This week I want to reflect on bias in the media. It’s not just any old bias I want to talk about; it’s the most sinister type, that motivated by a hidden, nefarious agenda.
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These thoughts have been prompted by a particularly upsetting story—upsetting generally, but also for anyone who has worked as a journalist and managed to hold on to the notion that there is something special about a free press. That’s the sentencing a few weeks ago of Peter Wilby (pictured above), a former editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Independent as well as a long-time Guardian columnist, for possession of child pornography, including images in the most serious category—real children being sexually abused and subjected to pain.
With that in mind, the first striking follow-up came from Toby Young. I don’t know Toby well, but have met him at a few events (most recently in Dublin on Saturday, where I was speaking at an event organised by the Free Speech Union Ireland). I am also a member of the FSU UK, which he founded.
The lineup for Ireland Uncensored on September 16th, from left to right: Kevin Sharkey, Senator Sharon Keogan, Niall Boylan, Michael Shellenberger, John McGuirk, me and Ben Scallan
Years ago, I was vaguely aware of Toby as the founder of a “free school” during the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government—in fact, a friend sent her children there. The next I heard of him was in 2018, when he was forced to step down from the board of the Office for Students, after a campaign to force him out based on some vulgar tweets and easy-to-criticise articles written during his earlier career as a columnist-provocateur.
I didn’t follow Toby on Twitter, hadn’t read any of the columns in question and was, at the time, doing a very full-on job that left me no capacity to follow the vagaries of British cancellations. So I was surprised when I checked what his sins had been and discovered that they were pretty minor—actually, I don’t know why I was surprised; by now I should know better.
He had tweeted several times about the size of women’s breasts. A single paragraph in an article on social mobility, which largely concerned the (significant) influence played by assortative mating—the tendency of clever, well-educated and rich people to marry each other—made the suggestion, more or less satirical, that if and when reproductive technology had advanced to the point where embryos could be selected for intelligence, it could be given free to couples with low IQs. He snorted a lot of coke when he was younger—no secret, and very common among the Tory boys he ran with. In fact, given his long career as a columnist-provocateur there was surprisingly little to attack.
Reading about it all five years later, it has such a wearying feel. “Tweets emerged”, the articles say—in other words, someone who didn’t like him searched on Twitter for his handle and words like “breasts”, “IQ” and so on. I certainly think I would be automatically suspicious of any such story now, and wonder if I’m alone in this.
Well, Toby knew Peter Wilby, and liked him. So when, during his cancellation, he saw that Wilby had written about him, he assumed Wilby would be coming to his defence and his heart leapt. Instead, Wilby tore him apart. The most hurtful thing he said was that Toby’s father—Michael Young, the man who coined the word “meritocracy” in a famous book, published in 1958 (in case you don’t know, he saw meritocracy as a very bad thing)—would have been deeply ashamed of him. Strikingly, Wilby also claimed that among Toby’s failings was an addiction to pornography—not something he had actually been accused of, unless you count remarking on breasts.
In a recent issue of the Spectator, Toby says that the moral he takes from Wilby’s conviction is that we really have to stop believing that liberal and left-wing moralisers are actually any better than the rest of us. But Wilby did more than that. He didn’t merely present himself as better than nasty men who talk about boobs and make satirical remarks when discussing demographic trends. He minimised child-abuse throughout his journalist career, claiming that abusers were actually innocent victims of witch-hunts and blocking stories about ongoing child-abuse scandals.
In an article in the Guardian, journalist Dean Nelson tells of his experience of pitching to Wilby in 1991, when Wilby was news editor of the Sunday Independent. Nelson had an explosive story: evidence of the systematic abuse of children in care in Wales. That the story had legs would have been obvious to any editor worthy of the name. But Wilby, Nelson writes, “couldn’t have been less interested”.
Nelson then took the story to the Independent (a sister publication to the Independent on Sunday, separately staffed and edited) which put it on the front page and made a campaign of it. Seven months he broke another story of abuse in a children’s home. This time the Independent ran it, but he later found out that Wilby, then deputy editor, had advised not doing so.
In a Twitter thread, Nelson does the sums on Wilby’s seven years as editor of the New Statesman.
Atm the @NewStatesman thinks you should pay them to read their staggering disclosures about its former editor #PeterWilby. Here it is for free....
Of the thousands of articles the magazine published during that period, 126 had a significant reference to child sexual abuse or paedophilia. Of those 126, 12 contain comments or arguments that could reasonably be interpreted as either minimising the seriousness of child sexual abuse, or as questioning the integrity of victims, whistle-blowers, police or journalists investigating allegations of sexual abuse of children.
Nelson calls this a “secret agenda”, and that seems like no exaggeration. Here’s further coverage in the Private Eye, and in the Daily Mail.
I’ve been thinking about what motivated Wilby to do all this, and what the answer means for the imperfect business of journalism more broadly. It may, at first sight, seem obvious that a person who is committing crimes might be keen on articles minimising the seriousness of that sort of crime. In fact, I think it’s anything but: criminals generally do not want to raise suspicion, and with that in mind it would be better to make a great show of moral indignation about crimes against children.
And indeed this is what many men who want to conceal their sexual activities do. The phenomenon of the hellfire-and-brimstone preacher who’s later caught in a brothel—and of the men who used to rant and rave about “poofters”, married women and were then picked up in police trawls—is very familiar. (I feel the need to say I’m not equating being gay, or even paying women for sex, with raping children—my point is that men who want to deny that they engage in reviled sexual acts don’t usually go out of their way to defend people known to commit those acts.)
I also don’t think it’s about one paedophile looking out for others, at least not exactly—I don’t know why Wilby would do that. I think people get misled by the phrase “paedophile ring”; those consist of men who work together to get what all of them want. To the extent that they seek to conceal each other’s crimes, it’s to hide their own or as a quid pro quo.
I suppose Wilby may have wanted to shed general doubt on the truth of claims of child-abuse, the better to brush off any that might in future land on him. That’s a bit of a stretch—such is the general hatred for paedophiles that a dozen or so articles in the New Statesman are unlikely to make much difference. But in favour of that interpretation is one particularly ridiculous piece in which Wilby he argued against reporting requirements for convicted child-abusers’ addresses. There are in fact intellectually respectable arguments for aspects of this very countercultural position, but Wilby didn’t make them. Instead he lazily—and without any evidence, because he was wrong—claimed the allegations were all about “witch hunts”.
But the most important reason Wilby went to bat for paedophiles, I think, is that he was trying as hard as he could to convince himself that what he was doing wasn’t really bad.
This belief is commonly expressed by child-abusers. In 2006-07 Sarah Goode, an academic at Winchester University, administered questionnaires to 56 anonymous self-described paedophiles she recruited on online forums. Many minimised or entirely denied the harm their actions caused, saying for example that that child pornography was harmless if the child had “consented” and that they preferred the children to look as if they were enjoying themselves. In fantasies, they imagined children seeking and initiating sexual contact with adults.
Such false thinking may flow from the “sexual over-perception bias”: a cognitive flaw which makes men (but not women) prone to seeing sexual interest where there is none. But it is also probably because denying the harm allows them to maintain some sort of self-respect while doing something they know most people abhor, and because it enables the abuse. It will be easier for a man whose abuse of children isn’t motivated by sadism to initiate sexual contact with a child if he thinks the child likes it, or at the very least isn’t being harmed.
My final thought is that there is a quite general tendency to minimise the experiences of anyone at the wrong end of unwanted sexual conduct. And this, I think, goes way beyond child sex abuse. And this absolutely shapes media coverage, as well as public discourse more generally, and policing and laws.
There are an awful lot of men who, among their various intellectual and emotional commitments, hold a brief for male sexual licence and refuse to take its victims seriously, whether they are children or adults. (I had already written this sentence before the Russell Brand story broke; if you doubt what I’m saying, just look at the comments on Twitter.)
This overlaps with the 2nd rule of misogyny: women saying no to men is a hate crime. I see this when I look at the stunning number of men who shifted from campaigning for gay rights to trans rights. The first—at least, so I thought—was about allowing gay people to enjoy the same freedoms between consenting adults as straight people already had; the second is about coercing women into dropping the boundaries they erected to keep themselves safe from men.
All I can think is that some of the men (by no means all) who campaigned for gay rights weren’t actually concerned about equal rights, but about men being stopped from doing what they wanted. I can’t see any other way to square the two.
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