needed, that everyone on Twitter (unless they’re on her side) is a total loser! (but not, of course, proof that the audience are all a bunch of bigots).
January 18, 2013 at 4:08 pm
Coincidentally, I just received my first truly abusive Tweet. I have no idea who this guy is or what he was reacting to. It’s rather entertaining.
January 18, 2013 at 4:26 pm
ah, looks like it’s gone. As, incidentally, has Suzanne Moore’s account – again.
January 18, 2013 at 4:38 pm
But the Internet remembers everything.
Yes, probably a wise move on her part.
January 18, 2013 at 5:18 pm
That’s horrible Ben.
Organic Cheeseboard, not surprisingly I like Nick Cohen more than you do, although I completely disagree with him on this one.
I expect people clapped partly because they agreed with what she was saying on the topic in hand, partly because they were civil – it doesn’t prove they agree with her on the transgender issue.
January 18, 2013 at 11:17 pm
I can deal with a bit of abuse. All-boys secondary school. Obscenities were as commons as pencils, blazers and doodles of penises.
January 19, 2013 at 1:51 pm
[...] our opinion journalists are, in large part, just talking to themselves than the idea that they do? Again, as the coffers of the media are emptied these people should ask themselves what they exist to [...]
January 23, 2013 at 6:00 pm
Nobody can take a^%$$# by dolphins seriously, right? LOL.
Oops…Maybe not. http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2013/01/02
January 23, 2013 at 6:01 pm
Ahahaha!