What Piers Morgan’s exit tells us about the future of impartial broadcasting in the UK
When the next history of the British media is written, there should be a chapter seeking to explain why it so often ends up being about Piers Morgan. Within 48 hours of Meghan and Prince Harry turning a much-needed spotlight on racism in the industry, Morgan’s sudden departure from ITV’s breakfast show shifted the attention not just to him, but to the issue of free speech. His comments tested the tension between freedom of expression and truth, just as two news channels are to be launched that could test the boundaries of the UK’s regulated, impartial TV media.
This is not about whether Morgan will end up working for Rupert Murdoch’s News UK streaming service or Andrew Neil’s GB News (though the prospect of jobs at the channels undoubtedly eased his passage from ITV), but about whether it can possibly be right to publicly disown the truth of somebody else’s mental distress.
The pretty obvious answer is that it cannot – and yet Morgan’s departure has still somehow managed to stir up a row over what impartiality means in broadcast news. It may be tempting to ignore this, but a failure to reassert the principles of impartiality will make it easier for broadcasters to succumb to the economic and political pressures pushing them towards the sort of partisan TV media that is common in the US.
But first, a recap for those struggling with the frenzied news cycle of the past few days. The morning after Meghan told Oprah Winfrey that she had contemplated suicide and received no help from the royal family, Morgan called her a liar. “I don’t believe a word she says, Meghan Markle. I wouldn’t believe her if she read me a weather report.”
The charity Mind, which supports an ITV mental health campaign, joined many others, including his own colleagues, in accusing him of being irresponsible and harmful. Meanwhile, 41,000 people complained to media regulator Ofcom. When a mealy-mouthed comment about not disputing the real issues of mental health failed to stop his own colleagues criticising him on air, Morgan stomped off.
In a departure note posted to Twitter on Wednesday morning, Morgan wrote: “I said I didn’t believe Meghan Markle in her Oprah interview. I’ve had time to reflect on this opinion, and I still don’t. If you did, OK. Freedom of speech is a hill I’m happy to die on.” Inevitably, he posted a picture of Churchill with the old saw: “Some people’s idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.”
Some of Morgan’s old colleagues at CNN rallied to his defence. Anchor Jake Tapper called the reaction “insanity” and tweeted: “This is what happens when you live in a country where there is no First amendment.” Tapper suggested that it would be better for complainants to “tweet Piers what you think of his comments” rather than go to the regulator, part of whose job it is to prevent public service broadcasters causing harm and offence.
Tapper is a brilliant presenter (as is Morgan in many ways), but his idea that Twitter is the place for redress underlines just how far down a nasty rabbit hole the American idea of freedom has led us: to a place where conspiracy theories and hatred can be disseminated by US social media giants without any sanction at all. After all, it was almost exactly a year ago that presenters such as Sean Hannity on Fox News were given the freedom to accuse the media of “scaring the living hell out of people” with the “new hoax” of the coronavirus.
The rules regarding harm and offence governed by Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code are written in the sort of legalese that would never go viral. Yet, along with public opinion, they are more or less the last bulwarks ensur
ing that the British broadcast media remains committed to offering as unbiased a version of events as is possible, unlike the newspapers, which are under no such mandate.
The UK system is far from perfect, of course. Rumours that the Daily Mail’s Paul Dacre is the prime minister’s preferred candidate for the top job at Ofcom and the very history of BBC licence fee negotiations alone demonstrate this. But in a world in which the business model for news has been ripped up, broadcast regulation means that the influential media is not governed by commercial interests alone.
Still, Morgan’s last Good Morning Britain show on Tuesday was watched by 1.29m viewers, more than its much quieter BBC rival with 1.25m. The problem is that outrage sells, just look at the history of tabloid newspapers in the UK. Murdoch, who has possibly made more money out of the British media than anyone else, knows this. My money is on a new Piers Morgan morning show on the soon-tobe streamed News UK. The good news is that brilliant journalists of colour such as Ranvir Singh and Clive Myrie are already being tipped to replace the former host on Good Morning Britain.
• Jane Martinson is a Guardian columnist
environmental justice at the heart of its policies.
This assimilation of the left programme into the centre is made possible by victory. It is based on a confidence that a broad-church progressive coalition can win a majority in the US. Furthermore, the Republicans have done the Democrats the favour of vacating the middle ground almost entirely.
The contrast to the UK is painful. Reeling from its bitter defeat, languishing in the opinion polls, Keir Starmer’s Labour party diagnoses a polycrisis too, but it consists not of issues of global significance, but of Brexit, the collapse of the “red wall” and the question of Scotland. Questions of identity overshadow everything. Rather than seriously questioning what the nation might be, as the combination of Trump and Black Lives Matter is forcing liberal America to do, Labour appears to be content with trying to reclaim the union flag from the Conservative party.
Starmer’s long-awaited “big speech” last month was an exercise in sophomoric national cliche. He managed to be sentimental even in the passages about British business. References to the blitz and 1945 formed the anchor. The climate crisis got a single line, with one other passing reference. The Mais lecture by the shadow chancellor, in January, was weightier. Unlike Starmer, Anneliese Dodds did in fact seriously discuss the climate emergency, but it is no longer the organising framework that it once was, no longer the pacesetter, the imperative to action. The only thing that matters is to convince some key voters that Labour is responsible enough to be trusted as a steward of the economy.
Though “acceleration” was one of Dodds’s key terms – a reference to the way the pandemic has amplified preexisting trends such as flexible working and digitalisation – she managed nevertheless to offer a curiously muted vision of the huge challenges facing the UK and the world economy.
No doubt the pollsters have finetuned these messages with target segments of the electorate. But if you do not belong to that audience, if you understand your identity to be complex and multiple, if you have ever been on the bitter end of the politics of patriotism, then flag-waving repels. If a little thought about society and politics has taught you to regard “common sense” as the most dangerous of snares, you cannot but worry about a party so desperate to please the Daily Mail.
Labour’s retreat from radicalism means that the initiative belongs to the Johnson government. Having done Brexit, it can look to the future. It leads even on climate. After destroying the miners union in the 1980s, the Tories may end up presiding over historic decarbonisation. After vaccines they will claim Britain’s hosting of Cop26 as a victory too. Ahead of the 2024 election, the Tories will no doubt pivot to “fiscal responsibility”, but as the budget makes clear, they are spending as the situation demands. Labour is left to harp on value for money.
The independent Bank of England created by Gordon Brown is now merrily buying bonds to finance Rishi Sunak’s spending. Whereas experts aligned with the Labour party were once leading a global conversation about redefining central bank independence in a progressive direction, the shadow chancellor now proposes to treat its independence as inviolable. Not so the Tory chancellor, who has added climate to the bank’s mandate.
No doubt the Corbynite left was too in love with its own radicalism. But the Green New Deal was not radicalism for its own sake. It was radical because reality demanded it. Faced with the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath, the world historic presence of China, Trump, the escalating climate crisis, and an unprecedented global pandemic, what more is needed to demonstrate this point? A politics that does not want to mobilise around these challenges, which prefers to deal in patriotic pastiche, forfeits any claim to be progressive.
The disinhibited politics of the new global right recognises this radical reality, though in the form of fantasy, denial and conspiracy. Global capital is swinging full tilt behind its own version of a Green New Deal. Hundreds of billions is now sloshing into renewable energy. The restructuring and job losses about to happen in the global automotive industry will put every previous reorganisation in the shade.
In the age of the great acceleration, Corbyn’s politics at least rose to the challenge of recognising that the future would be different. Labour’s new look – the Little Britain to come – promises a nostalgic road back to the future. It is, in reality, a dangerous dead end.
Adam Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University
morning; I’m too anxious and wary of becoming distracted. When I’ll be in a new venue for the first time, I look it up on Google maps and scour the website to get a feel for where everything is – a form of pre-familiarisation I had no idea was a common autism adjustment until I saw that some libraries offer it. Different noises, tastes, textures and temperatures need to be planned for and worked around, or else they’ll crowd my head and I might shut down. My organisation and sensory responses are often wildly out of sync with what’s expected of me, and the task of planning around this can feel like a fulltime job in itself. I have managed to give my publisher headaches around matters like collecting bookplates and mixing up Zoom times, but I think by publishing my book during a pandemic, I have had a gentler time.
That said, 2020 was for me, as for everyone, an unambiguously terrible year. I wish I could see socialising as a source of comfort. But I can’t. For me it’s more stress, anxiety and fear that I’m doing everything wrong. That’s not my friends’ fault. They can, and do, reassure me explicitly that they want me to be myself around them. The pain runs deeper than that: it’s settled in my bones that I need to mask with other people, even other autistics. My childhood taught me that, my adolescence confirmed it, and my adulthood proves it every day.
That’s why fiction is enormously important to me. Novels have always served as case studies of how most people think. The social observations of Jane Austen, Zadie Smith, Bernardine Evaristo, Edward St Aubyn, Alan Hollinghurst; they all make me stop and go: oh, that’s why. And once I understand, I can do it. Like an aspiring footballer who pauses the game, I take my time reading conversations , to work out who said what, and why. Then, when I go out and do the real thing, I’m more confident. And I do love it. That’s why I put so much work in. I’m endlessly grateful for fiction, because there’s no telling how isolated I’d feel without it. Books are why I have friends at all, even if I can’t always keep up with them.
So though I have not been talking much these past few months, I have been reading a lot. And believe it or not, after six months without socialising, what finally gave me the push to do better was writing this. I saw in my own words that I was in a bad situation I had the power to change, and I’ve finally started messaging people back. So I’m looking forward to the next few weeks as lockdown lifts. When I’m ready to start again, able to finagle those longoverdue catchups, I won’t feel rusty. I’ll remember the moves, and I’ll play.
Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times is published by W&N and has been longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction. The book is out now in paperback and can be ordered from guardianbookshop.com.
non-coercive. Woe betide she who does not know herself and speak that knowledge.
* * *
In the late 80s and early 90s, when activists were seeking to change the public mindset, much media anxiety fixated on “date rape” or “acquaintance rape”. In 1993, the sexual offence prevention policy of Antioch College, a small US liberal arts institution, caused a furore. Written by female students dismayed to find out about rapes on a campus that prided itself on a progressive inclusivity, the policy stated that “consent means verbally asking and verbally giving or denying consent for all levels of sexual behaviour”. Consent had to be ongoing, and it was required regardless of the relationship between partners, regardless of previous sexual history or current activity. It could not, moreover, be given by someone who was intoxicated, unconscious or asleep. Affirmative consent, increasingly written into laws and guidelines in recent years, holds that an absence of “no” is not a mark of consent, and recognises that mutuality in sex is vital. And it has been extraordinarily divisive.
In her book The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism, published the same year as the Antioch consent policy, Katie Roiphe argued that campus anti-rape campaigns projected a retrograde image of women that earlier feminists had succeeded in challenging: an image of women as vulnerable, wide-eyed and timorous. This argument is still with us more than 20 years later; in Unwanted Advances, published in 2017, Laura Kipnis argued that affirmative consent guidelines have led to a culture of helplessness and victimhood on US university campuses.
Roiphe and Kipnis acknowledge the injustices and injuries that women encounter, but suggest that the solution to these lie in an idealised figure: the strong woman who can overcome it all – who can shrug off injuries and be tougher; be, frankly, less of a baby. Their critiques express perfectly, in other words, a confidence feminism – a feminism that places the onus on individual women and their assertiveness to overcome challenges and succeed in an unequal world.
For these critics, “grown” women know how to shrug off the inevitable ups and downs of sex, instead of crying assault. The trope of “bad sex” does important work in these conversations. Young women are encouraged, Kipnis argues, to deploy bureaucratic measures “to remedy sexual ambivalences or awkward sexual experiences”. For her and her peers, sex, “even when it was bad (as it often was)” was “still educational”. The idea that women should toughen up spans the political spectrum; journalist Bari Weiss expressed a similar stance in her response to allegations against comedian Aziz Ansari in 2018. The allegations, published in an account on babe.net, provoked a furore – not least because its apparently rushed publication appears to have fallen short of normal standard journalistic standards, such as giving Ansari the right to reply. (He later responded that the sex was “by all indications completely consensual” but that he “took her words to heart”.)
“Grace” (a pseudonym) told of feeling pressured into sex, and of trying to give signals – verbal and non-verbal – of not being keen, which she alleges Ansari repeatedly failed to respect. For many, her story resonated as an example of an entitled and bullish man, intent on acquiring sex, with little interest in the woman’s pleasure (or even perhaps his own?).
For others, Grace was expecting Ansari to mind read, and had failed to make clear either her own desires or her lack of enjoyment: she had failed to say yes enthusiastically, and failed clearly to say no. There is, Weiss says, “a useful term for what this woman experienced on her night with Mr Ansari. It’s called ‘bad sex’. It sucks.” Weiss acknowledged that women are socialised to “put men’s desires before their own”. But the solution to this problem is not, she claimed, to resent men “for failing to understand their ‘nonverbal cues’. It is for women to be more verbal. It’s to say, ‘This is what turns me on.’ It’s to say, ‘I don’t want to do that.’” Weiss admonished “Grace” in finger-wagging terms: “If he pressures you to do something you don’t want to do, use a four-letter word, stand up on your two legs and walk out his door.” Similarly, Kipnis, on Jessa Crispin’s Public Intellectual podcast, laments the fact that students “can’t get over” 30 seconds or 15 minutes of bad sex. And Meghan Daum, in the Guardian, wrote about a gap between many women’s public support of #MeToo and their private conversations. She writes: “‘Grow up, this is real life,’ I hear these same feminists say.” There are strong intimations here of weak, wounded children versus confident grown women, and it’s clear who we’re supposed to want to be.
This is a feminism in which it is every woman’s duty to be assertive and confident, and in which, above all, one must not be seen to be wounded or injured. Indeed, the mere fact of feeling wounded is already a sign of weakness in this regime of individual capacity. What’s more, bad sex is framed as an inevitable feature of the landscape; a brute, intractable fact around which women must work.
Critics as different as Kipnis and
Weiss can cast themselves as progressive by insisting that women can and should wield power and agency. And yet in the airy gesturing towards the inevitability of youthful bad sex, they place an unequal burden on women to manage the risks of sex. They treat male contempt of women’s pleasure and autonomy as an unchangeable fact, while treating women’s manoeuvring around it as an imperative – and they reserve their scorn for women who fail to respond to it with an appropriate gutsiness.
Back in 1993, the New York Times’ op-ed on the Antioch consent policy said that adolescence, and particularly the college years, are “a time for experimentation, and experimentation means making mistakes”; no policy can ever “protect all young people from those awful mornings-after”, moments from which “people learn”.
If “people”, as the New York Times put it, learn from bad sex, are the lessons men and women learn the same? It may well be that men learn that they can get away with not caring about a woman’s pleasure, and that women learn they must prioritise male pleasure over their own. Who learns that their role is to acquire pleasure at whatever cost, and who learns that they must suffer sex’s consequences alone?
* * *
Consent is a given – the bare minimum for sex. And affirmative consent is, as sexuality scholar Joseph Fischel argues in Screw Consent, the least bad standard for sexual assault law, compared with force, resistance or nonconsent standards. Requiring some minimal, not necessarily verbal, indication of positive agreement to sex shows a respect for a person’s sexual autonomy, and is a better measure than silence or resistance. But consent has a limited purview, and it is being asked to bear too great a burden, to address problems it is not equipped to resolve.
In their frustrations with consent, campus sexual culture and #MeToo, critics grope confusedly towards the insight that much sex that is consented to, even affirmatively consented to, is bad: miserable, unpleasant, humiliating, one-sided, painful. “Bad sex” doesn’t have to be assault in order for it to be frightening, shame-inducing, upsetting. They understand, hazily, that, as a legal concept, consent is unable to meaningfully get at how sex can be bad without being strictly assaultive. But they are as if paralysed by these insights, and fail to probe (or convey much concern for) the dynamics that determine bad sex – sex that, because of its inequalities in pleasure, is of grave importance. Instead of resigning ourselves to the inevitability of bad sex, and even romanticising it as merely youthful misadventure, we should take this bad sex seriously, subjecting it to sustained scrutiny.
Bad sex emerges from gender norms in which women cannot be equal agents of sexual pursuit, and in which men are entitled to gratification at all costs. It occurs because of inadequacies and inequalities in sexual literacy; in access to sex education and sexual health services.
It trades on unequal power dynamics between parties, and on racialised notions of innocence and guilt. Bad sex is a political issue, one of inequality of access to pleasure and self-determination, and it is as a political issue that we should be examining it, rather than retreating into an individualising, shoulder-shrugging criticism of young women who are using the tools available to them to address the pains of their sexual lives.
The notion of not just affirmative but “enthusiastic” consent seeks to raise the bar further in sexual culture; we don’t just want women to agree to sex initiated by men, but to want sex themselves, to feel excited about it, and to move in the world with their own desires and demands. Hence the swelling of affirmative consent into something more ambitious: into desire, pleasure, enthusiasm, positivity.
The problem with consent is not that sex cannot and should never be contractual – the safety of sex workers relies precisely on the notion of a contract, and the possibility of its violation, in order that they can be understood as having been assaulted. Nor is it that consent is unsexy or unromantic.
The problem, instead, is that an attachment to consent as the rubric for our thinking about sex – the problem with our being “magnetised” by it, as Fischel puts it – ignores a crucial aspect of being a person: that individuals do not bear equal relationships of power to one another. The attachment to consent as the overarching framework for thinking about good and bad sex amounts to holding on to the fantasy of liberalism, in which, as Emily A Owens puts it, “equality simply exists”.
Much sex that women consent to is unwanted, because they agree to it under duress, or out of a need to feed and clothe themselves and their family, or a need to remain safe. Women everywhere, every day, agree to sex because they feel they have no choice; because a man has them in his debt; because he has threatened them; because he can make them suffer, by sacking them, evicting them, reporting their immigration status or reporting them for an offence (such as sex work where it is criminalised). Many consent laws require consent to be non-coerced, but the reality is that women do agree to sex they would rather not have, out of a fear of the consequences.
It’s crucial, therefore, to maintain the distinction between consent and enthusiasm, precisely so that we can describe what is going on in these dynamics of unequal power.
Unequal power relationships mean that consent itself cannot distinguish between good and bad sex, though it can to a limited extent distinguish sex from assault. Consent can be sexy, we are repeatedly told – an insistence that may well have emerged from critiques mocking it as a buzz-kill. It should be wielded as part of the playful to-and-fro of sexual negotiation; it can, the website xojane.com advised, “be worked into foreplay, turned into an integral part of a sexual encounter as partners banter back and forth, tease, and check in with each other on what they are (and aren’t) going to do”.
But this only works if we assume a certain kind of partner, one who is already fully committed to the complex autonomy of the other. It all depends on whether the woman feels she has the option to refuse – something that is not limited to the legal question of coercion. It depends, among other things, on whether the man she is with is able to hear a no; is able to negotiate without abusing his often greater physical and social power; is not abusing the knowledge that women rarely report assault and have the odds stacked against them if they do. Is he asking for sex while being open to the possibility that she may say no? Can he countenance a no? Will he flare up, ignore, persuade, cajole, bully, punish? Any model of consent can prove itself worthless if a man is not open to his sexual partner’s no, or her changing desires, and if he responds to either of these with a rage borne of humiliation. A woman can still leave a sexual encounter justifiably feeling mistreated, while the man feels safe in the knowledge he “acquired” consent.
He asked, she said yes. None of this means we should jettison consent – it is crucial, and the bare minimum. But it cannot sustain the weight of all our emancipatory desires; we must be clear about its limits.
Consent – agreement to sex – should not be conflated with sexual desire, enjoyment or enthusiasm; not because we should be resigned to bad sex, but precisely because we should not be. That women experience so much misery-making sex is a profoundly social and political issue, and consent cannot solve it for us.
• This is an edited extract from Tomorrow Sex Will be Good Again:Women andDesire in theAge ofConsent, published by Verso.
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finally finds a way to take revenge. It is the 9 to 5 of the 90s, with Keaton in the Jane Fonda role, but she makes it her own.
7. Something’s Gotta Give (2003)
You would need a doctor’s prescription to find something more comforting than a Nancy Meyers movie; as the US journalist Rachel Handler said recently, Something’s Gotta Give “is like if you turned Meyers herself into a bottle of white wine and chugged it”. Keaton is extremely endearing as Meyers’ alter ego of sorts, a playwright who, through plot machinations best not investigated too closely, ends up being wooed by Keanu Reeves and Jack Nicholson simultaneously. You need to be a fleet-footed performer to be in a Meyers film and not come across as smug/annoying. Keaton is that performer.
6. Shoot the Moon (1982)
Like Kramer vs Kramer, Shoot the Moon is about divorce, but whereas Kramer places all the blame on the selfish mother, here the finger is pointed squarely at the father (Albert Finney). Keaton plays the alternately furious and heartbroken wife. Movies about divorce are rarely subtle, with characters sketched in black and white, but Keaton doesn’t go for the simply downtrodden, even when confronting her husband about his affair. The joy she derives from her own affair is sweetly realised.
5. The Godfather: Part II (1974)
The first Godfather film ends with Michael (Al Pacino) shutting out Keaton’s character, Kay, but in the second film she brings herself to the centre of what is otherwise a monument to machismo. Her lovely face is the film’s conscience, while the scene in which she tells Michael that she didn’t miscarry their son, but rather terminated him to save him from “this Sicilian thing”, is the movie’s emotional heart. As much as the killing of Fredo, Kay’s abortion is the definitive proof of
Michael’s fatal moral descent.
4. Baby Boom (1987)
Sure, Keaton’s first film with her longterm collaborator Meyers doesn’t have the dramatic clout of, say, Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977), but it has endured a lot better. Keaton is deliciously believable playing against type as a gung-ho Wall Street type whose life comes undone when she unexpectedly inherits a baby. Often dismissed as fluff, Baby Boom is one of the great feministlite films and Keaton deftly moves between drama and full-on slapstick.
3. Manhattan (1979)
It is almost impossible to talk about Manhattan without descending into
Like Keaton’s most famous film, Annie Hall, Reds was written and directed by, and stars, one of Keaton’s exes: Warren Beatty, in this case. As in Annie Hall, she dominates what could easily have been the man’s vanity project. Reds is ostensibly a biopic of John Reed (Beatty), the US communist activist, but Keaton’s performance as his partner, Louise Bryant, is the more involving. The scenes in which she stands up to Reed, about his infidelity, and then Eugene O’Neill (Jack Nicholson), for his cruelty, should be required viewing for those who dismiss Keaton as a ditz.
1. Annie Hall (1977)
Not just Keaton’s most celebrated performance, but one of the most memorable performances of all time. Allen wrote it for her, using Keaton’s real surname, and only she could have captured Annie’s sweetness and fragility without descending into cloying irritation or, worse, becoming a proto manic pixie dream girl. Allen wanted the movie to be about the inability of his character, Alvy, to feel joy; Alvy is certainly the captain of this film’s ship, narrating it and dominating the action. But Annie’s warmth towers over Alvy’s depressive comedy, like a sunflower bringing light to a dark patch of the garden.
• This article was amended on 11 March 2021 to more accurately describe the final scene of The Godfather and to replace an image from The Godfather with one from The Godfather: Part II. An erroneous reference to Keaton playing a banker in Baby Boom was also removed.