Bad-faith right-wing beat-ups

[David]

If you were to ask me what my biggest annoyance with the right-wing media is, it's not that they have a different opinion to me about the world, on specific political issues or regarding how things ought to be. That's all fine: we live in a society with a plurality of views, and it's normal that views I disagree with should be expressed and defended. No, what annoys me most is their insatiable penchant for making stuff up to (pretend to) get angry about.

Some may say that everyone does this – and yes, the Dave Sharma flower affair that we've just been discussing in the other thread comes to mind – but the right-wing tabloids and shock jocks really are the masters at this, and I don't think anyone else comes close to touching them. You can trace it back at least as far as the "PC Gone Mad" news stories of the '80s and '90s: a genre in which teachers are forcing children to sing "Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep" (an absurd urban myth), things are always being banned (but not really) and, of course, Christmas is under constant threat of being done away with.

While 'woke' is the new 'PC' and providing plenty of material for bad-faith beat-ups of this kind, I thought for a while that maybe this stuff was becoming a bit passé. But evidently not – check out these two classics from the last couple of weeks alone:

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/dr-seuss-books-removed-by-woke-librarians/video/11338c987e0666f762c9aacb7b9f8d55

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9331819/ABC-reporters-told-avoid-word-paedophile-child-sex-predators-dont-feel-marginalised.html

(There was also this, which seems equally ridiculous, but I haven't looked into it: https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2021/02/26/mr-potato-cancelled/)

The first is the story (which I'm sure everyone's heard by now) about six relatively obscure Dr Seuss books being "banned" – actually, discontinued from the publishing house – for racially insensitive drawings or language. If this all sounds familiar, it's because there's nothing new about it whatsoever; it's pretty much a direct rerun of what happened with Enid Blyton books 30+ years ago, in which editions of Noddy (etc.) were rereleased with new illustrations removing references to golliwogs. Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of that (and it does strike me that there's something a bit self-serving about rights holders trying to suppress or whitewash their own works that paint them in a less-than-perfect light, as Disney has done with Song of the South), it's scarcely a case of book-burning or a beloved author being "cancelled"; the old versions of Noddy books are still widely available in secondhand bookshops even to this day, and I suspect that will be the same for these Dr Seuss books (despite reports of a few opportunists trying to flog editions for triple figures on eBay) – which, again, I suspect the vast majority of people expressing outrage about this have never read.

The second beat-up is in response to an in-house ABC email discussing a perfectly reasonable suggestion by a Tasmanian sexual assault support service: that referring to child sex offenders as "paedophiles" is misleading and contributes to stigma against people with that clinical diagnosis. To be honest, I can't understand why outlets like the ABC and The Guardian continue to insist on this conflation in their reporting, and would have thought that the arguments as to why you shouldn't do it have been pretty obvious for a while now – but if you disagree, there's nothing to fear: the ABC have insisted that the email doesn't reflect their editorial policy, and they're not changing their style guide anytime soon. Regardless, this too made the rounds in the tabloids and shock-jock segments, with the implication in most reporting (as in the Daily Mail article above) effectively reversing the story: that the request was being made to cater to the feelings of child abusers by not tarring them with the "paedophile" brush – a misreading so incredibly dumb that it makes a case in its own right for why news agencies need to be more careful with their reporting of these matters.

What gets me about this stuff, though, is that I don't think the people pushing these outrage campaigns are dumb. I think they know exactly what they're doing, and that's to present non-stories that they know are non-stories, but that they also know will wind their audience up. Some might be inclined to defend this as just a legitimate business model (they need the clicks, and readers are willing to offer them), but I suspect that all of these beat-ups, in sum, end up forming a large part of people's world views: that political correctness is out of control and coming for everything we love, and that "the left" is much more powerful than it actually is. It's no surprise that people like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin – who directly feed off sentiments like these – are so successful, and I suspect even paranoid conspiracy theories like Qanon are bolstered by such stories, filed away as more evidence of shadowy forces controlling language and our reality. So I think it can serve some pretty sinister ends.

The irony in all this is that, yes, identitarian leftism can be annoying and overreach, and there are serious debates to be had about the core principles of "woke" ideology. But right-wing culture warriors don't actually seem capable of seriously engaging with any of this – instead, it seems like they'd rather spend their time constructing straw men to knock down. Is it really too much to ask for people to discuss things honestly?

[pietillidie]

It's a massive nutter economy, from media tycoons to pundits, advisors, strategists, PR agencies, lobbyists and fundraisers. Right-wing hysteria sells papers and now gets clicks, and is the outreach arm of influence peddling. The left has its hysteria, and even passing industry support, but it's nowhere near as lucrative because right hysteria is underwritten by a stable flow of corporate lobbying dollars, in turn underwritten by the boundless energy of narcissistic greed, further underwritten by a simple equation: cost reduction means greater narcissistic reward.

[stui magpie]

[ronrat]

Their is a bloke who gets tweets on Q and A nearly every week. He worked for me for a while and was probably the most mysoginist racist lazy and rude bastard I ever worked with over 34 years.

Yet people thinks his opinion counts. I doubt he has changed.

[watt price tully]

David, further to your comments about Dr Suess you might find this interesting:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/during-wwii-dr-seuss-tried-to-slay-anti-semitism-but-also-promoted-racism/