Lost in the concrete forest: ‘Iron’ Mike’s profitable idiocy, Novara’s UnHerd capitulation, and Owen Patterson’s odious excuses…
Each, in their own way, reveals an ugly truth about the broken media.
“A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not…”
— Reagan in a televised address from the White House, March 4, 1987
“Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Nixon couldn’t tell the truth, and Reagan couldn’t tell the difference.”
— Mort Sahl, Mort Sahl’s America (1997)
The comedian Mort Sahl died yesterday. He was aged 94 and while he outlived satire — which was murdered in 1973 by a blow to the head from Henry Kissinger’s Nobel Peace Prize — he sadly did not outlast Kissinger1. Nixon’s war criminal2 Secretary of State remains stubbornly alive — aged 98 — receiving only mild punishments like having to meet Liz Truss.3
A brazen ability to treat truth and lies as largely interchangeable, coupled with a willingess to double down when you’re caught out, is a professional advantage to politicians and media figures alike. Boris Johnson, a man medically incapable of experiencing shame, has pursued the strategy in his march through press and parliament, but he’s merely one of the most prominent examples.
Yesterday morning on TalkRadio — LBC for cabbies who consider the Grand Theft Auto games to be a series of instructional videos — ‘Iron’ Mike Graham4 (imagine Jabba the Hutt’s less socially adroit cousin) ‘interviewed’ a spokesman from Insultate Britain. It was a set-up with Graham intending to mock the man’s job like a hack comic doing crowd work but it didn’t quite work out that way:
Cameron
Morning, MikeMike Graham
Oh ‘ello, what are you glued to, Cameron?Cameron
Just your screen, unfortunately.Mike Graham
’Unfortunately’… what do you do for a living, Cameron?Cameron
I’m a carpenter.Mike Graham
A carpenter, right. So, how safe is that for the climate?Cameron
Well, I work with timber which is a much more sustainable material rather than concrete. I also…Mike Graham
But you work with trees that are cut down, don’t you?Cameron
It’s a sustainable building practice.Mike Graham
How is it sustainable if you’re killing trees?Cameron
Because it’s regenerative, you can grow trees.Mike Graham
Right… well, you can grow all sorts of things can’t you?Cameron
Well, you can’t grow concrete.Mike Graham
Yeah, you can.Cameron
…Mike Graham
See you, Cameron. Cheerio… That was Cameron, he grows trees, then cuts them down, them makes things from them. Brilliant. Marvellous. I don’t think I ever want to talk to any of those people.
Graham was clearly hoping that his interviewee would have an easily mockable job but, as he has the mental turning circle of an oil tanker, he stuck to the line even as he discovered that Cameron was a carpenter. It’s either a failure of staff work — a good researcher would have discovered that fact and warned Graham to take another tack — or a deliberate stitch up because the host is loathsome.
Having sat-navved himself into such a conversational cul-de-sac that he was declaring on national radio that you can “grow” concrete, Graham brought the interview to a premature close and then began doubling down faster than competitors in a twins-only three-legged race.
As usual he adopted the full scale Dril strategy (“im not mad, please dont put it in the newspaper that i got mad”) by making the interview clip his pinned tweet, boasting about all the retweets — in fairness, talkRadio doesn’t care about what kind of attention it gets — and appearing on Jeremy Kyle’s to honk about how “words are [his] currency”. If that’s the case, talkRadio is so cursed with verbal hyper-inflation that I’m surprised its hosts aren’t waddling around with Weimar-style wheelbarrows full of dictionaries.
He then moved on to sharing an article on researchers using bacteria to grow building materials (which the academics compared to concrete but which is another thing entirely) and got futurist Tom Cheesewright5 onto his show this morning to support his assertion by talking about other research… which still doesn’t produce concrete.
Concrete — actual concrete rather than lab-grown experimental materials that have been compared to concrete — is made from aggregate bound together with cement and water, which forms a slurry that can be easily moulded into different shapes. It accounts for about 8% of greenhouse gas emissions. Timber is a more sustainble building material that leads to far lower emissions.
But Graham, having trapped himself in a corner, doesn’t want to talk about the relative merits of concrete and timber; he wants to pretend that he’s both “owning the left” and correct that you can “grow” concrete. And he’ll get away with it. talkRadio may not be a big megaphone — it has about 1% reach — but it’s a Murdoch-backed megaphone nonetheless.
Truth one: Obvious and egregious stupidity has no detrimental effect on your career in the British media. In fact, you style it out by shouting louder and making it part of your ‘persona’, and you’ll be promoted. We can call it The Madeley Principle.
While a chunk of Twitter was laughing at Graham’s crushingly literal take on the phrase “concrete jungle”, a subtantial part of it — me included — was angered and disquieted by YouTube’s deletion of Novara Media’s channel, seemingly without warning or explanation6. It was another example of the arbitrary nature of platform power and highlights the risk to smaller media outlets.
In part because of the strength of feeling on social media, Novara was restored to YouTube within hours. But the shock seems to have been enough for it to run into the arms of UnHerd — the hideous ‘rationalist’/phrenologist baby born of the result of a Christmas party kneetrembler between The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator — with Ash Sarkar giving an interview to that publication’s Executive Editor, Freddie Sayers.
Beneath the headline Left and Right must unite against tech censorship and lured into the conversation by transactional ‘support’ from “from all sides of the political spectrum” (as Sarkar puts it), the UnHerd interview is so transparently a trap that I expected Admiral Ackbar to pop up in the corner of the frame.
Rather than sticking on the topic of platform censorship and the specific case of YouTube’s systems, Sarkar allowed Sayers to draw her into giving a quote on the “censorious left”. She told him:
There has been a censorious turn to the left. It’s no good denying it. And there has been, I think, a tendency to say, because this conversation has the potential to bring in viewpoints which we deem hateful and harmful, that this conversation shouldn’t be happening at all. That is something which I disagree with.
Which is, in itself, a defensible position but you have consider who was asking the question that provoked that answer and where he was asking it. It’s like a fox in a clumsily sewn suit of feathers strutting into the hen house and asking, appropos of nothing, about the chickens’ position on fox freedom.
One of Novara’s most prominent hosts and contributors turning up on UnHerd and standing beneath the line “left and right must unite” leads to the conclusion that the two outlets are united by media class interests over everything else. It’s clumsy to imply that YouTube treats left and right the same or that the interests of the left-wing media organisations and right-wing ones are/should be aligned.
The video affirms the false right-wing persecution narrative and Sarkar’s words will be used against her and Novara in the future. In Eesop’s fable of the dog and the crocodile, the dog refuses to stop because it knows the crocodile is up to no good. Yesterday, Novara made itself a more credulous dog then hopped on the crocodile’s back. The question now is just how long it takes before we hear the sound of jaws snapping shut.
Truth two: It’s easy to be fooled into thinking your interests are aligned once you start sharing the same sofas and green rooms.
While Sarkar sidling up to UnHerd and Graham’s fevered imaginings about concrete trees dropping blocks on his giant swede head were each shocking in their own way, yesterday’s most eye-popping media statements came from Owen Paterson, the former cabinet minister found to have exploited his position as an MP in “an egregious case of paid advocacy”, and his media outriders.
Paterson is featured on the front page of today’s Daily Telegraph with the line: “Torture of my investigation helped drive my wife to her death.”7 It follows a comment piece from Thatcher biographer, Sam Eagle’s evil cousin, and former Telegraph editor Charles Moore headlined Owen Paterson is the latest pro-Brexit MP to fall victim to a flawed, unjust system.
Today’s interview with Paterson, conducted by Camilla Tominey, is headlined Watchdog’s Kafkaesque inquiry helped tip my wife over the edge and while Patterson is entitled to make claims about his own family, both it and Moore’s piece leave The Daily Telegraph doing something that the Samaritans expressly recommend media outlets should not do: Attributing someone taking their own life to a single reason.
It’s unlikely that The Daily Telegraph — which broke the MPs expenses story back when it still occasionally cosplayed as a real newspaper — would accept a non-Tory MP (or even a Tory withwhom it wasn’t friendly) trying to distract from their own actions by raising the tragic death of a loved one. It’s particularly notable that Moore makes a big play of mentioning Patterson’s support for Brexit as if some sneaky remainers put all that cash in his hands.
The Daily Mail also offers sympathy to Paterson with a feature by Guy Adams that asks “was he a greedy politician on the make... or tragically naive?” Owen Patterson is 65 years old and I suspect the Mail’s outbreak of empathy would not have occured if the subject of the story was less of a true blue ‘chap’.
Paterson, a former Environment Secretary, was found to have lobbied for two companies (Randox and Lynn’s Country Foods), receiving £112,000 a year to advise them — alongside his £82,000 MP’s salary — in a case that the report called “an egregious case of paid advocacy”.
While Paterson and his friends in the right-wing press are framing the story as a hit job by Kathryn Stone, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, her inquiry was followed by an investigation by the Parliamentary Standards Committee, which is made up of MPs from across the House including Tories. It found he repeatedly used his parliamentary office for business meetings between 2016 and 2020, sent letters related to his business interested on Commons-headed notepaper and failed to uphold the Nolan principles for standards in public life.
Truth 3: It is a universally acknowledged, that a well rich tory in possession of friends at The Mail and Telegraph, will never be without an excuse.
And, as luck would have it, there’s a Mort Sahl quote for that one:
Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.
Sahl said of Kissinger: “Nixon's the kind of guy that if you were drowning 50 feet off shore, he'd throw you a 30 foot rope. Then Kissinger would go on TV the next night and say that the President had met you more than half-way.”
Should any legal representatives for Mr Kissinger wish to challenge this assertion just reply to this email.
Who — The Times claims today — is a “fashion influencer” despite her demeanour and clothing only being likely to influence people with ongoing head injuries.
His given first name is Archibald but he ditched that long ago having realised that it doesn’t fit the “man of the people” schtick he’s selling.
Cheesewright told Graham: “Yes, you can grow stone and effectively turn carbon dioxide in to a variety of stone like materials. In the fundamentals of the process, you are correct.”
Novara says it was on one strike and no warnings (YouTube operates an opaquely applied “three strikes” policy.
Rose Paterson was found in the woods adjoining the Patersons’ home in June 2020.