I oppose irresponsible programming - not free speech

So The Late Late Show decided to book Katie Hopkins – British tabloid columnist, vocal Trump supporter and bigoted racist extraordinaire – to fly over from England to discuss the context and outcome of the US election. RTÉ received over 1,000 complaints in little over a day, but the complainants were quickly labelled smug and opposed to democratic, basic free speech, and accused of – wait for it – denying Hopkins a platform.

Let’s be very clear about one thing: this has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with poor programming.

“RTÉ, as the national public service broadcaster, shall reflect the democratic, social and cultural values of Irish society and the need to preserve media pluralism,” reads the first guiding principle of the Public Service Broadcasting Charter. The third principle adds that “no editorial or programming bias shall be shown in terms of gender, age, disability, race, sexual orientation, religion or membership of a minority community.”

So The Late Late Show, notorious for under-representing women amongst its guests, went and booked a woman who not only regularly engages in hate speech and famously referred to immigrants as 'cockroaches' but has explicitly endorsed and amplified rape threats. The irony would be hilarious if it wasn’t so frightening.

RTÉ justified the decision by highlighting what a big event the US election was. Presenter Ryan Tubridy added that Hopkins’ ‘thing’ is to state controversial opinions, which start important conversations. Shorthand, if I may: we're broadcasting a bit of racism and misogyny to spark debate. Reflecting the values of Irish society, huh? This is the media equivalent of the Taoiseach congratulating Trump on his victory on behalf of the Irish people. Not in my name.

There are endless ways to analyse the context in which a man like Trump can be elected President of the United States, without inviting along a hateful person with an already significant platform, not to mention the fact that she seems like quite a far-fetched choice in an Irish-American context. I can think of countless ways to bring to the fore controversial issues while providing a platform for women with voices that are otherwise seldom heard. How about starting by inviting immigrant women from direct provision centres onto the show for a different perspective?

Far from wishing to deny someone a platform, I want to extend that platform to include more voices in an aim to embrace that charter pluralism principle. Far from being smug, I’m worried about a public service broadcaster that should refrain from demonstrating programming bias in regards to everything from gender to race, yet finds it so hard to find suitable women that it resorts to inviting one with a fondness of hate speech and controversy. This is irresponsible broadcasting, plain and simple – at any time, all the time, but especially in the current political environment.

Want to have a debate about free speech and pluralism? Bring it on. But the way things stand, if anyone's smug it's Katie Hopkins.

A word on choice and tone-policing – or, why balance is a sham

We’re used to being told that we’re doing it wrong. We’re used to being told that we’re too aggressive, too angry, too shrill. But when, all of a sudden, we start hearing it from people supposedly on our side, alarm bells start ringing.

These alleged pro-choice supporters with the vocabulary of anti-choicers started voicing their concerns in national newspapers recently, airing their fears that the repeal campaign may be failing and revealing that they wouldn’t be joining the March for Choice after all. Why? First we were told that we were failing to take the debate about the unborn’s right to life, and that we’d need to do so in order to win over Ireland’s ‘mushy middle’. It’s a debate campaigners are taking every day, of course, but it turns out that the argument was just a tool used to evoke the image of a poor, innocent baby before going on to shame women for not grieving and feeling guilty enough.

Next we were informed that we were being too aggressive, something that of course makes perfect sense to anyone sharing our pro-choice views and generally agreeing that having been refused bodily autonomy for what seems like forever is more than a bit disgraceful. But this too turned out to be a hoax, followed by an endless stream of reasons why liberalised abortion legislation would be a bad thing, including that sexually transmitted diseases are on the up, that solo parenting might not be quite as horrific as you think, and that many people struggle to get pregnant in their forties. Oh, and just as a side note, we were all overreacting to the video evidence of a faux abortion counselling service telling lies about cancer and parental abuse, and we should all calm down and be civil.

You could think of such poorly staged attempts to package a conservative anti-choice agenda in a less fundamentalist, ever so slightly semi-enlightened guise as harmless. Or you could look at a public discourse obsessed with a literal notion of balance and start to feel robbed. Ring up the paper that published the two aforementioned examples and they’ll refer to them as pro-choice opinion pieces. Transparent or not, it doesn’t take a media scholar to realise that we’ve just lost an important platform along with the chance to define who we are.

The repeal campaign deals with the conversation around the unborn all the time, but if a supposed representative of the movement suggests that it doesn’t, it’ll quickly start to seem suspicious, as if campaigners are hiding something. When an alleged insider drags issues of STIs and infertility into the abortion discourse, it piles on the work of the pro-choice movement to refute such ridiculous claims. And no number of calmly eloquent reproductive rights activists on TV will ever erase the discomfort experienced by some people in relation to the rage also fuelling the movement, once someone who says she’s on their side takes issue with their anger and frustration, even describing them as deluded and condescending. For every column width of anti-choicers posing as pro-choice allies, we are little by little losing control of the narrative.

Isn't it funny how the majority of people seem happy to turn a blind eye to what looks quite a lot like defamation of an entire movement, yet when Helen and Graham Linehan spoke about their experience of losing a baby to a fatal foetal abnormality the BAI upheld a complaint pointing out that the coverage wasn’t balanced enough? Isn't it funny that RTÉ paid out a total of €85,000 to journalist John Waters and members of the Iona Institute after Rory O’Neill referred to their views as homophobic, yet none of the thousands of people who are about to take to the streets for the March for Choice this Saturday is likely to see any sign of a cheque for being described as deluded and “losing their collective minds”, their views completely and utterly misrepresented and the campaign recontextualised to a ridiculous degree?

The Press Council of Ireland’s Code of Practice states that content should not have “been inappropriately influenced by undisclosed interests”. The articles produced by our two faux pro-choice friends – both of whom are, just to be clear, sharing unquestionably anti-choice content on Twitter – are, as such, failing to meet the council’s standards. So why is it allowed to go on? It’s been suggested before that calls for balance in media reporting are almost always part of a conservative agenda, aiming to preserve the status quo; the Broadcasting Act of 2009 holds that broadcasters should not present anything that “undermines the authority of the State” or is “likely to promote, or incite to, crime”. Not only does this highlight beyond any doubt that we’ve given up on the idea of media as a fourth estate, which should monitor our elected leaders to hold power to account, but it also poses some important questions about the notion of balance in regards to the reproductive rights debate, seeing as abortion is still a criminal offence in Ireland.

Perhaps it is time we accept that our idea of balance is a sham – that it is used to protect the privileged and powerful but time and time again fails to deliver when those who dare to question the status quo are being silenced. We have a public service offering that welcomes commercial interests along for the ride, with broadcasters relying on advertising revenue and sponsorship deals to deliver their content. How could we ever fool ourselves to believe that investigative journalism is fully and freely investigative when the work is funded by advertisers with vested interest in its findings? What happens the day a guest of the Late Late Show decides to talk about the need to invest in public transport and increase motor tax, when every week an audience member leaves the show with a brand new Renault?

The gist of the two fraudulent articles comes down to this: that the fury of abortion rights advocates is offensive, and that women who need abortions should be ashamed of themselves. Look at the lies that are published in our name without as much as a blink of an eye, and ask yourself why it might be that we’re angry and shrill. Look at the BAI endorsing the view that the Linehans’ grief should have been attacked live on air, and ask yourself who should be ashamed. It’s easy to be calm and civil when you’ve got the status quo and every regulatory body in the country on your side. When your uterus is treated as public property and every single mainstream media outlet will fight for its right to tell you what to do with it, all while patronisingly pretending to have your best interests at heart, there is no such thing as calm.

Join the Abortion Rights Campaign to March for Choice this Saturday in Dublin, starting at 1.30pm at the Garden of Remembrance.