Alastair Stewart: a broadcaster’s downfall
It was a “schoolboy error” that ended a distinguished career, said Simon Kelner in the I newspaper. Caught up in a “pointless” Twitter spat, the veteran ITN newsreader Alastair Stewart last month turned to Shakespeare, quoting from Measure for Measure to highlight what he saw as the self-importance of his adversary. “But man, proud man / Dress’d in a little brief authority / Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d / His glassy essence...” he typed – and if he had stopped there, he would still be reading the news. But instead, he went on, continuing the quote: “like an angry ape”. The man on the receiving end, a black Lib Dem local politician called Martin Shapland, took offence, assuming (though Stewart denied it) that a racial slur was intended. He shared the tweet, declaring “Alastair is a disgrace”, setting off a social media firestorm that resulted in the 67-year-old broadcaster being forced to stand down.
By his own admission, Stewart’s words were misjudged – but no one “possessed of basic honesty and decency” believes he is a racist, said Brendan O’Neill on Spiked. For a start, he had used that quote before, in a spat with a white person. Then there is the fact that in a 40-year career he has never expressed even a “single racist idea”. And yet because in this one instance
“someone says their feelings were hurt”, an innocent man had to go. It just shows how irrational our “woke” culture has become. Perhaps the outrage over the tweet was just an “excuse”, said Matthew Moore in The Times. According to colleagues, the real reason for his fall was that he is an “old, expensive white guy” – and that in order to get around age-discrimination laws, ITN bosses “obsessed with diversity” seized on his mistake (along with other, unspecified “errors of judgement”) to get rid of him.
It should be clear by now that there is a major “anti-woke backlash” going on, said Ellie Mae O’Hagan in The Guardian. Think of the loud groan when Laurence Fox was accused of “white privilege” on Question Time, or the trend for “anti-woke” celebrities such as Piers Morgan. For years, there was a kind of “liberal consensus”, at least in public, in Britain. But today, while the young and left-wing have grown more radical over gender, sexuality and race, another group – mostly older and white – has become “aggressively hostile” to their politics. Cases like this one make many people furious, and their anger is a powerful political force. “Progressives need to wise up to the fact that they are losing this argument, and decide what they are going to do in response.”