Inviting Steve Bannon to the New Yorker Festival was a Terrible Idea, But David Remnick was Not Evil to Do So
Today we learned that one of the headliners at the upcoming New Yorker Festival was Steve Bannon — President Trump’s chief strategist for the first seven months of the administration, and general purveyor of noxious and hateful nationalism and racism. The magazine’s editor, David Remnick, was planning to interview Bannon before a live audience.
By the end of the day, after significant online protest that such an invitation normalized hatred, the New Yorker withdrew the invitation. Remnick may still interview Bannon for a podcast, but not live and on stage.
It was a very bad idea to invite Bannon to the New Yorker Festival, which honors esteemed and respectable thinkers of all ideological persuasions. Bannon’s ideology is a malevolent force that has only brought great sadness and fear to the world. As Syracuse communication professor Whitney Phillips might put it, the festival invitation — especially from a publication as high profile as the New Yorker — is part of the “oxygen of amplification” that allows odious views to become ever more mainstream.
At the same time, it is also true that Bannon’s ideas have a long and shameful history — in the US, of course, and in various forms all around the world. Nationalism and racism are not going away, and in many ways are on the rise. Journalists have to cover these developments somehow, and I believe it was in this spirit that Remnick — one of the premier reporters of our time , who has published numerous articles critical of the Trump adminstration— issued his invitation to Bannon.
Not that Twitter saw it that way. As ever on the platform, everything was categorical and without any nuance. Rather than “David, we understand your goals but this is the wrong way to go about them” it was “David Remnick is an evil Nazi sympathizer.”
This is why I so appreciated New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb’s take on this controversy, part of which I included above. This is indeed, to quote Cobb, a case of “binary morality. ”A reporter of Remnick’s stature is not immune from criticism — far from it — but he does deserve some credit before people leap immediately to the very worst of conclusions.
Fat chance, I know.
