Oh no, not branded
This is not journalism, this is passive-aggressive finger pointing and hissing. Ellie Harrison in the Independent:
Jonathan Ross has been branded “transphobic” after he endorsed comedian Graham Linehan’s controversial views on Twitter.
Wtf is that supposed to mean? What’s it doing in a newspaper? Branded by whom? “Branded” how? Anybody could say that about anyone. It’s meaningless. It could mean that Ellie Harrison has “branded” Jonathan Ross that way by saying it just before she started typing.
New lede:
Somebody called somebody something.
You don’t say; what a shocker.
There’s also the sleazy “controversial” pasted onto Linehan. Controversial according to whom? Controversial according to what standards?
Newspaper editors should spike this kind of shit. It’s childish gossip and fight-picking and it doesn’t measure up as journalism.
She sticks to it though. All she’s got is “people do say.”
Linehan, the creator of Father Ted and The IT Crowd, has repeatedly been accused of transphobia. Last month, he was widely condemned for comparing doctors treating transgender children to Nazis conducting medical experiments on prisoners in concentration camps.
All passive voice, all no-agents passive voice – where is all this branding and accusing and widely condemning coming from?
Oh, you know – people on Twitter.
[…] Jones on the other hand found that wretched content-free “ooh somebody said” piece of dreck in the Independent a prompt to make another soaring declaration of […]
The scarlet TERF. Right on the front of his chest. Where everyone can see.
These days everyone is either ‘branded’ or ‘dubbed’, often interchangeably and with zero apparent thought about what those terms mean. Especially terrible people are sometimes both branded (an excessively painful punishment and extreme form of othering) and dubbed (an honour conveyed by an authority) by the same people for the same thing. All to distract people from the fact that the “somebodys” in “somebody said something about somebody” are kind of important if you’re going to go around calling it news. “latsot calls Trump an idiot” isn’t news but “Putin calls Trump an idiot” is.
The passive voice is yet another way of making a point without having a case and it works so well. I despair almost as much at the people who thoughtlessly suck this type of nonsense from the spoon as at those self-righteously pouring it out.
People like Owen Jones are always so gleeful when they find someone to call a transphobe, aren’t they? I was wondering earlier where that joy comes from and whether I’m guilty of the same sort of thing. Perhaps – I thought – I experience some slight malicious enjoyment when someone who’s made a career of trying to destroy gay rights (bonus points if they’re religious) reveals themselves to be homosexual. But that’s not it, not quite the same. It’s more like the brief, wild glee of a child in the playground who tricks another into using a swear word then skips off delightedly to tell the teacher. Or the child who lopes along in the wake of the bullies, franticly picking new targets to avoid becoming one itself.
The Independent ceased to be a newspaper both literally and figuratively some time back. It’s a great pity; in its early days it did much to invigorate British journalism, which had become very stale in the mid-80s. It blended serious reporting and analysis – I’ll always recall the front page of 23 December 1989 reporting both the Romanian revolution and the death of Samuel Beckett – with humour, such as its test-drive of a Centurion tank. For a while it looked as if it might even supersede the Times as the newspaper of record. Now, apart from one or two decent journalists, it’s just a refuge for writers who are too wacky even for the Guardian. Why anyone – indeed if anyone – signs up for its paid content is a mystery.