Why the culture wars are being lost by default

We have a moral problem in this country. Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a cowardice problem.

One of the reasons the other side is winning the culture wars – and no one should be in any doubt that they are – is that too few conservatives and genuine liberals (as opposed to authoritarian neo-Marxists who have hijacked the term) have the guts to stand up and declare themselves.

Look at the comments on this blog and others such as Bassett, Brash and Hide or Muriel Newman’s Breaking Views.

The people who comment know what’s going on. They realise that liberal democracy and capitalism are under unprecedented attack. They are thoughtful and perceptive in identifying the threats posed by the cult of identity politics and they know what’s necessary to counter it.

They understand that we are in an ideological war to protect and preserve the values of the free, tolerant society we grew up in. So why do so few of them identify themselves?

The people driving the culture wars have no such qualms. Confident in the knowledge that their world view is shared by the institutions of power and influence – government, the bureaucracy, academia, schools, the media, the arts, even the corporate sector – they promulgate their divisive, corrosive messages without fear.

They are winning by default because too many people on the other side - that is to say, our side - keep their heads down and their identity secret. People whose political instincts are essentially conservative may not be outnumbered, but they are certainly outgunned.

It’s a given that conservatism often equates with passivity and apathy. The vast mass of people who are broadly happy with the status quo will never compete with the ideological zeal of the social justice warriors, and it would be idle to expect them to. But I’m not talking here about the masses who are primarily concerned with raising a family, paying the mortgage and watching rugby; I’m talking about those who are deeply worried about the radical re-invention of New Zealand society and who recognise the need to oppose it. They’re the people who need to raise their heads above the parapet.

They could take their cue from commentators like Chris Trotter and Martyn Bradbury – old-school lefties who have the courage to take on the identity politics cultists, even at the risk of alienating many of their former political allies (and who, perhaps even more uncomfortably from their point of view, now find themselves aligned with conservatives in defence of the core democratic value of free speech). Don Franks, an occasional commenter on this blog, is another Marxist free speech champion who finds himself vigorously at odds with the new generation of middle-class, university-educated social justice warriors.

In fact the Left in New Zealand has historically been far more fearless than conservatives about expressing unpopular, non-conformist opinions. When I was in charge of letters to the editor at The Evening Post during the 1990s, hardly a week would pass when we didn’t publish provocative missives from diehard socialists such as Rene (R.O.) Hare, Arthur (A.P.) Quinn and the Reverend Don Borrie. It didn’t worry them that they were out of step with the mainstream. We could learn from their conviction even if we didn’t agree with their ideology.

The anonymity issue was epitomised for me by someone who hides behind the pseudonym of Redbaiter, formerly an occasional commenter on this blog with whom I recently had an increasingly impolite email exchange (now terminated). His online nom-de-guerre suggests a fearless crusader for freedom, but he’s too timid even to identify himself in private emails.

He justified his anonymity to me by citing threats and abuse he supposedly received when he previously used his real name. (I don’t think I’m betraying any confidence in revealing this, since no one, to my knowledge, knows who Redbaiter is. I certainly don’t.)

Other anonymous commenters on this blog have used similar arguments. But threats and abuse, as unpleasant as they are, are surely a price worth paying for the free and open exercise of free speech. The neo-Marxists must derive great satisfaction from the fact that many of their opponents so lack the courage of their convictions that they keep their names secret, as if there's something shameful about their opinions. Perversely, it enables the other side to feel morally superior.  

Another argument often heard in defence of anonymity is that jobs and careers can be jeopardised by the expression of politically incorrect opinions, which in itself indicates how seriously democratic values have been subverted in the prevailing climate of intolerance.

Some followers of this blog don’t hesitate to point out to me that I’m in the privileged position of not being dependent on income from a job, which is true. But I’m sure many people who comment on blogs like this have, like me, moved past the point where careers might be at risk. What’s stopping them from naming themselves?

It’s worth mentioning here that the Free Speech Union, which is officially registered as a trade union, has corresponding legal rights to protect freedom of speech against interference by employers, and has successfully done so. Speaking of which, the union will be having its first annual conference in Auckland next weekend and can look back on a remarkable year of achievements (mostly ignored by the mainstream media, which should be at the forefront of the free speech movement) in the fight against the insidious phenomenon known as cancel culture.

The emergence of the FSU is a heartening sign that resistance to authoritarian censorship is slowly gaining momentum, but there’s a long way to go. In the meantime, it would help if more people demonstrated their support for free speech by openly and unapologetically exercising it. The more who step forward, the more they give courage to others. It’s called critical mass.

 

 

 

Two more reasons why the public have lost faith in the news media

We live in the age of the media sideshow. In Britain, the press is in a state of uproar because Boris Johnson’s closest adviser, Dominic Cummings, broke the lockdown rules to drive 400 kilometres to his parents’ home, apparently so that extended family could care for his four-year-old son.

It doesn’t look good, especially when his wife was showing coronavirus symptoms and Cummings, according to Johnson, was worried that he would contract the virus himself. There were surely other ways of making sure their son was looked after.

But it’s worth noting that the story was broken by The Daily Mirror and The Guardian, two papers aligned with the left. The British left loathe Johnson, deeply resent his popularity, and will use any means they can to damage him.

Cummings makes it easier for them because he’s personally unpopular and appears to revel in his image as a master of the dark political arts. He’s also resented within the Conservative Party because of his perceived influence over the prime minister, which probably explains why some Tory MPs are demanding his head on a platter.

Yes, this is an issue for Johnson, and he’s characteristically tackling it head-on. It’s refreshing to see a political leader standing his ground rather than meekly capitulating to sanctimonious left-wing media bullies, as so many gutless centre-right politicians do.

Does Cummings deserve to be defended? I couldn’t say. But what’s clear is that a frenzied media beat-up has blown the issue out of all proportion. That was apparent from Corin Dann’s interview on Morning Report this morning with an over-excited Vincent McAviney, one of Radio NZ’s British correspondents.

McAviney signalled his bias when he made a snide remark suggesting that because Johnson has had multiple children with various partners, he’s in no position to talk about fatherly instincts. Really? Johnson has spread his seed around, so he’s a hypocrite for sympathising with Cummings’ desire to protect his son? Is that a gigantic non-sequitur, or what?

Warming to his theme, McAviney proceeded to paint Cummings as some sort of sinister Rasputin-type figure exercising “huge” control in Downing Street – more than anyone before him, he reckoned. Perhaps McAviney is too young to remember the egregious Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s all-powerful communications supremo, whose toxic behaviour supposedly inspired the character of Malcolm Tucker in the BBC political satire The Thick of It.

But the British journo well and truly blew any chance of being taken seriously - you could say he jumped the shark - when he cited angry tweets by J K Rowling and - get this - a former winner of The Great British Bake Off as conclusive proof of public outrage. The case rests, m'Lud. 

I wonder, do people like McAviney realise how absurd they sound? And does RNZ expect us to regard him in future as a sober and reliable observer of British politics?

Meanwhile, an equally ludicrous sideshow was playing out right here in New Zealand over the supposedly scandalous MAGA cap that someone spotted on a shelf in the office of new National leader Todd Muller.

In a comically hysterical piece in the New Zealand Herald, Damien Venuto argued that this was no innocent political souvenir brought home (along with a Hillary Clinton badge) by someone with a harmless interest in American politics.  No, it was apparently prima facie evidence of sympathy for white male supremacists.

Even the redoubtable, hard-core leftie Martyn Bradbury drew the line at this, pointing out that Venuto’s column was exactly the type of over-reaction that free-speech advocates seize on as proof of the left’s intolerance of differing views.

He’s right, but for me the greater tragedy is that woke journalists like Venuto – McAviney too, for that matter – are the reason the New Zealand public have almost completely lost faith in the media.

Dotcom and Bradbury: a match made in heaven - or should that be hell?

Some of the greediest people I've known were lefties. In fact I suspect the reason they were lefties is that they were deeply, bitterly envious of people with wealth and wanted a share for themselves. In a few notable cases, once they discovered their inner capitalist, there was no holding them back. This was true of several people I can think of who were once staunch union activists but later discovered a talent for making money.

I thought of this when I read courtesy of Whale Oil that Martyn Bradbury, the man whose flat was once decorated with portraits of Mao, Marx and Che Guevara, was charging Kim Dotcom $8000 per month plus GST for political strategy, "on top of a $5000 payment to allow him to upgrade his computer, cellphone and tablet devices". In other words, just another greedy left-wing trougher.

Bradbury has been making heroic efforts in recent months to appear sane, presumably with a view to making himself politically acceptable. It now appears he wants to stand for the new Dotcom party in Auckland Central. If Dotcom has any sense at all he will cut Bradbury loose; in fact today's Dominion Post suggests he might have done so already. I hope it's wrong. Dotcom and Bradbury deserve each other.

Another reason to be suspicious of journalism schools

Anyone who has followed my sporadic musings about journalism will know that I have mixed feelings about the academic takeover of journalism training.

My misgivings start with the fact that I have been privileged to work with, and learn from, a long list of great journalists who had no academic training. They learned by doing.

Prior to the establishment of the first journalism school at what was then Wellington Polytechnic (now Massey University) in 1967, people drifted into journalism via a variety of routes. Many came straight from school, working their way up from menial jobs as messengers or copyholders in reading rooms. They were generally not the sort of people who had been swots or academic achievers at school but they either had, or soon acquired, the instincts and skills that made them great reporters.

To use a cliché, they had a bit of mongrel in them. They included a disproportionate number of misfits and non-conformists, drunks and womanisers. But they knew how to unearth stories and they were free to develop their own individualistic style and flair.

I’m not totally set against formal journalism courses but I suspect (and I know some other journalists of my era do too) that some of the people described above wouldn’t have entered journalism had they been compelled to complete a one-year course of study first, as is now required. And I wonder how many potentially good practitioners are deterred from entering journalism by the thought of having to jump through academic hoops. The qualities that make a good journalist aren’t necessarily those that produce conscientious students.

I also suspect that the selection process for journalism schools filters out potentially good rough-diamond candidates, instead favouring goody-two-shoes types who tick the right boxes and are unlikely to make waves. You can sense how radically the culture of journalism has changed the moment you walk into a modern newsroom and note all the earnest young faces staring intently at their computer screens. Old hands, accustomed to the shouting and swearing of a previous era, find the silence unsettling.

I’m not alone in thinking this. Warwick Roger wrote a column years ago in which he pointed out that, like me, none of the journalists he most admired had been to journalism school. More recently, Deborah Hill Cone lamented the prevalence of what she called “white bread” journalists and the disappearance of the bolshie eccentrics and lowlifes who populated newsrooms when she entered journalism.

So there’s one good reason to wonder whether the academic teaching of journalism is entirely a good thing. I’m not arguing that it should be abandoned, but I think it would be in journalism’s interests to leave the door ajar for people who don’t necessarily meet the academic test. (I should again point out here that Jane Bowron, whose dispatches from the Christchurch quake zone in the Dominion Post have won her legions of fans, slipped into journalism through the back door when she retrained as a sub-editor after the old Dom’s proofreading room was disestablished. We should all be grateful for the fact that she twice failed to get into journalism school, because I doubt that her idiosyncratic style would have survived the tut-tutting of the journalism tutors.)

That leads me to another of my concerns about journalism schools. They tend to encourage a bland orthodoxy, with the result that everyone comes out writing in much the same style. I search the papers in vain for the individualistic and sometimes slightly anarchic flair that once encouraged readers to hunt out the bylines of particular reporters. When you do find examples of such writing, it’s usually under the name of people who are not trained journalists, like Joe Bennett. I fear that the graduates of our journalism courses have any endearing quirks drilled out of them.

Then you have to look at the people doing the teaching. There are a few very good journalism tutors, usually people who have done the business themselves and teach from experience. But there’s also an awful lot of second-raters – some with minimal practical experience, others with nondescript CVs who have been drawn to teaching as a soft option. I remember years ago being on a selection panel charged with appointing a head tutor at a journalism school and despairing at the pitiful paucity of talent and experience among the candidates.

Even when good journalists become tutors, they almost invariably mutate into academics. Over time, they stop thinking and talking like journalists and lapse into the unintelligible jargon of academia. I reckon it should be a condition of all journalism tutors’ appointments that they be required every three years or so to work for at least six months in a newsroom, just to put them back in touch with reality. Some hope.

If anything, the insistence on academic credentials serves to discourage the appointment of experienced journalists. The appointment system is skewed in favour of candidates with qualifications, such as masters’ degrees and even doctorates, that virtually no working journalist possesses. This increases the risk that over time, the teaching of journalism will become ever more concerned with theory and more distanced from practice.

This suits some journalism academics very well, since it permits the intrusion of leftist ideology into the lecture room. Academics such as associate professor Dr Martin Hirst, who rejoices in the grand title of curriculum leader in journalism at Auckland’s AUT University, approach the teaching of journalism from a highly politicised standpoint. An avowed socialist, Hirst is of the school that believes journalism is all about challenging the established order. He and others like him sneer at the notion of objectivity that for decades has underpinned mainstream journalism in Western liberal democracies.

Media studies departments are even more vulnerable to political contamination. Marxism as an economic theory may be dead and buried, but what is known as cultural Marxism, which applies Marxist class theory to society and culture, is firmly entrenched in academia. Dr Sean Phelan, who teaches media studies in Massey’s Department of Communications, Journalism and Marketing, specialises in “post-Marxist discourse theory” and regards the teaching of journalism as an “instrument of the existing hegemonic order”. He thinks journalists need more instruction in critical (read Marxist) theory.

The extent to which some journalism schools have fallen under the sway of leftist ideology became startlingly evident with the appointment earlier this year of Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury as editor-in-residence at the Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec), which teaches the national diploma in journalism. In a press statement proudly trumpeting Bradbury’s appointment, the head of Wintec's School of Media Arts (a person I'd never heard of - nothing new there) said he would be a “mentor and advisor” to Wintec’s current crop of journalism and communications students.

What are Bradbury’s qualifications for “mentoring” budding journalists? You might well ask. I’d describe him not as a journalist but as a leftist polemicist, albeit a very noisy one. (Bradbury has variously been described as “the man who will not shut up” and “the most opinionated man in New Zealand”.) His home, the Listener revealed in a profile in 2005, was decorated with posters of Marx, Che Guevara and Mao, which suggests a man who never matured beyond the undergraduate phase in his political views. If Wintec wants to be known as the journalism equivalent of an Islamist madrassa, it couldn't have chosen a more perfect appointee.

Bradbury probably can’t believe his good fortune at being given a state-funded job in which he can indoctrinate impressionable students. I get the impression, from occasionally reading his blog and listening to him loudly declaiming on Jim Mora’s afternoon panel, that he’s interested in journalism only as a means of advancing a leftist, anti-capitalist agenda. This of course makes him ideally suited to academia, where antipathy toward the corporate mainstream media and all its bourgeois values – such as balance and neutrality – runs deep.

The paradox, of course, is that the same corporate mainstream media will be expected to provide Wintec graduates with jobs, assuming they survive the formidable endurance test of being ear-bashed by Bradbury for a year. Not for the first time, I marvel at the media industry’s benign tolerance of media academics who are hostile to it. Media companies don’t fund journalism courses, but they employ their graduates. This surely gives them some influence over the way courses are run and who teaches them. How much longer, I wonder, will they remain silent on the subversion of mainstream journalism values by leftist theorists?