Hack belt, first Dan: Why Dan Hodges genuinely believes he and the Daily Mail do something more than trolling...
Everything's fine if you've got a byline.
Previously | Toxic avengers: The paper of “Enemies of the People” and “kill vampire Jezza” cannot offer lectures on civility...
In a Twitter back-and-forth with LBC’s James O’Brien, Dan Hodges wrote:
… genuine question. Today, me and Guido and The Spectator are worse than the trolls on here. What about six months? What about a year? How far are you planning to go with this?
He was responding to tweets from O’Brien that said…
I don't see much on here from the most unhinged & disgusting anonymous trolls that is more vile and deliberately inciteful than what I see from The Spectator & GuidoF awkes 'journalists' so it seems unlikely that outlawing anonymity would solve much.
… and, responding to an interjection from Hodges:
I regularly see my wife, my children, my adoption & my fertility served up for abuse on here, Dan, but even I'm not arrogant enough to think it's anything like as important as the stuff about refugees, muslims, foreigners & black footballers that appears in newspapers like yours.
To answer Hodges’ question: Yes, you, perpetually-thirsty drink driving enthusiast Paul Staines and the editorial staff of The Spectator are worse than Twitter trolls. And the reason can be boiled down to a single word: “power”
While columnists like Hodges and their editors hate to get into discussions about power dynamics — simultaneously believing that their views are important while pretending that the amplifying power of a byline and famous masthead make no difference — it matters.
The views of people on social media — anonymous or otherwise — are only discussed on radio or television when it’s been decided that they are a problem. But media has given itself a permanent exemption from real criticism; it is never the conduit for hate or an arena that deals in dehumanising language.
And just as they have long given themselves a philosophical exemption from the demands that debate be “kind”, newspapers and other media outlets have lobbied for a legal exemption from the forthcoming “online harms” legislation that so many of them have furiously championed. While papers rage at social media — which is, after all, a competitor — they have ensured that their own anonymous comment sections will not be subject to new regulation.
“Your cesspit is disgusting! Our cesspit smells delicious.”
In yesterday’s Times, the paper’s Beijing correspondent Didi Tang reported that:
China will require more than 200,000 accredited journalists to take at least 90 hours of continued education each year to ensure they are “politically firm”, “professionally excellent” and toe the party line.
This, inevitably, led to British journalists — including the Financial Times’ Jim Pickard — to note the importance of “democracy and the free press”. It was hard not to tap the sign engraved with the Humbert Wolfe inscription:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to.
While it is undeniable that there are many good investigative journalists in Britain — some of whom are employed by the Financial Times — the notion that hacks in the UK never "toe the party line”, particularly those in the ludicrous travelling circus of the Lobby, is laughable.
Just as Hodges, wrapped in his duvet of professional ignorance, cannot for a second imagine that he might have anything in common with a troll — despite writing for the organisation behind “Crush the saboteurs” and “Enemies of the people” — too many British journalists operate under the “no one tells me what to write” delusion even as their proprietor’s whims are infused into every story.
After tweeting that “democracy and the free press should never be taken for granted”, Pickard — the FT’s Chief Political Correspondent — followed up bemoaning the “very predictable replies”. Much as I hate to be predictable and having already reached for Wolfe’s epigram, I’m afraid I’m going to have to reach for that Chomsky quote too.
In an interview back in 1996, Andrew Marr asked Noam Chomsky how he could possibly know that the interviewer was “self-censoring”. Chomsky replied:
I’m not saying you’re self-censoring; I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.
The key to being a prominent member of the British press is to never question why you are sitting where you’re sitting. If you do, it’s a Truman Show moment and the entire edifice can collapse around you, just as Truman’s life in the movie falls apart once he discovers that nothing around him is actually as it seems.
Today, from The Daily Mail to The Guardian, the newspapers report with straight faces on “David’s Law”, a renewed push since the killing of Sir David Amess last Friday, for anonymity on social media to be “banned”1. As the Conservative Party Conference “karaoke-gate” story illustrated, hacks and politicos often share social spaces and have very similar class interests so it’s no surprise that many prominent journalists like the idea of an anti-corn cobbing law2.
It’s also why tweets, sketches, and news reports about yesterday’s tributes to Sir David Amess allow Mark Francois to become the teary-eyed face of objecting to “online misogyny”. Putting aside other… ‘issues’, Francois is the man who drew his finger across his throat in a slitting gesture while Theresa May was speaking in Parliament and voted against lifting Northern Ireland’s abortion ban.
Francois — nicknamed “Little Hitler” by Amess when he ran the late-MP’s campaigns — used his speech to suggest he’d like to drag Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey to Parliament. His outrage at misogyny didn’t stretch as far as The Sun, The Daily Express or The Daily Mail, for instance, perhaps because all of those papers frequently turn to him for an outrage quote.
Of course, Francois words were warmly welcomed by journalists who hate the way in which social media has allowed “nobodies” to point out their complicity, cloddishness, and hypocritical cant. He called for…
David’s law [to be put] onto the statute book, the essence of which would be that while people in public life must remain open to legitimate criticism, they can no longer be vilified or their families subject to the most horrendous abuse, especially from people who hide behind a cloak of anonymity with the connivance of the social media companies for profit.
But what about journalists and columnists who, with the connivance of the press proprietors vilify not just celebrities or politicians but any individual who they deem worthy of a monstering? What about the king trolls — Lord Rothermere and Rupert Murdoch — who use the front pages of newspapers to declare people “traitors”, “saboteurs” or “enemies of the people”?
Francois words were a call for censorship, a call for the silencing of voices that do not have the bolstering of a byline and the deep pockets of a press baron behind them. When the government decides what criticism is legitimate, no criticism is legitimate.
The reason that The Guardian’s headline (PM faces calls for ‘David’s Law’ to halt online abuse) follows the same line as The Times (MI5 ‘should have more control over Prevent) and The Daily Mail’s free paper sibling Metro (Time to end the online hatred) is that there is no true media plurality in Britain, despite the crowing over how much better ‘we’ are than the Chinese.
On the same day that the papers talk of “ending online hate”, Richard Littlejohn — whose vile column about Lucy Meadows was specifically referenced by the coroner (“a character assassination”) after she took her own life — is able to write a column snarling about “the sewer of social media” alongside lachrymose sentimentality about David Amess.
Richard Littlejohn pretending to be part of the solution rather than a decades-long example of everything that is wrong with the British media and public discourse in general? To steal his tedious catchphrase, “You couldn’t make it up.” Except, he does, every week to a deadline in The Daily Mail.3
We are collectively being gaslit by the British press. We are expected to pretend that the newspapers, the TV shows, the radio programmes do not engage in the kind of cruelty that would get a Twitter account banned forever. And we’re not supposed to mention the sheer opportunism of pretending the killing of Amess is about social anonymity. The limits of the conversation are already policed with heavy manners.
Giles Coren laughed at Dawn Foster’s death but that’s not trolling because he has a Times column and a BBC series. Dan Hodges could write a column illustrated with an image of Jeremy Corbyn in a coffin 10 days after the murder of Jo Cox but that’s just robust criticism. Jan Moir made cruel and unfounded insinuations about Stephen Gateley’s death and 12 years later she’s still one of The Daily Mail’s ‘star’ columnists. The list goes on and on.
And as for the rest of Hodges’ trio of terrific journalists — drink-driving connoisseur Paul Staines and The Spectator — going through the pieces they have published (including in the latter’s case homilies to the Wehrmacht and Greek neo-nazis) is like trudging through raw sewage.
And where did Dan Hodges go to talk about his latest column? Yes, GB News, the televisual equivalent of a flat-roof pub and home to the biggest concentration of well-renumerated trolls outside of a fairytale bridge.
If you’ve ever been called a troll and are looking for legitimacy, just get yourself a job at The Daily Mail. You’ll instantly become a commentator. Remember, you can’t be an evil prick if you’ve also got an expense account…
That this is logistically impossible, philosophically incoherent, and morally obtuse doesn’t get much coverage.
“‘im not owned, im not owned!’ I continue to insist as I slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob” (Dril, 2011)
Apologies to Stewart Lee, there.