“The tawdry tale of how identity politics has turned the 2018 Comment Awards into a vehicle to attack nominated journalists is rather tragic and self-defeating.
Two of the shortlisted nominees for the Society and Diversity award, Guardian journalists Gary Younge and Nesrine Malik, demanded that they were removed from the shortlist, because Times columnist Melanie Phillips appeared on the same list.
We have become accustomed to people refusing to share platforms with others. But refusing to be on the same shortlist? They argued that shortlisting Phillips “legitimizes her offensive attacks on immigrants…and Muslims” and that her “body of work…amounts to bigotry and divisiveness.”
The subsequent Twitter comments drew support from a range of eminent journalists who one might have hoped would be more concerned with celebrating press freedom rather than virtue signaling.
In today’s toxic media wars, it seems that by claiming to speak on behalf of an identity group or in defense of the marginalized, one is given a green light to lash out in the most vituperative way.
But sadly it is a snapshot of a broader censorious atmosphere in relation to views that don’t neatly fit into today’s prevailing orthodoxies on any number of identity-related issues. The toxic “I Find that Offensive” default position, the ring-fencing of certain topics as beyond discussion, the delegitimizing of anyone who doesn’t conform, is inevitably eating away at democratic debate more broadly.
The price for even raising the debate is to be labelled a bigot and to have one’s reputation trashed.
If Donald Trump’s attacks on the media take the form of shouting “fake news” at any journalists who don’t flatter his narrative, the equally chilling identitarian mirror image are those who shout “offense,” “white supremacism,” “transphobia” at those who skeptically query intersectional narratives.
This climate is already garnering too many media scalps.”
https://quillette.com/2018/10/25/the-comment-awards-fiasco/
