By giving Steve Bannon a platform, the FT legitimises and validates his existence...
The Financial Times has some of the best journalists in the business. They’re the sort of people who know exactly what it means when a company sends a terse email referring to a two-sentence tweeted statement, in response to a query that its press people flatly refuse to discuss.
This is what FT did with me ahead of the planned appearance of Steve Bannon at the Future of News Summit, the same Steve Bannon who had, a day before the FT’s tweet, attended a gathering of the National Front in France where he said: “Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honour.”
The same Steve Bannon who is a former vice-president of Cambridge Analytica, the firm at the centre of a storm over its mining of the data of 50 million Facebook users for the purpose of influencing the US election to benefit Donald Trump, whose campaign he strongly influenced, and Britain’s EU referendum for the Leave.EU campaign. That Steve Bannon.
Could it be that the newspaper was ever so slightly embarrassed about his appearance on its stage? For the record, the tweet stated: “As the news media is being tested in many ways, the FT Future of News Summit will look at the most pressing issues facing the industry. Steve Bannon is being interviewed on stage by FT editor Lionel Barber – this is a news interview and he is not being paid.”
Bannon, as those who have followed his career will know, is one of the standard bearers of the alt right, which many would argue is simply a cuddly new term for the extreme right. First as executive chairman of Breitbart News, then through his involvement in Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency, he has helped legitimise a poisonous narrative, playing a key role in bringing sentiments that had been consigned to the fringes right back into the mainstream.
They contributed to the ugliness in Charlottesville, when the swastika flew on American soil alongside the stars and bars of the racist Confederate battle flag, and more besides. Read that quote again: “Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honour.”
The FT is thus playing the role of enabler, helping to facilitate his continuing quest to bring new life to some of the darkest forces of the last century
Forced to quit the Breitbart, to which he had returned following his firing from the White House, amidst the furore over comments attributed to him in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury he now needs a platform. He needs legitimacy. This is what the Financial Times has chosen to provide him with. It matters not a whit that it isn’t paying him. He doesn’t need its money. He does need the oxygen it is providing him with, and the credibility of its platform. The value of that to a man like him in the position he’s in is incalculable.
The FT is thus playing the role of enabler, pouring fuel into the latest iteration of the Bannon Death Star, and thereby helping to facilitate his continuing quest to bring new life to some of the darkest forces of the last century. This is not something a respectable media organisation ought to be involved with.
There are those who, at this point, might argue that I’m in danger of falling into the same trap as the students who went as far as to try and ban Germaine Greer from their campus over her views about the transsexual community. I’m not. The willy nilly no-platforming of people with views people find unpalatable has clearly gone too far.
But Bannon, through his past conduct, is an exceptional case. He has proven himself to be what the Americans like to refer as “a bad actor”. If that argument is not good enough for you, how about this: Just imagine if it wasn’t Steve Bannon we were talking about, but a man going by the name of, for example, Salim Bahri.
Imagine if Bahri was a member of the Islamist alt right, and the founder of a website advocating, say, an
Islamic caliphate governed by a deeply Conservative interpretation of Shariah law. Imagine if he sought to provoke by angrily attacking the West, women, Jews, non Muslims generally. Imagine he had uttered a variant of that “badge of honour” quote. Do you think he would even have got within a sniff of the FT’s shindig? Do you think he would have even got past UK customs?
But it hardly needs me to make that case. The Financial Times has made it for me through their refusal to discuss Bannon’s appearance. If it is so reluctant to debate the case for it, is there even a case to be made?