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Last week produced an eventful but not untypical weather-front of news stories about culturally contentious issues. There was the microstorm about the Queens photo being taken down in the common room at Magdalen College, Oxford; the tiny tempest of Test cricketer Ollie Robinson being dropped for racist tweets dating from when he was a teenager; the squall over the England football teams commitment to taking the knee; and the sudden shower of Oxford academics boycotting Oriel College over its decision to retain its reviled Cecil Rhodes statue.

These, along with the deathless headline Law student cleared after saying women have vaginas, were examples of what might also be called skirmishes in a larger and ongoing series of battles: the culture wars.

As a recent report by the Policy Institute at Kings College London shows, there has been an exponential rise in the past couple of years of news stories that use the term culture wars. Exactly what constitutes a culture war is just one of the many issues that people fight about in the culture wars, and theres a sizeable minority of participants who go so far as to argue that the main characteristic of this present culture war is that its not really a culture war.

According to the Policy Institute, a quarter of the articles it analysed took the position that culture wars are either overblown or manufactured if they exist at all. If thats just the media being contrary, then take a look at the public at large. In a Times Radio poll conducted in February, respondents were asked When politicians talk about a culture war, what do you think they mean? Only 7% came up with a relevant answer, 15% got it wrong, and a slightly concerning 76% said they didnt know.

Just because people dont know what a culture war is doesnt mean theyre not in one. For, as all those feverish headlines suggest, there does appear to be something afoot.

I do think were in a culture war, says Matthew dAncona, an editor at Tortoise Media, where he has written perceptively about the politicisation of culture. There have always been cultural conflicts but its become much sharper in the last 20 years thanks to declining trust in institutions that were meant to hold together the cohesion of society, some of the growing inequalities, and most of all the proliferation of technology that enables and indeed encourages people to cluster in their cultural groups.

The historian Dominic Sandbrook agrees that a culture war is under way but cautions against overstating its dimensions. I think one of the mistakes people make when they talk about culture wars is they think that its something that necessarily sweeps up the whole of society, and everybodys invested in it. He thinks that more often than not its a dispute between two sides of an educated elite.

What does seem clear is that symbolic issues and questions of identity occupy a larger and more antagonistic position in the general culture than they did 10 or 20 years ago. As dAncona suggests, this development and the explosion in social media, where millions of people can seek out like-minded opinion-holders, are unlikely to be coincidental.

Just as significantly, confidence in the traditional concerns of politics political parties, economics and wealth redistribution has taken a bit of a battering. Bill Clintons campaign strategist James Carville famously said Its the economy, stupid to explain what made the difference between electoral victory and defeat.

While thats still a vital factor, the financial meltdown and the bailout of banks in 2008 left many voters baffled as to what was going on.

As old-style political parties struggled to articulate what needed to be done, the opportunity was there for populist politicians and narratives to fill the comprehension void.

For the simple truth is that while its not easy to express an informed opinion about the effect of collateralised debt obligations on the American housing market, it doesnt take a doctorate to decide whether a statue should be pulled down, or to work up an unbending judgment about the character of the Duchess of Sussex. As Sandbrook puts it: People are more interested in flags than inflation.

If public focus has shifted towards more symbolic and emotive issues, then its a change that can be both exploited and directed by the cynically astute.

There have always been stories like the one about Magdalen College and the image of the Queen, says dAncona.

Whats interesting now is the speed with which cabinet ministers or indeed No 10 respond. That to me signals were into a different kind of political game. One where a strategy is at work.

He points out that the combined effect of Brexit, the pandemic and the governments commitment to a levelling-up agenda means there is an extremely challenging period ahead in terms of policy and its implementation. Everything the government has on its to-do list is hard.

Its a human instinct and practically a political rule that when confronted with a number of tough priorities, the first job is to hunt around for easier options. The culture wars suit the Johnson way of doing things, says dAncona. Hes good at things that involve short, memorable slogans and showmanship. Is he good at test and trace? Not conspicuously so. Is he good at PPE? No. Is he good at lockdown timing? Absolutely not. But the thing that hes quite good at is spotting a dividing line.

Sandbrook is less inclined to see debates about national and personal identity in terms of political distraction. He thinks they plug into deep-rooted and timeless matters of belonging and place. Along with his fellow historian Tom Holland, he co-presents a podcast, The Rest Is History, which recently looked at the history of culture wars.

For Sandbrook, culture wars have always existed. They are what was fought as the Roman empire moved from paganism to Christianity in the early fourth century, and just as today that process involved clashes over statues and shrines.

What is certainly true, he says, is there are moments in history when disputes about history, identity, symbols, images and so on loom very large. Think about so much of 17th-century politics, for example, when people would die over the wording of a prayer book. The same applies, he believes, to any number of periods, including the arrival of the permissive society in the 1960s, in which there is an attempt to establish new mores.

For Holland, the term culture war has a stricter meaning, relating to the German word Kulturkampf, which described the clash between Bismarcks government and the Catholic church in 1870s Prussia. It is therefore specifically a dispute between religious and secular forces. Certainly if we look at America, where the modern incarnation of the culture wars was first identified, the conflicts over abortion and gay marriage have been fought, at least by one side, from an explicitly religious perspective.

The US sociologist James Davison Hunter gave popular currency to the term in his seminal 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. He argued that they were about the orthodox versus the progressive. That division remains visible in the UK, but without the religious component.

I dont think the Christian side of it matters, says Sandbrook, disagreeing with Holland. You can have culture wars in a non-Christian society. Yet he agrees there might be a religious impulse at root.

The Puritans took the culture wars with them, he says. Now America has re-exported the arguments back to us.

He says that Holland thinks that woke social justice warriors dont realise theyre really 16th- and 17th-century Christian Puritans.

If, as Holland believes, todays social justice warriors are the unknowing heirs to Puritanism, then their preoccupations are less about morality than identity, even if dissenting opinions can still be denounced with a puritanical zeal. Nowhere is this tendency more evident than within the university system. The drive to decolonise the curriculum has led many academics to complain, usually off the record, of what one English professor described as a dispiriting witch-hunt atmosphere and professional intimidation.

As much of the intellectual motivation for challenging established power structures has emerged from the humanities, and in particular the field of critical theory, it is hardly surprising that this should also be the scene of some of the most conspicuous stands. In any war there are always innocent victims caught in the crossfire and no doubt thats how the 150 Oxford academics boycotting Oriel think of the students they are refusing to teach.

Whats notable is that the left initially saw issues of identity those concerning race, gender and sexuality as an area of straightforward progressive gain. The struggles were all about liberating oppressed minorities from under the yoke of white male power. But as the battles became both more complex and particular whats the correct position on whether self-identifying trans women with birth-male genitalia should have access to womens lavatories? so did rights begin to conflict and solidarity fray.

The divisions that have opened up within the Labour party are to an increasing extent grounded in differences in cultural politics between its middle-class metropolitan supporters and its traditional provincial working-class base. But there are also other tensions, for example between trans activists and gender-critical feminists. At almost the same time last week that Maya Forstater was winning her appeal against an employment tribunal, after saying that people cannot change their biological sex, the Labour leader Keir Starmer was reaffirming the partys commitment to introducing self-identification for trans people.

The former leader Tony Blair has publicly advised Starmer to steer clear of these culture wars, because they are polarising areas that have limited voter appeal. But dAncona believes thats an unrealistic ambition.

A modern left-of-centre coalition has to include that social justice movement element Starmer cant just turn to BLM [Black Lives Matter] or #MeToo and say, away with you all.

By contrast, there is a sense that each of No 10s pronouncements on cultural or identity issues is calculated to maximise public support, even if it offends metropolitan sensibilities. As dAncona notes, this is why, in the run-up to a crucial G7 meeting, which is also President Joe Bidens first foreign visit and the first time the international community of leaders has gathered in a long while, Boris Johnson was able to find time to admonish the England and Wales Cricket Board for suspending Robinson over his historical racist tweets.

And its probably a measure of how keenly No 10 studies the national mood that after the England manager, Gareth Southgate, wrote a stirring letter calling for support for his players, Johnson went from refusing to condemn England supporters for booing the team over taking the knee to appealing for the booing to stop.

Its one thing to generate social media noise, and provoke a few high-minded columnists, but its hard to know if Johnsons strategy has any deeper meaning or political capital. Were in a new world of unpredictable directions and strange manifestations. Look at Oliver Dowden, says dAncona of the culture secretary, who used to be a centrist in David Camerons government. Hes reborn as a kind of woke-buster.

More troublingly, he argues, the politics of a culture war are febrile and unstable, with the potential to inspire fundamental bigotries leading to ever greater and more damaging divisions. These are not forces, he contends, that should be toyed with.

Yet if the culture war is leading to ever more entrenchment and acrimony, dAncona complains that the standard Conservative response is, We didnt start it. Thats not the response of true leadership. Its the response of the playground.

Whoever started it, the culture wars look set to continue for a while yet. With their preference for gesture over action, they dont cost very much to participate in if you discount hurt feelings and require no great expertise or experience. Doubtless within them are worthy and perhaps essential debates, along with the familiar vices of name-calling, point-scoring and virtue-signalling.

The problem is that specific issues are seldom discussed on their merits, but packaged together into ideological job lots, the better to establish clear moral battle lines. The demarcation is not so much between left and right as right and wrong. If you accept one position, goes the thinking, its immoral not to adopt the rest.

The Nazi SS officer and playwright Hanns Johst once wrote a much misquoted line: When I hear culture I unlock my Browning. In our thankfully less violent times, the mention of culture instead unloosens the tongue. The trick is to respect the principle of free speech, while maintaining the standards of civil discourse.

But the threat of Johsts brand of righteous contempt is never far away. It would help if there were responsible figures cooling the debate. In the past, one person to whom you might look to perform that role would be the prime minister. In these culturally weaponised times hes more likely to be flame-heating it.

The murder of George Floyd

Most aspects of the culture war are vividly symbolic rather than messily actual. But Floyd really was killed; the violence wasnt silence but a police officers knee. The key thing, though, is that the murder was filmed and its documentation proved to be internationally inspirational, not least in the UK.

The Rhodes statue at Oriel College

The Rhodes Must Fall movement began over six years ago in South Africa. His statue in Oxford remains a provocative symbol of imperialism and, as its critics would say, white supremacy. This controversy is not going to go away anytime soon.

Winston Churchills statue in Parliament Square

The defacement of Churchills statue in last years Black Lives Matter protests was a galvanising moment. Whereas the toppling of slave-trader Edward Colstons monument in Bristol was met with either support or complacency, the graffiti denouncing Churchill as a racist prompted a cultural backlash against BLM.

The Last Night of the Proms 2020

The most patriotic and indeed jingoistic of musical evenings, it was announced that its traditional climax of Rule Britannia was to be played without singing, much to the annoyance of those who cried censorship. Online choirs were organised by way of cultural resistance. But the BBC caved into pressure and the words were sung by a cohort of 18.

The Keira Bell high court decision

In a judicial review brought by Keira Bell, the high court ruled that the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trusts gender identity service (GIDS) for children with gender dysphoria had been misinterpreting the law on child consent in referring children as young as 10 for puberty blockers.

The court found the potentially serious long-term health consequences of taking puberty blockers are unknown, and that virtually all children at GIDS who started puberty blockers progressed to cross-sex hormones. The decision was condemned as shocking by Stonewall. The NHS has since suspended the use of puberty blockers for under-16s unless there is a best interests order from a court.

The European Union referendum

Although it was on the surface a political decision about where sovereignty resides, the issues surrounding Brexit were as often as not cultural at root. More than anything the referendum exposed faultlines in the nation that remain open and prey to exploitation.

The Oprah Winfrey interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex

Its a mark of the weird political landscape that an American celebrity interview with a couple of fugitive royals could become the subject of so much hostility and polarised opinion. Prejudices and preferences concerning race, class and nationality created a meta-narrative that successfully overshadowed the banality of the conversation.

Laurence Foxs appearance on Question Time

When Fox rejected the notion that Meghan Markle was a victim of racism, he announced himself as a cultural, anti-woke warrior ready to defend white males against the racism of being described as privileged. Just over a year later he was running to be mayor of London. He lost.

Oliver Dowdens warning to cultural institutions

A policy of non-interventionism has long been the accepted relationship between culture secretaries and cultural institutions but Dowden appeared to breach this understanding when he told museum and gallery heads that they should retain and explain contentious statues, and not be drawn into rewriting history. Because history is fixed and symbols are for ever.

This article was amended on 24 June 2021. An earlier version cited, as a key flashpoint, the Last Night of the Proms 2020, and said that Rule Britannia was played without singing. In fact, the BBC reversed its original decision and the words of the anthem were sung by a small choir.

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Everything you wanted to know about the culture wars but ...

2008 was a really important year, insofar as the Great Recession accentuated an important distinction within the white middle class. It drove a wedge between the middle and lower-middle or working class and the highly trained, professionally educated managers, technocrats and intellectualsbasically, between the top 20 percent and the bottom 80 percent. And that meant [there] were now class differences that were overlaid upon some of these cultural differences. And in surveys that we've done here at the Institute [for Advanced Cultural Studies at University of Virginia], weve tracked that. In 2016, the single most important factor in determining a Trump vote was not having a college degree.

So now, instead of just culture wars, there's now a kind of class-culture conflict. With a sense of being on the losing side of our global economy and its dynamics, I think that the resentments have just deepened. That became obvious, more and more, over the four years of Trump, and part of Trumps own genius was understanding the resentments of coming out on the losing side of global capitalism.

And I think this is reflected, too, in the ways in which progressives speak about the downtrodden: Most of the time, it is in terms of race and ethnicity, immigration and the like; it is not about the poor, per se. I think thats a pretty significant shift in the lefts self-understanding.

What do you think is behind that shift?

Well, if you became an advocate for the working class, youd be an advocate for a lot of Trump voters. Again, I think there's a class-culture divide: a class element that overlays the cultural divide. And they [white non-college-educated voters] voted en masse for Trump. And I think thats an element of it. Theyre also the carriers of what [some on the left] perceive to be racist and misogynist, sexist understandings and ways of life. Thats my guess.

Straightforward, materialist social science would say that people are voting their economic interests all the time. But they dont. The seeming contradiction of people voting against their economic interests only highlights that point: That, in many respects, our self-understanding as individuals, as communities and as a nation trumps all of those things.

Along those lines, there can be a tendency, especially on the political left, to talk about culture war issues as being distractions that are raised in order to divide people who might otherwise find common cause around, say, shared economic interests. What do you make of that view?

We are constituted as human beings by the stories we tell about ourselves. The very nature of meaning and purpose in life are constituted by our individual and collective self-understandings. How that is a distraction is beyond me.

You know, people will fight to the death for an idea, for an ideal. I was criticized in the early 90s for using the word war [in the term culture war]. But I was trained in phenomenology, in which you are taught to pay attention to the words that people themselves use. And in interviews I did [with those on the front lines of culture war fights], people would say, you know, it feels like a wareven on the left.

We are constituted as human beings by the stories we tell about ourselves. How that is a distraction is beyond me.

I talk about this sense of a struggle for ones very existence, for a way of life; this is exactly the language that is also used on the left, but in a much more therapeutic way. When you hear people say that, for instance, conservatives very existence on this college campus is a threat to my existence as a trans person or gay person, the stakes for them seem ultimate.

The question is: What is it that animates our passions? I dont know how one can imagine individual and collective identityand the things that make life meaningful and purposefulas somehow peripheral or as distractions.

Theres a passage you wrote 30 years ago that seems relevant to this point: We subtly slip into thinking of the controversies debated as political rather than cultural in nature. On political matters, one can compromise; on matters of ultimate moral truth, one cannot. This is why the full range of issues today seems interminable.

I kind of like that sentence. [Laughs] I would put it this way: Culture, by its very nature, is hegemonic. It seeks to colonize; it seeks to envelop in its totality. The root of the word culture is Latin: cultus. Its about what is sacred to us. And what is sacred to us tends to be universalizing. The very nature of the sacred is that it is special; it cant be broached.

Culture, in one respect, is about that which is pure and that which is polluted; it is about the boundaries that are often transgressed, and what we do about that. And part of the culture warone way to see the culture waris that each has an idea of what is transgressive, of what is a violation of the sacred, and the fears and resentments that go along with that.

Every culture has its view of sin. Its an old-fashioned word, but it [refers to that which] is, ultimately, profane and cannot be permitted, must not be allowed. Understanding those things that underwrite politics helps us understand why this persists the way it does, why it inflames the passions that we see.

It feels like the universe of things that might be considered part of the culture war has grown considerably over the past 30 years, such that it seems to now envelop most of politics. In that situation, how does democracy work? Because when the stakes are existential, it would seem like compromise is impossible. Can you have a stable democracy without compromise?

No, I dont think you can. Part of our problem is that we have politicized everything. And yet politics becomes a proxy for cultural positions that simply wont brook any kind of dissent or argument.

You hear this all the time. The very idea of treating your opponents with civility is a betrayal. How can you be civil to people who threaten your very existence? It highlights the point that culture is hegemonic: You can compromise with politics and policy, but if politics and policy are a proxy for culture, theres just no way.

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How the Culture War Could Break Democracy - POLITICO

I want my child to go to school free and unmasked, a woman shouted at a union official in Broward County last week, as protesters held up signs that said My Body, My Choice and Masks = Child Abuse. Broward County voted to require masks despite the governors order.

The rhetoric was also incendiary 300 miles away in St. Johns County, where masked parents demonstrated alongside small children and urged school officials to buck the governors order. Dead children are not acceptable losses, one sign read. After a school board meeting that stretched more than seven hours last week, masks remained optional.

We have been handcuffed, the school board chair said.

At the same time, at least 28 states, largely Republican-controlled, have moved to restrict education on race and history. Another 15 states, mostly run by Democrats, have moved to expand racial education, according to Chalkbeat, a nonprofit education news outlet.

Much of the debate has centered on critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that analyzes racism at systemic levels and is generally not taught until college.

This is not really about critical race theory, said Dorinda Carter Andrews, a professor of race, culture and equity at Michigan State University, where she teaches such a course. Its really a distraction, she said, to suppress the ways in which educators engage young people in race dialogue.

Keith Ammon, a Republican state representative in New Hampshire, is among those who have sought to regulate how teachers talk about race. He said that concepts like white privilege could create a divisive worldview and that he was wary of teachers who bring their activism into the classroom.

As a lawmaker, he said, he has a job to put some guidelines to how taxpayer money is used.

As these laws take effect, educators may increasingly find themselves in the cross hairs.

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The School Culture Wars Over Masks, CRT and Gender ...

Earlier this month, British media once again platformed a talking point pushed by anti-trans activists. The Sunday Times, among other outlets, "reported" on a backlash to a hypothetical scenario in which a sex offender might choose to identify as a woman. That an imaginary notion was elevated into a news item speaks to the entrenched anti-transness of British media.

But then Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling tweeted the article, further elevating the narrative; she became a trending topic on Twitter, promoting a link between transness and sexual violence. US media covered her tweet as a controversy that implied there might be a real threat posed by trans self-determination. It might be too obvious to state, but there isnt. In fact, there is actually an ongoing epidemic of violence against trans women, and no such pattern of trans women committing violence against cis women or anyone else.

This was, however, the latest point of panic in a wave reacting to the so-called transgender tipping point of visibility. And Rowling in particular has chosen to make herself the face of this backlash.

Just last year, she publicly targeted clinics where trans youth receive lifesaving gender-affirming treatment, turning trans bodily self-determination into a story about the supposedly threatened safety of cis children. She has also mocked evolving public health language that includes trans men and nonbinary people, hijacking that recognition to create a story about the supposed erasure of cis women.

Like fellow billionaire Peter Thiel, she has even reportedly deployed her money and power to try to silence criticism. And yet all the while her anti-trans campaigning is generally characterized by the media as controversial views: not part of an explicit agenda, but an ongoing human interest mystery chronicled as a perplexing personal evolution.

Rowlings status as a celebrity billionaire affords her extra protection and the benefit of the doubt while also helping to amplify her talking points. But its specifically because she speaks as a white woman with concerns about the safety of women and children that her anti-trans framing is accepted on Twitter and treated by the media at large as worthy of debate.

Never explicitly framed as a misinformation agent who might merit deplatforming, Rowling is a symptom of the current media ecosystem, in which disinformation about minority identities is accepted as legitimate controversy.

This scenario comes into play whenever powerful people, institutions, or political organizations raise public concerns about the protection of majority groups, especially white women and children.

In fact, two of the biggest, seemingly unrelated, culture war stories this year were propelled by a similar reframing of misinformation as legitimate debate. These so-called controversies were supposedly about trans people, especially trans girls and women, and teaching history, known as the critical race theory debate.

Both were part of political backlashes that came in response to increased visibility for minority groups: increased representation of trans people in media and public debate about gender and the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

Framed largely by right-wing activists and think tanks as human interest issues about fairness in sports and classrooms, they circulated into national legacy media including publications like USA Today, CBS, The Atlantic, and the New York Times through first-person opinion pieces by mothers of cis athletes raising fears about trans inclusion or human interest reports featuring on-the-ground stories of white moms airing complaints about supposed radical ideas being introduced in schools.

Whatever the content of the reporting or articles, in platforming these issues through the concerns of cis and white people, mainstream media helped distort what constitutes legitimate perspectives for coverage, and in doing so sidelined the actual difficulties experienced by marginalized communities, including Black and trans youth.

Ultimately, this kind of coverage raises deeper questions about news organizations and who decides the perspective of culture war journalism.

Theres a long history in the US of setting the terms of debate by centering media narratives around the well-being of white women and children. Its usually associated with anti-Black and anti-gay right-wing activism and can be traced back to antischool integration campaigns in the 60s, through save the children anti-gay campaigns in the 70s, and even the coverage questioning how children would fare under marriages between same-sex couples in the aughts.

Right-wing activists used similar framing to introduce the so-called controversy over critical race theory. Attempts to eradicate histories of race in the US are nothing new. As recently as 2011, activists attempted to ban ethnic studies and Mexican American studies curricula in Arizona. But ethnic studies simply doesnt have the polarizing or concerning ring necessary to stoke a national panic about existing curricular offerings like studying civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

The term critical race theory was perfect for right-wing campaigns, though, because, as one activist told the New Yorker this summer, to most Americans it connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American. So a long-term campaign to dismantle any talk of race and history in schools was rebranded as a crusade against critical race theory, even though that term actually refers to a graduate-level theory about the intersections of law, culture, and structural racism that has nothing to do with elementary history in classrooms.

Theres a long history in the US of setting the terms of debate by centering media narratives around the well-being of white women and children.

The idea of the country as race-obsessed and race discourse as destructively divisive was already percolating in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, especially after George Floyds murder.

Outlets like the New York Times and the Atlantic dedicated valuable resources to reporting on the supposed excesses of anti-racism. These nuance stories by white journalists included one about a Black fathers school board campaign against anti-racism. In the Times, there was a story about a Black student who made a supposedly false accusation of racial profiling at Smith College. Even attempts at self-reflection centered whiteness and painted anti-racism as an elitist concern; a story about the Times own newsroom racism was used to highlight how privileged white high schoolers now felt entitled to call out racism.

Right-wing think tanks, like the Manhattan Institute, promoted that precise notion online and in legacy media to activate parents into believing anti-racism was out of control. Quotes from concerned moms further stoked these fears: They are making my son feel like a racist because of the pigmentation of his skin.

The idea of talking about race wasnt necessarily new to many Black and brown parents for whom discussing the realities of inequality and existing in a white world isnt an option in the same way. Yet outlets including CBS and the Atlantic picked up that framing too, feeding into the sense that radically new ideas were suddenly being introduced with headlines like, When the culture war comes for the kids, and How young is too young to teach kids about race? (The latter headline was changed after a backlash.)

As the November elections neared, news stories about suburban or small-town parents battling over school curricula started popping up as well. The framing of these battles through reported human interest stories, rather than, say, misinformation explainers, suggested that these were newsworthy grassroots issues that spoke to broad parental fears rather than a vocal minority stoking social media disinformation.

To some degree, the stories discredited the panic about race education in schools by pointing out the organizations and dark money groups (like the Judicial Crisis Network) who helped fund these campaigns and including voices of supporters of existing curriculums. But they still promoted the idea that these battles represented two equal sides of inflamed national feelings, rather than a strategically invented controversy and well-funded top-down disinformation campaigns.

Ultimately, the timing and framing of these stories about race and education highlight that they were not deemed newsworthy because of concerns of the community members at the center, Black parents and youth, or the massive ongoing inequality around race and class that still permeates public schools. Instead, they helped reframe debate to center white parental anxieties.

In many ways, this same scenario misinformation platformed as debate has been playing out in the coverage of trans people, long before J.K. Rowling seized the moment as a major anti-trans voice. Newsrooms lacking in trans journalists had been framing trans existence through concerns that trans people were incapable of deciding their bodily self-determination on their own.

This type of clueless question about how young is too young for children to know their gender, coming from outside the trans community, was epitomized by a now-infamous 2018 Atlantic cover story. It explicitly addressed imagined anxious white parents with the (misgendering) headline, Your child says shes trans...shes 13.

The story and its cis panic about trans identity as some kind of trend among teens was later completely debunked by other news outlets. Since then, gender historians have shown the long history of trans children, studies have confirmed that trans children are just as certain about their gender as cis teens. The Atlantic never officially apologized for the storys framing, including misgendering and outing the cover model. (The writer, however, has since been placed on watch lists for anti-LGBTQ journalism).

This year, right-wing activists expanded their concern to sports. And it wasnt an accident they set that arena as a location to invent debate.

In the real world, all trans people are not white and not middle class and have little access to healthcare even if they can find an affirming clinic, especially when most insurance companies refuse to cover such care. Trans people struggle not with identity itself, but with an anti-trans world that restricts access to resources for transition and features gatekeepers who set rules and timelines on cis terms. And unsurprisingly, Novembers elections saw right-wing activists promoting a new wave of bills blocking access to healthcare for trans people. As GLAAD pointed out, that Atlantic cover story was used in a legal brief filed by seven state attorneys general in a federal lawsuit seeking to roll back existing healthcare access for trans people.

This year, right-wing activists expanded their concern to sports. And it wasnt an accident they set that arena as a location to invent debate. Like classrooms, sports are imagined by white Americans as a neutral space of meritocracy, and right-wing think tanks purposely promoted that setting for human interest stories about fairness.

Publications including USA Today and the Economist took the bait, uncritically platforming first-person pieces by white mothers and white athletes airing out concerns about maybe having to compete against trans girls. The misinformation spread by cis athletes about hormonal or strength differences was ultimately debunked.

But real questions about meritocracy, including around race and class inequality, did not even get folded into these chronicles, revealing that narratives were about the protection of supposedly endangered young white women. This becomes clearer when considering that the surveillance regarding testosterone levels has primarily targeted cis Black women athletes.

Given the minority status of trans people in society at large, its unsurprising that trans athletes never even materialized in most states where the bills were being pushed. Yet even positive human interest pieces about trans athletes were reactive ones in which trans humanity was rendered visible only in terms of the wave of cis fears.

As with the CRT coverage, the focus on questions about youth transition or sports isnt actually about the struggles of trans people at all, which include disproportionately high rates of housing insecurity and under or unemployment.

The sidelining of actual trans issues in order to debate imaginary fears does, however, speak to broader systemic problems with media and the way that trans people circulate as objects of coverage for cis people rather than subjects of their own reality. Even media attempts to cover anti-trans activism have turned into debates between cis women about transness through controversies about trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFS).

That moniker itself, recently used to describe Rowling, platforms anti-trans activists within the context of feminism and has lent legitimacy to their efforts, portraying bigotry as some kind of newfangled intellectual exercise over the meaning of feminism or queer community. In fact, anti-transness is part of a long history of class and racial exclusions in feminism, both in media and, most importantly, in the real world, where trans identity has been made into a scapegoat for anger about inequality more broadly.

Its unquestionable that the CRT and trans debates have been pushed into the media by right-wing activism and conservative politicians through strategic waves of anti-CRT and anti-trans bills. Theyre even timed to purposely inflame conservatives and rally the base for elections.

But at this point, its too easy to see anti-trans and anti-Black concern-mongering as just an issue of right-wing misinformation. After all, these framings are accepted for coverage via the editorial judgments of majority white and cis newsrooms.

So-called culture war issues are where the media allows itself maximal editorializing on behalf of cis white anxieties and fears about a changing world. But the terms for what becomes a culture war story are not decided by the public. Instead, they are decided in newsrooms that dont mirror reality but certainly help shape it.

American newsrooms are even whiter than the country as a whole, and its in that context of media echo chambers that critical race theory is repackaged as controversial. Most Americans believe the history of slavery should be taught, for instance. And after the 2021 November election, polls showed that even the idea that critical race theory drove elections was overstated.

Similarly, trans rights are actually not controversial in the US population at large. But trans journalists are woefully underrepresented in newsrooms. Its predictable that cis journalists talking to each other about transness results in stories that home in on and magnify cis debates about trans identity. This dynamic sidelines the potential richness of good faith exchanges within the trans community about the complexity of existing in a cis world.

Current thinking about misinformation is focused on anti-science or partisan campaigns that exist in the social media ether. But there are other important questions, like the way the media feeds into misinformation by platforming sources that reframe debate outside the terms of the communities these debates actually affect.

Trans people struggle not with identity itself, but with an anti-trans world.

Partisanship is still the favored term in journalism for talking about media balance. But considering editorial judgment through partisanship simply recreates existing power imbalances by focusing on issues about race, class, and gender only if theyre legible through the lens of Republican vs. Democrat. It would mean something quite different if corporate media held itself accountable to the communities it covers rather than political parties.

Categorizing questions about ethical coverage through partisanship issues also helps ignore uncomfortable realities about news capitalism, like the fact that newsrooms need to make a profit and stories are often packaged for advertisers and imagined white readers.

Financial incentives are a major reason why its hard to wean media off engaging with misinformative framings to capture cis and white readers, which still constitute a majority of the public. After all, these panicked stories feed engagement for Twitter, Facebook, legacy media, and new venture capitalist corporate platforms like Substack.

Its not an accident that in all the race and trans backlash stories, class is invoked not to call out how white middle- and upper-class perspectives shape newsrooms (including through media CEOs). Instead, it is invoked to imply that anti-racism or trans rights are somehow an elitist concern. This framing takes pressure off the publications themselves to engage with these issues as a labor concern in their own newsrooms. But divorcing stories about class and identity from the real world and existing power structures is a distortion. Framing and context shouldnt only be dictated by cis white fears and concerns.

Still, there have been some changes by newsrooms around the framing of stories to acknowledge power imbalances in the real world. The Verge has updated its policies for giving big tech companies anonymity as background sources for articles. Some news organizations are questioning the uncritical use of police sources when ascertaining the truth of events. Cis and white concerned parents might be less obviously identifiable as problematic sources, but its a powerful category of people due for a similar reckoning.

Tellingly, after a backlash to the white framing of its how young is too young CRT story, CBS changed the headline not to, say, White Parents Are Finally Having to Grapple with Questions Others Routinely Do. Instead, it was replaced with a nonclickbait-y mouthful: Documentary explores debate over how and when race should be taught in schools.

That shift of the framing to debate is the customary way mainstream media dodges any pressure about taking sides. But platforming both sides implies we live in an already equal world. We dont. And thats a fact.

Link:
The Culture Wars Arent Real. The People They Hurt Are. - BuzzFeed News

It has been another huge year for podcasts, with a rise in both fictional and celebrity-hosted podcasts, along with the perennial true crime ones. Themes of diversity, social justice, environmental issues and cancel culture were also prominent this year.

Here, then, are five of the best podcasts of 2021 and some suggestions for companion listening.

From Serial to Ear Hustle (produced inside San Quentin prison) to Darwins Birds Eye View, the podcast medium has allowed us to fully hear prisoners stories, without any prior judgement based on their appearance. Suave extends the tradition with a deep dive into the story of a Latino-American man called David Luis Suave Gonzalez, sentenced to life imprisonment at Graterford State Correctional Institution, Pennsylvania, aged just 17.

It turns out that like other juveniles in that state, he pleaded guilty rather than be subject to a potential death penalty. Journalist Maria Hinojosa tracks Suaves story over decades, until a new ruling means he may find freedom, at almost 50. A penetrating exploration of prison psychology, this podcast is anchored in a complex relationship between a journalist and her source.

Companion listening: In the Dark, Series 2, Episode: Curtis Flowers.Years of investigation by this podcast team helped obtain the release of a Mississippi man, Curtis Flowers, who was wrongfully imprisoned for 23 years partly due to a racist district attorney. This long-awaited interview with a freed Curtis reveals a man who is sad, charming, clear-eyed and remarkably free of bitterness.

Read more: Michelle Obama, podcast host: how podcasting became a multi-billion dollar industry

Jon Ronson, the Louis Theroux of podcasting, provides a historical take on the culture wars in this carefully crafted BBC podcast (dropping Feb 9 in Australia). In the first five episodes (all Ive heard), Ronson deploys his trademark ability to scratch a big theme and find the quirky human stories that flip common perceptions.

A televangelist espouses gay rights at the height of AIDS; the censoring of progressive school literature in America in the 60s gives way to a woke backlash decades on against a seminal black memoir; a reformed anti-abortion crusader rues his propaganda; and a 1980s proto-Q-anon-style conspiracy that sent an innocent childcare worker to jail for years shows that framing a victim does not need online hysteria. The series provides sobering context for the conflicts that have been so amplified by social media anarchy, delivered with a kind of wry wonder at our inhumanity.

Companion listening: The Eleventh from Pineapple Studios documents horrifying tales of contemporary cancel culture in its first series, The Inbox, while Limited Capacity from CBC is a more playful take on internet predations.

The title derives from then President Donald Trumps vicious description of Haiti, El Salvador and some African countries in 2018. This spurred young Ghanaian-American Afia Kaakyire to delve into family history and self-discovery, telling true tales dipped in entrepreneurial dreams, green card anxieties, complicated love.

Though her name is made-up (for obvious reasons), Afias voice is utterly authentic. She chronicles with honesty and irony her ambivalent, evolving relationship with Ghana and her extended family, in a wide-ranging essay-memoir produced to the excellent standards we associate with the Radiotopia network of independent artists. Episode 3, in which she interviews her remarkable mother, Agnes, about her long journey to becoming a property-owner in New York, is a standout. And unlike many narrative podcasts, the ending doesnt disappoint: the final two episodes positively sizzle.

Companion listening: Crackdown shares themes of being Other and wishing to be truly seen. This activist Canadian podcast is hosted by Garth Mullins, a drug user who is also a professional radio reporter. In collaboration with a community of drug users in Vancouver, the podcast robustly advocates for opioids and other drugs to be made legal, styling itself as the drug war, covered by drug users as war correspondents.

This epic podcast traverses the Okavango River from its source in Angola to its discharge into the Botswana Delta 1500 kilometres later, through the eyes of local keepers and scientists dedicated to its conservation. Funded by the National Geographic Society and others, its a sound-rich portrait of the river as a vital, living artefact, narrated by two engaging African scientists who are emotionally and environmentally connected to it.

Companion listening: The Repair Season 5 of the always-on-the-Zeitgeist Scene On Radio tackles the climate emergency, starting at the Book of Genesis, which exhorted man to subdue nature.

Sometimes the Big Topics get a bit overwhelming and its nice to be reminded of what podcasting means to many: a chumcast/chatcast, where a couple of pals shoot the breeze on whatever takes their fancy. Countless chatcasts dabble in sport, pop culture and TV recaps.

With corporate heavies like Spotify, Audible and lately Facebook, muscling in on the medium, its refreshing to hear two homegrown Aussies randomly ruminating on a very pertinent theme surviving the share house and riding out the rental crisis. Hosts Marty Smiley and Nat Demena have lots of fun with Karen bin nazis,(entitled white women who police bins on streets), food-tamperers and housemates that never flush.

Companion listening: Helen Garner reading Monkey Grip, her own tale of toxic share houses, set in Melbourne in the 70s. Deliciously observed, this gritty urban anthropology (disguised as a novel) makes you realise not much has changed, despite the internet. Free on ABC Listen app, or on Audible.

Siobhan McHughs book The Power of Podcasting will be released in February.

Continued here:
River stories, culture wars, share house sagas: 5 of the best podcasts of 2021 - The Conversation AU