Goodwin’s Bore: Pretending that the right-wing press isn’t obsessed with the culture war is ludicrous...
Goodwin’s Bore: Pretending that the right-wing press isn’t obsessed with the culture war is ludicrous...
... but being ludicrous is Professor Matthew Goodwin's greatest professional strength. And he'll eat a book of your choice to prove it.
Godwin’s Law says that as the length of online discussion increases the probability of a comparison with Hitler or the Nazis approaches one.
The Goodwin Law says the presence of self-pwning, book-eating, Brexit-boosting think-tank parasite academic Professor Matthew Goodwin in a discussion guarantees it will immediately descend into stupidity.
The last time Goodwin appeared in this newsletter was back in April when he popped up in The Daily Mail to opine on the findings of the government’s suspect race relations report1. I wrote then that:
Goodwin pushes an argument that is so common among right-wing rentagobs in the British press that it’s like they pick phrases from a communally-owned big hat full of cliches… it’s because people like [him] need an enemy to define themselves against, particularly as the right controlled the levers of political power for the majority of the last century and continues to in this one.
And while Goodwin has done many stupid things in the intervening months, his latest emission falls well within the purview of this newsletter. No doubt as a precursor for a terrible article in the Mail or the curséd cow site UnHerd, he tweeted yesterday:
You don’t need to be a professor of political science to see the problem with the graph and Goodwin’s analysis of it2; an article doesn’t need to use the words “culture war” to be a piece that contributes to the culture war. In fact, outlets such as The Daily Telegraph and The Times which write incessantly about ‘culture war’ topics are much less likely to put a name to their obsession.
The reason The Guardian used the term more in the period considered in the graph is that it’s more likely to analyse the culture war output of its competitors and therefore need to define it. Goodwin might have noticed that if he wasn’t required to display performative ignorance in his role as Director of the Centre for UK Prosperity at the Legatum Institute, a right-wing think-tank that shares its main funder (Legatum) with GB News.
Goodwin swiped the graph in his tweet from Culture wars in the UK: How the public understand the debate, a study by Duffy, Hewlett, Murkin et al. in conjunction with IPSOS Mori, published by Kings College London in May 2021. The researchers only looked at one term “culture wars” and restricted their search of the Nexis database to articles written before 31 December 2020.
What might they have found if they searched the same database for the term “woke” which has been taken up and distorted so thoroughly by the right-wing press over the past five years?
Leonardo Carella, a doctoral candidate in politics at the University of Oxford, did just that and found that the word was used…
2528 times by The Telegraph
2014 times by The Times
1607 times by The Sun
1472 times by The Independent
and 920 times by The Guardian…
…over the past year. Those results — which are admittedly of the same limited use as the “culture war” search without further context — flip the picture. But Goodwin who wrote about living in “fear of the woke mob” for the Daily Mail back in February needs that ‘enemy within’ to give him meaning and reasons to appear in print and on broadcast.
One of those most frequent analogies used in knocking down Goodwin’s latest hastily constructed strawman was that criminals tend to talk about crime less than victims of it or those trying to solve it.
Goodwin is so entrenched in the ‘culture war’ grift that I’m fairly sure you’d find a balaclava and swag bag stuffed in his back pocket even as he pretends that the culture war isn’t a right-wing endeavour pushed by precisely the kind of publications that eagerly give him a byline.
Here’s a selection of ‘war on woke’ articles from The Daily Mail published just in the last week:
Could THESE children's books be next on the woke watch list? [‘Could’ is a powerful weasel word in journalism. A lot of things ‘could’ happen. I ‘could’ be appointed the next editor of The Daily Mail…]
ABC set to air 'rimming' scene in woke teen comedy All My Friends Are Racist [Shock news as analingus finally arrives in Australia]
John Cleese, 81, blasts 'absurd' woke culture as he fronts series examining political correctness… [Alternate headline: Man with TV show to promote makes comments designed to get publicity]
The Wiggles 'will get woke and go broke' after introducing four new 'diverse' members, says outspoken senator Matt Canavan [Extremely odd Australian politician shouts at children’s band]
How Cinders broke the glass (slipper) ceiling: She's gone from simpering 1950s cartoon to woke, bovver-booted feminist. [Jan Moir ranks versions of the fairytale princess on how ‘woke’ they are… for some reason.]
Meanwhile, over at The Daily Telegraph, the past week has seen the paper decry “woke military generals”, declare The White Lotus “the perfect satire of your holier-than-thou, performatively 'woke' teenage daughter, suggested that men who clean up around the houses that they also live in are “the woke, papoose-wearing, vol-au-vents-baking brigade” and, in a column by angry egg-man Allister Heath which I covered yesterday, claiming “woke ideology is the greatest threat to freedom since communism”.
Yesterday, the paper showed a Goodwin-level of commitment to twisting survey results with a piece headlined TV industry much more woke than public, survey shows. The article begins by saying…
The television industry is significantly more “woke” than the general public, a survey has found, with programme makers out of step on subjects including Black Lives Matter, transgender rights and the British Empire.
… but buries the sample size way down the page:
The sample of delegates was small, with 185 responses
And while it goes big on the differences between national surveys and that tiny self-selecting sample of TV execs…
Nationally, 23 per cent agreed with the statement: “The British Empire is something to be ashamed of.” Among TV executives, the figure was 63 per cent.
Only 27 per cent of the festival delegates said they were proud of the UK, compared to 56 per cent of the general public…
… On transgender rights, 59 per cent of the TV executives said that they had “not gone far enough”, compared with 31 per cent of the general public.
… it moves on quickly from the issues where the TV festival attendees and the public agree:
Both surveys found the majority of people saying they supported the Black Lives Matter movement, although the figures were 60 per cent for the general public and 83 per cent in the TV industry.
Over at The Times, that other broadsheet culture war obsessive, the same survey gets the attention of Richard Morrison in The Arts Column, with a piece headlined TV bosses must switch on to what the viewers really want. While Morrison notes the difference in sample sizes (“Nearly 200 programme-makers” vs. “3,000 TV viewers”) he quickly shoves any concerns about comparing them to one side, writing:
You hear constant accusations of current affairs programmes and documentaries being skewered to favour the viewpoint of what’s usually labelled the metropolitan liberal elite.
Because, of course, a man with a column in The Times is certainly not the “metropolitan liberal elite” and you’d be unhinged to suggest otherwise.
Like The Daily Mail, The Times also couldn’t resist covering the Australian senator losing his mind over a children’s band (‘Go woke, go broke’: Australian MP Matt Canavan dismisses racial diversity on children’s show) and has, over the last week alone, published 13 news stories and reviews balanced on the term “woke” in some way.
The Sun, which has made a special ‘wokeipedia’ logo for its modern “PC gone mad” stories, has spent the last few weeks obsessing over “woke foodies who want the word ‘curry’ cancelled” (they don’t), “woke censors who have declared war on classic comedy Allo Allo” (they just added a warning about outdated attitudes at the start of episodes) and how Llewelyn Bowen “would have snubbed the show if bosses made it ‘too woke’” (man makes stand against something that didn’t happen).
It’s easy for me to search Google News and the newpapers’ own websites to find stories that explicitly mention “culture war” or the word “woke” but most stories that push these narratives don’t state as much in the headline or the body copy. Media analysis requires much more nuance3 than that; it’s like trying to foil a string of bank robberies by hanging around in the street and hoping to hear the gang talking about their next job.
Goodwin thought he had a gotcha with the King’s researcher’s graph because he always starts from a position of knowing what he wants to prove and then sets out to find data that supports him. His interest is not in facts but in a story that serves him and his side of the debate. That’s what makes him so appealing to think tanks and The Daily Mail alike.
He’s just another worker in the British media’s gaslight factory. It doesn’t matter that we can see the culture war being waged in the pages of the Telegraph, Times, Mail and Sun on a daily basis; Matty’s got a graph and it ‘proves’ that the phantom haunting the abandoned fairground was The Guardian all along.
In fact, anecdotal evidence gathered from an analysis of Twitter suggests that being a pol prof rots your brain faster than a diet of bathtub speed.
Of course, Goodwin thinks nuance is a lovely little town in southern France.