What’s in a platform? Bannon, journalism and free speech

Matt Beard
Sep 6, 2018 · 9 min read

It feels like we keep having the same old free speech debates. In the past, we’ve wrestle with whether to give anti-vaxxers or climate skeptics a platform. Today, we’re having the same debates in a slightly more complex territory: politics and morality. The issues are the same, but it’s harder to get certainty — scientific certainty is more easily accessible than its moral equivalent.

In the last couple of days, the flash point for these debates has been alt-right Ubermensch Steve Bannon. In 48 hours, he was interviewed by ABC 4 Corners journalist Sarah Ferguson, announced and uninvited from the New Yorker Festival, and defended by Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, who will interview him at their Open Future Festival.

How should we think about this? Does a commitment to free speech require us to offer Bannon a platform? What the hell is free speech anyway?

What does free speech really mean?

It’s dumb and knee-jerky for people to come out and say with certainty what free speech is in moments like this. The term is highly contested, subject to change and may take on slightly different meanings in different contexts. But, it’s useful to map out some of the general parameters of the free speech debate from the philosophical canon.

Let’s start with the basics. Free speech doesn’t mean you can say whatever the fuck you want. The misquote from Voltaire saying “I disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it” (it was actually Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing a fictional piece about Voltaire) implies we should boldly defend all speech, no matter how noxious, deceitful or harmful it may be.

The so-called father of liberalism, John Stewart Mill, famously uses the example of yelling ‘fire’ in a theatre to make this point. You couldn’t defend this as being a legitimate act of free speech, because the likelihood of harm from the stampede is so high and so likely. We should, Mill thought, curtail freedom when failing to do so will be harmful.

But Mill had a pretty physicalist account of harm. He was of the stick-and-stones school of thought. Harms were injuries, deaths, assaults — he didn’t imagine or take seriously (as far as I’ve read) the possibility or extent of psychological harms that might result from speech. Instead, he thought all speech, with the exception of cases of the harm principle, should be protected as matter of rights — even if it was wrong or immoral.

His reason was that “all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility”. The biggest risk in silencing speech is the risk that we’ve silenced the truth. What if I’m the one who’s wrong? Aren’t a few unpleasant convesations worth it in the face of the enormous risk of censorship: stifling moral progress, scientific development or human knowledge itself?

If you’re wondering why you should care about what Mill thought about free speech hundreds of years ago, there are two reasons. First, I’m a philosopher — I need to tell you what long-dead thinkers said in order to pad my word count. Second, and more importantly, Mill’s ideas aren’t gone. Check out Leigh Sales’ tweet, when speakers like Patton Oswald, Jim Carey and Jon Mulroney started to withdraw from the New Yorker Festival:

Sound familiar? Here’s Katharine Murphy after they finally pulled the plug on Bannon:

So, we’ve still got some Millians around today. But the Millian view has had plenty of pushback since he put pen to paper (finger to typewriter? When was the typewriter invented? I dunno…). For one thing, Mill’s view of harm is pretty narrow. He’s concerned with what we might call direct harms — physical injuries, damage to flourishing by way of defamation, stuff like that. Mill, a fairly affluent, white man — though admittedly quite progressive on a range of issues — wasn’t able or willing to consider the psychological affects of being the object of immoral, degrading or threatening speech.

One of the points that has been widely made regarding Bannon is that those most likely to defend his right to speak (whilst criticising the content of his speech) are those least likely to be affected by his words one way or another. And to be clear, that’s me. I’m a straight, white bloke with stable income and multiple degrees. Bannon’s influence in Australia won’t affect me anywhere near as much as it will affect a host of other people.

The important thing to recognise here is that there are epistemic limitations that come with our life experiences. And those limitations might lead us to take a fairly narrow view of harm rather than expanding that category to include psychological effects and displacement, as someone like Judith Butler argued.

The second thing worth noting is that the origins of free speech didn’t include within it a right to be heard. Today, our questions aren’t primarily about what a person can say (18c debates aside) but who should be given an audience. That’s a question that bears on free speech, but goes way beyond free speech as a right and into a nexus of political discourse, journalistic ethics and public debate. The point is, we can’t just knee-jerkingly scream ‘free speech’ as though it’ll resolve this issue.

NB: A lot of this section parses stuff I’ve written on free speech for The Ethics Centre in the past. Check this link if you want to read a bit more.

Journalistic ethics: Whose interests is the interview serving?

Underlying lots of the heated debate is an idea that goes all the way back to Socrates. The ancient greek philosopher, famous for being killed for being a pain-in-the-ass, believed all wrongdoing was born of ignorance. Education, therefore, was moral salvation. It would correct mistaken judgements and redeem even the most wretched character.

Today, lots of people still operate in this paradigm. In a recent skit for Tonightly, journalist Jazz Tremelow and philosopher Tim Dean riffed on the supposed failures of the left to engage in meaningful argument; instead opting for ad hominem and virtue signalling. And if you view all public debate as an exercise in trying to work out what’s true and persuade your opponents, of course you’d see it that way.

You’d also have no doubt of the value of subjecting Steve Bannon to rigorous questioning; believing the best argument will out — bad ideas will fall away and the public will have been served. And this is the argument that’s featured most commonly around Bannon. The Economist, for example, promised he’d be subject to a “rigorous grilling”. Maybe he would be — but does the mere fact of Bannon’s being grilled amount to serving the public interest?

The answer to this question, like the answer to the question ‘should bad people be allowed to speak publicly?’, is ‘it depends’. The public interest is served, generally speaking, if it is better informed and able to exercise important democratic decisions. This depends on whether the interview is able to obtain new information and whether that information is to the service of the public.

These are things we can’t know for sure before doing the interview — maybe this journalist will ask the magic question at the right moment that finally ‘defeats the bad guy’; maybe hoards of toxic Bannon fans will finally be struck by the problems in his world-view… maybe. We can’t know — but we would need to be pretty sure there was something newsworthy about Bannon right now, rather than assuming Bannon is prima facie newsworthy. If he’s going to say what he’s always said, there’s not much value being offered except ratings and accolades for the journalist.

But — and this is the part that gets missed — if the interview is unsuccessful, it’s not a ‘no harm done’ affair. Bannon is a lightning-rod for racist political discourse. His running of Breitbart, influence in the rise of folks like Milo Yianoppoulous and a certain president, involvement with Cambridge Analytica in race-baiting electoral advertising and so on, target the lesser demons of people’s nature. His presence seems to invite the worst in people — their anger, fear, prejudice and contempt. Lending Bannon visibility, even critically, carries these risks. And these risks are borne by already-vulnerable populations. As Tim Soutphommasane has written, “there is a heavy price to freedom that is imposed on victims”.

All this needs to be part of the discussion of weighing up the morality of giving Bannon a one-on-one interview. In military ethics, a war is often seen as justified only if it has some probably of succeeding, because there is a near-certainty that innocent people will suffer widespread harms for no reason if not. Given the risks involved in interviewing Bannon, maybe we need to apply a similar metric?

We also need to factor into this analysis the potential moral costs of failing to keep Bannon in the spotlight, a point Michael Salter made to me yesterday.

I think Salter’s right. But I also think this argument hinges on a crucial point of contention — is a one-on-one interview the best medium to put Bannon under scrutiny? Many have tried to put him under the blowtorch. It’s a medium he tends to favour, and usually performs pretty well in. Who benefits most from playing on his turf?

These moral assessments are complex. They require us not to treat free speech as some sacred cow. They also demand journalistic humility. Perhaps you won’t be the one to slay the dragon; maybe Bannon is just too good in that context. And even if you’ve got a shot at catching him out, you need to weigh not only the public interest at large, but which groups within the public bear the costs and which groups benefit.

What about Bannon’s rights?

If you’re a real free-speech diehard, you might have noted I haven’t said much about Bannon’s rights here. That might seem particularly unjust, especially because on my model, Bannon is being disadvantaged not because of what he is necessarily, but because of who he is to other people. On the surface of things, that does seem unfair. What happened to a fair hearing?

Well, for one thing, fair hearings are a legal concept and it’s not obvious why or how they translate outside that context. For another, to make this argument, you need to take a pretty narrow view of racism. But people do. Sarah Ferguson conceded to Bannon in her interview that there’s no evidence in his interviews or speeches that he is racist (a point Jason Wilson’s excellent column makes early on). I’m of the view that “we shall know him by his fruits” — a view that’s been reinforced by reading Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.

Manne argues that misogyny is typically viewed as “a property of individual misogyniss who are prone to hate women qua women, that is, because of their gender, either universally or at least very generally.” Manne makes the point that this definition is basically useless.

“What lies behind an individual agent’s attitudes, as a matter of deep or ultimate psychological explanation, is frequently inscrutable… the naive conception would threaten to make misogyny very difficult to diagnose.”

Instead, Manne argues, basically, that misogyny is as misogyny does. The hostile effects of misogyny on women are the measures of it’s presence; not some inaccesible psychological attitude. Does Bannon need to hate people of colour in order to pour fuel on the tinderbox of racial politics? Not if Manne’s analysis is right (and I think it is). And that — independent of his character and worldview — is enough to make his appearance morally loaded.

Add to the mix the crucial point that the right to free speech does not give you a right to an audience, and we get a pretty convincing case to think Bannon is in no way harmed by his not being interviewed.

A return to nuance and showing your work

I don’t think anyone loves the way politics is being conducted at the moment — even those using it are, for the most part, probably exhausted by it. They’d love to be civil; they’d love to spar ideas — but this requires a level playing field. Of late, lots of people have championed the virtues of civility in public discourse — many of those who defend interviewing Bannon among them. But if civility is your jam, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to put one of the architects of noxious politics up in lights, and legitimise his modus operandi in doing so — as Ketan Joshi explains.

With that said, not all exposure is a platform (again, kudos to Salter for this point). Lots of media scrutiny sucks (just ask Yasmin Abdel-Magied or Duncan Storrar), but it’s a fine line in determining which is which at times — Bannon being a case in point. I also think it would be reallly useful if, in cases like this, journalists and producers were a bit more transparent around the decision-making process.

My maths teacher never liked me very much — nor I him (hello, Dr Macks, if you’re reading) — but I’ve always remembered one lesson from his classes. Getting the right answer is worth one mark; showing your process for getting there is worth a lot more. By understanding the methods by which the media make decisions, we can more easily point to shortcoming in the reasoning, highlight blind spots in the process and trust the process.

Should Bannon be interviewed? Is he newsworthy? Should we prefer safety to free speech? The answer is a boring ‘it depends’. But in mapping out the contours of what it depends on, we go a long way to answering the question, and showing why a lot of the answers we’ve seen are inadequate.

Matt Beard is a moral philosopher from Sydney. Follow him on Twitter @matthewtbeard

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade