One of the more extraordinary admissions by a journalist in recent years was made, almost casually, by Mick Clifford in the Irish Examiner over the weekend. Writing about the Transgender Equality Network of Ireland, he noted the following:
TENI frequently sends people into media organisations to instruct how matters around gender dysphoria must be reported. Yet TENI has always refused to engage in any public discussion, claiming any such discussion questions the rights of trans people to exist. This is simply not the case.
It might well be posited that the approach of the organisation, and some others of a like mind, does little to elicit empathy among the general population for teenagers who are questioning their gender.
With respect to Mick, I’d have to quibble a little with his phrasing. He says TENI “sends” people into media organisations. This is hardly perfect accuracy, conjuring up as it does the image of a phalanx of TENI officials marching past security at the front door of the Irish Times, commandeering the newsroom, and issuing commands to terrified staff.
What actually happens, so we’re completely clear, is that the newspapers and broadcasters invite TENI in to talk to their journalists. Over the years, a few people in the media have privately bristled to me about these sessions, but never quite been willing to go on the record about them. Journalists are assembled and told how to cover the trans issue “sensitively”, which usually includes some emotional blackmail about the damage that might be done to people by using their wrong pronouns and so forth. If you want to understand why the past decade has seen – on both sides of the Irish sea – an explosion in headlines like “woman charged with exposing her penis”, then you need look no further than these sessions.
One of the reasons that this sort of thing is so extraordinary is that there does of course already exist a code of practice for Irish journalists and media outlets on how to cover the news. It is the Press Council Code of practice, and this writer like every other here at Gript is obliged to comply with it. It demands that we be truthful, that we distinguish fact from comment, that we respect privacy, that we do not deliberately stir up hatred, and so on. Nowhere does it say that we must use a person’s chosen pronouns, or refer to male rapists as women. That voluntarily adopted extension to the journalistic code is one demanded by TENI and similar organisations. The question is why so many media organisations have voluntarily complied.
They would not, after all, dream of inviting in Republicans Abroad to tell them how to cover Donald Trump sensitively, or inviting the Russian Ambassador in to tell journalists what words to use whilst covering the reign of Tsar Vladimir the terrible.
The answer for why these media organisations voluntarily comply is, of course, fear. They are told by TENI and other groups that language is a form of violence, and that by using biologically and scientifically accurate language to describe people, they risk doing serious psychological harm to their subjects. They are fed a plethora of statistics about self-harm and suicide rates amongst trans people, and then they are told that the use of certain forms of language makes those rates worse. It is the basest level of moral blackmail: Speak as we tell you to, or people might die.
Forced to confront a choice between writing about the female penis on the one hand, or killing people on the other, journalists will generally choose the former.
The problem, of course, is that it is not actually the duty of the journalist to promote the mental health of transgender people. This is a category error that the media makes relentlessly: Assuming that they have a duty higher than accuracy and precision of language. This idea of a “higher duty” is the foundation of all journalistic bias: It underpins why, for example, the nationality of a serious criminal suspect may be obfuscated after a terrorist attack, or why when it comes to global warming, journalists use PR-driven terms like “climate change”. In all cases, the journalistic objective is not to inform but to protect.
What this does to journalism, of course, is to render it extinct. When the reporter is taking lessons from one party to a public issue of controversy in how to speak about that controversy, he or she is no longer a reporter, but a PR flack for one side. Thus the words of somebody like Graham Linehan are obfuscated, or described as controversial, by the journalist – not because they are, but because the journalist thinks the point of journalism is to protect TENI and trans people.
This entire farce is the fault of the newspaper editors and newsroom managers, who should have the basic integrity and confidence to tell lobby groups that their journalism is independent, and not subject to external influence.
But as Mick Clifford admitted over the weekend, this is not what happens. When you read about TENI or the transgender issue in an Irish Newspaper, you are essentially reading the words of TENI-trained PR agents. Maybe that doesn’t bother you, but I suspect it bothers enough people to substantially explain the continued fall in trust that the public expresses for the media.
Incidentally, and in case it needed saying, TENI won’t be “sending” people into Gript anytime soon to instruct us. Nor, for that matter, will their opponents on the other side of the debate.