A questionable platform
‘ALEX JONES IS A STORY WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT,’ SAYS PROFESSOR OF SANDY HOOK MASSACRE CONSPIRACY THEORIST
American cable giant NBC is moving ahead with plans to air a feature interview of Alex Jones — the Texan conspiracy theorist whose paranoid fantasies of government plots have earned him influence in red state America, all the way up to Donald Trump’s White House.
The decision comes despite a growing advertiser boycott and demands that Jones be denied this prominent platform, especially from relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, which Jones has falsely called a hoax designed to restrict gun rights.
“You can’t just put him in a box and say he’s just a character,” said Nelba MárquezGreene, whose daughter Ana Grace died at Sandy Hook. “He’s really hurting people.”
Even Chelsea Clinton, daughter of Hillary and Bill, pressured producers of Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly to scrap the show, tweeting: “There is no justification for amplifying lies (or a liar), particularly about unimaginable tragedy. I hope no parent, no person watches this.”
Though it has so far failed, this effort to spike the interview makes Jones the most high-profile recent target of “no-platforming,” an activist strategy that originated in British student politics, but has found fertile ground in the American culture wars.
No-platforming has risen to prominence in the U.S. over the past year or so, thanks to episodes involving Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter. Calls for this form of civil censorship have become so common and predictable that, for provocateurs, getting uninvited can seem like half the point of getting invited in the first place.
Those American cases followed similar disputes in the U.K. that initially focused on racist political candidates, but grew ever more narrow in focus, such that pioneering feminist Germaine Greer became a target for disagreeing with aspects of transgender identity politics, and longtime gay rights activist Peter Tatchell became a target for signing a letter in
support of Greer.
Usually, the disputes are about campus talks, where the considerations of free expression and inquiry are different than on the public airwaves.
“The purpose of the university is to engage with ideas,” said Darren L. Linvill, associate professor of communication at Clemson University in South Carolina. From the academic perspective, Jones is “just spouting things that he thought of in the shower. There’s no need to listen to him.”
But conspiracy theorists can be important news topics, as Trump illustrated with his pursuit of Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
“The purpose of a news show is to engage with issues important to the public, and (Jones) is certainly important to the public. The value I see in engaging with him is that his audience is growing. As his name becomes spoken more commonly, people are going to go seek him out and listen to him and I would much rather that the first time somebody listen to Alex Jones be in a pre-taped conversation with Megyn Kelly, where she has an opportunity to bring some level of reason, some level of accountability to the conversation and, you know, take apart his nonsense and his invalid arguments,” Linvill said. “Ultimately, I think it depends on what that interview looks like.”
“Everybody always has ulterior motives for being interviewed,” he added. “That’s the job of Megyn Kelly, NBC and the show editors, to make sure that it’s not just about Alex Jones, that it’s
about Alex Jones’ ideas and where those ideas fall short on the fact test.”
But in the hyper-connected world of online media, where Jones thrives, there is a sense of hopelessness, Linvill said. The traditional liberal intellectual safeguard known as the “marketplace of ideas” appears to have failed, with Jones as a prime example. Here is a shameless fabulist with a huge following who has been granted White House press credentials, and even once interviewed Trump himself, before the election, in which Jones blithely accepted the future president’s false claim to have “predicted Osama bin Laden.”
“Your reputation is amazing,” Trump told Jones. “I will not let you down.”
Criticizing Jones only emboldens him, and so it is tempting to ignore him on principle, to no-platform him, to deny him the satisfaction and the clicks. This is the “signal boost” theory of journalism, a view that emphasizes the value of publicity for publicity’s sake, regardless how badly an interview subject might come off to an enlightened viewer. It involves a tacit assumption that a journalist’s role is to dole out attention to the worthy, ignore the unworthy, and police the borders of civil discourse.
Like the demand to ignore killers who are imagined to desire attention, this view can stigmatize curiosity, and confuse attention with approval. It also would have prevented some important reporting. Peter Bergen interviewed terrorist Osama bin Laden for CNN. Diane Sawyer interviewed murderer Charles Manson for ABC. Even Kelly herself interviewed Vladimir Putin the other week, although she has been criticized for letting him get the upper hand.
Jones is not in that league. He runs InfoWars.com and related shows on radio and YouTube. He is a conspiracist in the classic mould, fixated on fluoride, chemtrails, mind control, 9/11, the moon landings, Bilderbergers and the New World Order. His shtick is to fit every new tragedy into a pre-determined narrative about false flag operations, delivered in a rapid-fire, frothing rant.
The Waco siege of 1993 was a formative episode for him, followed shortly by the Oklahoma City bombing, but his imagination reaches back to the Reichstag fire, the sinking of the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, and the Kennedy assassination.
True to form, Jones has already called for the NBC interview to be cancelled because of dishonest editing and “misrepresenting my views on Sandy Hook.”
Every indication, however, is that NBC is sticking to its guns.
“As journalists it’s our job to interview newsmakers and people of influence no matter how abhorrent their views may be,” said Liz Cole, the show’s executive producer, to NBC News. “Megyn does a strong interview; we’re not just giving him a platform.”
Kelly has also responded, after she was removed as emcee of a Wednesday night gala for Sandy Hook Promise, which advocates for the prevention of gun violence.
“I find Alex Jones’s suggestion that Sandy Hook was ‘a hoax’ as personally revolting as every other rational person does,” she said in a statement. “It left me, and many other Americans, asking the very question that prompted this interview: how does Jones, who traffics in these outrageous conspiracy theories, have the respect of the president of the United States and a growing audience of millions?”
As Linvill put it: “Alex Jones is a story whether we like it or not.”
AS JOURNALISTS IT’S OUR JOB TO INTERVIEW NEWSMAKERS.