To think Owen Jones is childish

[sandrabedminster]

Owen Jones storms off sky news

I don't even get what his issue is, he's invited on to discuss the headlines and then runs off as he doesn't like how much attention the biggest story is getting.

But Sky is always shit. It's hardly a surprise.

He was on C4 News.

From the 'I' online

Sky News presenter Mark Longhurst has expressed regret following an on-air clash that saw Owen Jones leaving the set of Sunday night’s newspaper review.

At the time host Mark Longhurst would not label the killing of 50 men in a LGBT night club in Orlando, Florida a hate crime. The presenter sought to “delineate” the debate between “hate crime or whether it is something is done in the name of religion”. He argued that rather than being a homophobic attack it was instead carried out against “human beings” and “freedom of all people to enjoy themselves” and comparable to the attacks on the Bataclan in Paris.

In a statement to the i, Mark Longhurst said: “Last night’s press preview featured a discussion among the reviewers about the terrible events in Orlando. As the presenter responsible for chairing the conversation, I regret that the segment ended as it did. I absolutely accept the atrocity in Florida was, of course, an attack on LGBT people, but I was also trying to reflect what was on the newspaper front pages. It was never my intention to offend Owen Jones and I very much look forward to working with him again in future.”

Owen Jones has called his comments “the definition of a non-apology.”

Fellow guest Julia Hartley-Brewer was also criticised for saying on the review: “I don’t think you have ownership of horror because you are gay”. On her talkRadio show slot she responded: “I will not check my white straight privilege at the door”.

“I will not be told what I can and cannot say because I do not live in an Islamic state.”

AlPacinosHooHaa - I don't think that is lowering the tone. I think it is a legitimate comment that as subjective and flawed human beings we tend to have a stronger emotional response to tragedies when they strike closer to home. Sometimes that means we react more strongly to shootings in Paris than Ankara (and the level of media coverage and public outcry was noticeably different) and sometimes that means that women's forums like MN react more strongly to stories about the abuse of women than an equivalent all male group might and my Jewish friends feel differently about synagogue attacks to my Christian friends. "There but for the grace of God" is a very normal human response and I think the decent thing for people not affected in that way is to respect those people who are.

As a note, my family are Sri Lankan. When the boxing day tsunami hit I was a wreck. I cried like a baby. No one I knew had died, but those were beaches I'd played as a child, I knew someone who worked at a hospital where corpses were taken in, OH and I had been there the year before to meet each other's families. And my English friends respected that different level of grief.

I think it's reasonable to respect the fact that a gay man, hearing about people like him, being murdered just for their shared sexuality, will feel this tragedy on a different emotional level.

Ifiwasabadger he wasn't being interviewed about the attack he is regularly PAID to DISCUSS the newspaper headlines. He didn't want to do that he wanted to spend 30 mins giving a speech.
He claimed that you couldn't understand the issue if you weren't gay which us total bullshit. I'm not gay but I felt revulsion that so many lost their lives.
He was given plenty of time to have his say 12 minutes in fact and when the presenter tried to expand the subject to include the actual newspaper headline OJ threw his toys out of the pram and stormed off.

Flamingflume - that! And so much more concisely that I put it.

tab scone is trying to assert people dont care about areas populated by as she said - brown people.

I disagree and as you have said in your post is my response to her.

We are moved by different things that we have a connection with. I find it distasteful to try and call this natural response racist. As you have said - you felt a strong response to Sri Lanka because you know it. You may have a response but less, to somewhere you have no connection too. Its natural.

if he wasn't in a good place to discuss it he shouldn't have gone onto the show. It's a news review show. They discuss newspaper stories. It's not a place to discuss one's own politics other than in quite high level terms. I think he should have said that it's important to see this as an LGBT hate crime - which he did. All that happened to offend him is that the others didn't immediately copy his phraseology.

I do agree that there is a general downplaying of the LGBT aspect of this awful crime. But it's being knocked around by all sorts of people as a evidence of their rightness. The anti gun lobby are using it to promote gun law reform. The NRA are using it to promote more guns. This happens with every mass gun crime in the USA so that's not particular to this crime. Then Trump is using it for his anti-Muslim tirades. The left are using his use of it to decry his racism. It's even been used to support Brexit. There are lots of complex issues here. That would have been an interesting discussion in which his points would have sat nicely. Instead it became weirdly polarised rant.

I think we will all learn more about the motives for the attack as the investigation moves forward.

It seems to be many things: a deliberate attack on LGBT folk, a dose of religious extremism, a violent and possibly very disturbed young man, easy access to weapons.

Sad for the young people who lost your lives and for their families and the emergency services who attended.

I don't think Owen Jones is the story here.

I was a bit annoyed by the comment about not understanding unless you were gay, but after reading some of the comments, I'm starting to think he had a point.

What the presenters (and some of the commentators) seem not to understand is that by downplaying the homophobic aspect they were focussing on the fears of straight white people. If you are gay, you fear extremist fundamentalist. Muslims, but you also fear extremist fundamentalist Christians and violent homophobes of no religious affiliation. Addressing Islamic extremism does nothing to prevent violent attacks from those other groups, which in my personal experience have been far more common.

flamingflume has nailed it.

Sorry, haven't read the full thread, but I watched OJ storming off Sky News last night. He shouldn't have walked off but I totally understood his point of view. It was clearly a homophobic attack and needed to be fully acknowledged as such.

I think today's coverage has focused more on the homophobic nature of the attack than the coverage that I saw yesterday. I wonder if OJ walking off the on live TV hit home with some of the news editors?

I so disagree. The discussion was of a massacre in which LGBTQ lives - and the lives of friends of LGBTQ people - were wiped out, erased. How on earth are you supposed to react to that discussion being turned into a rhetorical act of erasure of LGBTQ people? It's actually a kind of collusion to go along with that rhetorical erasure. You can't just state "Well, this can also be seen as a homophobic attack" and then move on. The 'moving on' is politically incorrect and an erasure of truth.

It must also have been incredibly frustrating to have been publicly patronised by two no-nothing fuckwits, with nothing but a huge sense of self-importance to justify their off-loading their opinions. But that's Sky News for you, as I keep saying. It's the equivalent of the Daily Mail: hate, celebrity, idiot-level 'news'.

FlamingFlume's analogy is, indeed, succinct and to the point.

after the attacks in Cologne it prompted much debate about attacks on women

Much of the debate focused on 'cultural values' and was met with the same whataboutry as is being displayed here.

I don't think anyone was trying to take ownership or 'straight splaining' anything, they where discussing the multiple factors at play that different papers was running with and that are evident as ego has posted.

This is going to come out wrong but I will give it a go.

I don't agree with the words but can kind of see that the 'attack on all humans' could mean an attack against culture, it obviously was an homophobic attack, possibly by some repressed gay man (who also it seems wasn't a right wing supporter), you don't have to be gay to feel upset/repulsed (which Owen alluded to) at what's happened, nor are you minimising anything by looking at the many contributing factors, as with cologne there is a disconnect in even acknowledging certain contributing factors though

That should be "two know-nothing fuckwits".

If a woman said that men couldn't understand the experience of fearing stranger rape walking home at night because they had male privilege, it would be a case of #yesallwomen #notallmen.. but watch how no one wants this to be an LGBT issue.

I keep seeing on social media this idea that LGBT people are trying to "own" the tragedy and have come across this phrase of "claiming exclusive ownership" several times because hey, we're all human.

But riddle me this. If there was a terrorist attack carried out on an English football team who were playing, say, Germany would all of us say, "it wasn't an attack on English people, it was an attack on HUMANITY". What about an attack on a specific national parade e.g. a St. Patrick's Day parade? Would we expect no one Irish to feel a tiny bit more shaken than people of a different nationality or reference Irishness in their response? There's definite resistance to viewing LGBT people as a minority at the moment.

Of course Irish people would feel more shaken. And of course the French were more shaken by Bataclan than we were and we were more shaken by people who don't know Paris and who've never been there - because you naturally feel closer to things and people that you know.

But it's also empowering to say that this is an attack on humanity. I don't think the LGBT element should be downplayed. It's clearly central. But I do also think all of this stuff is an attack on our broader values of individual freedom. Just as misogyny shouldn't only be important to women. We women might name it first but I want everyone to feel affronted by attacks on women because they are attacks on women and women are part of humanity.

But riddle me this. If there was a terrorist attack carried out on an English football team who were playing, say, Germany would all of us say, "it wasn't an attack on English people, it was an attack on HUMANITY".

If they attack was ISIS connected (for example) a group who want to change our way of life and remove our freedoms I would have no issue with Germany announcing that it was an attack on "us all". I would consider it an act of support i.e. we stand together. If memory serves me, similar messages were given by leaders of the Western world after the Paris and Brussels were attacked.

Obviously the pain was be felt more in England or among footballers and football fans but I wouldn't be offended because someone in France or Holland Or Iceland is outraged by it.