Ideological and other clubs in the media
Plus: What any party seeking to increase influence can learn from UK’s broad conservatish media tent
Another week, another reasonable stance pushed behind the pale in Canadian public conversations: questioning the covering of women in certain Islamic traditions, even if you raise it from within the Muslim faith. Pediatric surgeon out of McGill, Dr Sherif Emil, sent a polite letter to the Canadian Medical Association Journal in which he, together with the well-known and once-Canadian now US-based activist Yasmine Mohammad, questions the Journal’s choice of a photo illustration. The picture shows, to positively illustrate diversity, a veiled toddler. OK, a pre-schooler. Could the girl be 4? Let’s say a 4-y-o hijabi. A tweet from Yasmine Mohammad expresses disbelief that a veiled 4yo girl would be presented in a normalized and neutral way, and be unproblematically an illustration of a Muslim household.
I will remind the reader that girls usually get veiled from adolescence on. They are not yet considered temptresses at the toddling age, even in most conservative households. A veiled pre-schooler is indeed a peculiar sight even in traditionalist Muslim homes. (A Quora thread on the topic, which includes contributions from many hijabis, here.)
Upon the publication of the letter the usual operating procedure followed. People who make a living off of creating outrage over issues of this kind have called the letter and the journal islamophobic. A twitter mob quickly assembled. “Harm” was bandied about, the demands for apology and retraction followed suit. “These words will lead to death”. The editor did a public mea culpa, the letter was retracted. A CBC report taking without any reservations the side of the mob and the shamers materialized before end of day (the Star had the same kind of report up the next day). Like I said, standard operating procedure.
Never mind the voices of Muslim women against veiling and niqabs – which are a considerable constituency, and not only in francophone Canada. There is a lot of anti-veiling activism in the Iranian diaspora, and quite a lot of women of Lebanese, Iraqi and Turkish origin in Canada who would under no circumstance cover themselves. (I spoke with one of them, Turkish-Canadian mezzo Beste Kalender, back when I used to write about music.) There is no room for their political concerns in the media.
The unveiled Muslim women therefore join a number of other topics and constituencies which have until yesterday been part of the conversations in the Canadian public sphere but are now hooked in to the third rail. It’s an expanding third rail.
If we had the equivalent of the British online magazine Unherd, or The Critic, or The Article, there’d be a few good pitches in inboxes of those media already, and a day later pieces published arguing in favour of the freedom to express displeasure at a worldview that sees women’s sheer existing and moving in the world as a constant source of corruption for men, the only constituency that matters. It pains me to write this, but the left of centre has shrunk itself out of public conversations – particularly in Canada, and to a large degree in the UK as well. The liberals, especially those still gainfully employed in Canadian media, are largely avoiding and tiptoeing. Where is the fearless, irreverent, erudite writing to be found in the Anglosphere today? In UK’s right of centre outlets, alas, like UnHerd and the Spectator which have opened up their tents and invited writers of all ideological stripes to write for them. The UK right has managed to pull a fascinating trick in the last few years, as the left continues to tear itself apart. It’s created new media that 1) enliven and expand the public sphere where conversations can happen, 2) open their doors to the left dissidents who have been fired, shamed, etc by their own, so we regularly see the left minority thinkers finding unexpected homes in what used to be traditional right wing media (Suzanne Moore in the Daily Telegraph anyone?). It also 3) continued covering arts and books; why on earth would they cut arts and books? while refusing to go identiterian and race obsessed in arts criticism, and also 4) nurtured some genuinely hybrid, unusually sounding political thinking which, once you really look at it closely, leans conservative, even tho perhaps in some unusual ways (so-called Blue Labour, for ex).
UK right, by fortifying a good chunk of the public sphere, took care of its own interest too and made itself a dominant intellectual forum in culture and opinion journalism.
The unpleasant part of the whole business for those of us who regularly read UnHerd, The Critic, and the Spectator is that you will keep coming across pieces by the old-school reactionaries like Douglas Murray and Breitbart London’s James Delingpole, and some curiously enchanted coverage of figures like Eric Zemmour. Then there’s the ties that bind. I’ve only recently got the tiniest of inklings of the degree of nepotism in British media and its incestuousness with the Conservative Party. (Nepotism and political revolving doors, but in Canadian media circles, deserve their own newsletter.) Dominic Cummings wife, a baronet’s daughter, is a Spectator editor. Allegra Stratton, until recently UK PM’s spokesperson, is married to a Spectator political editor. Clare Foges, a Times columnist who wrote a well-argued column against the legalization of marijuana recently, is a former David Cameron speech writer. PM BJ used to be the editor in chief at the Spectator; the Spectator book editor Sam Leith (who happens to be nephew to Prue Leith of the British Bake Off fame, and grandson to Sir John Junor, long-time editor of the Sunday Express & friend of the paper’s owner, Lord Beaverbrook) recently shared on Twitter an unflattering episode about BJ’s stinginess from his time at the Speccie. (This exellent piece on BJ’s marital situation by the Spectator’s executive editor Lara Prendergast informs us that BJ still doesn’t miss an issue of the old magazine.)
That this magazine manages to produce exciting, general interest writing on a daily basis is extraordinary. They right-wing press in the UK found it in them to overcome their limitations.
The UnHerd operating budget – and they started with 15 full-time journalists -- is covered through an endowment by a multimillionaire who also happens to be a LibDem donor. (Over on the left, the London Review of Books is similarly funded, through a family endowment by its e-i-c Mary Kay Wilmers. UK gazillionaires are doing this one thing right.) As an online magazine/daily, UnHerd used to eschew paywalls but has introduced a metered paywall recently and a subscription model as an additional revenue source. It has made itself essential meanwhile so I guess they might as well go for it. They pay new writers a respectable 400GBP per piece. They also buy ads in one of my favourite podcasts, The Rest is History, and both historians from that podcast write for UnHerd occasionally. (And often review history books for the Times of London, the paper for which I’ve had a digital subscription since at least 2018.) Dominic Sandbrook, one of the historians, had a piece in the Spectator online the other day on how to get children – and adults, for that matter – interested in history, the essence of which is that it’s a joyous and fun activity, reading about history. How different is this from the utter miserabilism of the left and the liberal view on how history should be taught, and how it should be handled in view of our present concerns? Of course people will flock to writers who won’t insist that their readers wallow in bile. Would you rather read a writer who strives to give you pleasure, the best drink and the best seat in the house, or one who will want to remind you how bad you and/or things for you are? (I expect the main reason that Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 was so successful is the way it’s written; it’s all about its witty, un-miserable style.)
So every week, my inbox gets the Spectator newsletter on Arts and another one on Books. If you look at a physical copy of the Speccie, half of it, literally starting from the binding in the middle, till the last page, is arts and books coverage. I expect there’s more online – there’s definitely more political content online.
and the arts newsletter…
The Spectator also buys ads for its international edition in the Bari Weiss podcast, which has been a reasonable, nuanced, well-reported and produced podcast since episode one, and I’ve heard their ad in the Blocked and Reported podcast as well. Somebody there is very plugged in.
The New Statesman is less interested in arts and books, and while I’m registered as a reader and get regular subscription offers, the site is a mess which regularly won’t let me read my “four free articles a month”. I’ve been trying to get the Culture newsletter in my inbox, I’ll tell you if I ever get it. I subscribed a couple of times! The legendary social democratic magazine now, bizarrely, worships John Gray, former Thatcherite, now a communitarian who can stand neither the Labour Party nor the LibDems. He is an incredibly seductive reactionary writer who also happens to be an atheist (which is why I suspect conservatives are in no rush to claim him), profoundly pessimistic about humans, weary of universalist ideas, any kind of globalization, and any idea of progress and “the arc of the moral history is long but it bends towards justice” talk. Former Labour leader Ed Miliband recently had a book out and John Gray massacred its naïve internationalism and pro-immigration stance with amused mockery and the “I’m not upset I’m disappointed” vibe on the pages of, ahem, the New Statesman.
Then there are people in the NS like the always interesting Louise Perry who, while she calls herself politically homeless and says she never voted Tory, is a conservative thinker. Perhaps this is some sort of New Conservatism, populated by refugees from the trenches of the academic left, pro-sex trade left, identiterian left, online shaming left? Perhaps populated by people who come from an academic, Guardian-reading households like Perry (as she explains in this “birth control pill wasn’t great for women” interview with the host of a broadly Christian values-themed podcast), and the drop-outs from the queer theatre collective scene, like Mary Harrington who describes herself as “postmodern” and a reactionary feminist. I think they’re both doing some fascinating conservative thinking which is very much not my cuppa.
Who on the left do I think is a must read, then? Rachel Cooke (the New Statesman and the Guardian), Catherine Bennett (the Observer), Polly Toynbee at the Guardian still capable of deadly clear-headed anti-Tory Party columnizing; literary critic Kate Webb; Jessa Crispin in the US (and she’s reviewing podcasts for the Spectator as of late), Helen Lewis (a UK staffer at the American The Atlantic, and the Spark series on BBC4), Jesse Singal (also recruited by the Speccie as a media columnist). The wonderfully reasonable centrists Kath Rosenfield, Bridget Phetasy, Phoebe Maltz-Bovy, the Economist’s Helen Joyce. The always extraordinary Janice Turner (employed by the Times of London), incapable of a humdrum sentence or a half-assed position.
Over in Canada, I fast-read a lot of opinion writers, but can’t think of many that I actively seek out. Many of these have been columnists, selling the same wares, appearing on the same At Issue panel on the CBC, since before I came to Canada, more than 20 years ago! Of the new media, I sometimes, not frequently lately, check out what’s been going on on the Post Millenial, and I occasionally dip into the Read Passage, but the Passage needs much tighter editing (of the verbose and humourless chief editor in particular), a more robust backbone against the intra-elite performance art that is wokeness, and definitely more than four voices. Every now and then they come up with something excellent, like this record of the family connections in Canadian media, which apparently upset the “progressives” on that list the most.
What I wish for the National Post, and I know it’ll never happen, is that it expand its tent into a Times of London kind of tent, and mix it up in the opinion section. And for Canadian conservative-adjacent millionaires? To start new digital media, with the long-term self-interest in mind if nothing else. A Canadian UnHerd of sorts, thematically both national and international, so it gets British and American traffic too. Those hypothetical millionaires could also swoop in and invest in important culture magazines which are not exactly thriving financially (the Literary Review of Canada, Opera Canada).
Who do you read no matter what the topic or political stripe? Drop me a line to let me know.
PS: There will be at least one more LP before end of year – sorry lads & ladesses, my Christmas is in January, and December is usually a productive month for me. The final missive will probably be a roundup, the 2021 in books and podcasts. Thank you for sticking around.
