Hadley Freeman Article About Graham LInehan

[Igneococcus]

Not actually read it yet but here for anybody who'd like to read:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/6f23ce7c-596a-11ee-a62b-d21c2c8f0b9b?shareToken=3adab3e87e06a1d37788d0b2482f02b6

The likes of Caitlin Moran and her North London posse's silence is sickening. Her whole usp is fearless feminism with a humourous twist yet her cowardice on this subject is notable. The Times certainly needs a clear out as some of their columnists are becoming very tedious to read indeed, especially the ones related to each other

I read the article from the OP's link above and thought it was a media-centric piece, somewhat superficial, skimming along the surface in the way of the media.
But it was not until I opened the Sunday Times print copy last night that I got a shock on seeing the full scale of what they had done with this piece and the impact it would have had. I'll try to convey what it was like.

The Sunday Times is big bold broadsheet and this piece was startlingly in your face. It appeared under a huge page banner NEWS REVIEW in blue and under that in thick black block headline across three rows THE COMEDY GENIUS WHO LOST IT ALL IN THE TRANS WARS - these headlines were both over an inch high. The text went fully across the width of the page in four columns (divided by that photo and image of tweets shown in the OP) and went three quarters or more down the page. The impression was of a full page spread. A smaller article on Barbie (with headline a quarter the size) took up the bottom quarter of the page.

The NEWS REVIEW was two pages. That was the front one and overleaf the blue NEWS REVIEW headline was a quarter of the size and the main article was an article about Murdoch with less monumental headline in black initial capital and lower case "Risk taker, mould breaker: Murdoch is forever and always moving forward" which article and large photo took up about two thirds of the page, with an article on the right about truffle hunting and one across the bottom quarter "Winter is coming for 'Jophie', the ultimate millennial supercouple".

On reading the article again I thought it was more like a magazine feature than a news article meriting such prominence and space when the actual more newslike item was surely Murdoch retiring.
It went on at length about Glinner and his fame and standing but it was setting him up as this figure who in the writer's imagination turned from what he was into something entirely different. Superficial, and missing the point. By the second column, feminists were 'uneasy about Linehan's sometimes reckless activism' and he called someone a groomer. We then had a detour into autobiography and Nazis and by the fourth column 'many others' on her side viewed him with distaste and as a monomaniacal bully and a liability 'who gives gender critics a bad name.' I wonder how many and who they are. Is it influential people at the Sunday Times? Someone there has it in for Glinner to do that number on him in the NEWS REVIEW when it isn't really news. He must have been really knocked sideways on seeing that. Freeman's weekly column is normally a quarter page, below Dominic Lawson and next to the leader.

On the Nazi point, looking at the Newsnight interview, he was blocked by the interviewer every time he tried to explain what he saw as parallels with Nazis. She was like a woman with a hammer who kept hitting the same nail over and over but he kept his control over his thought and argument. He is intelligent and not the sort of caricature that some portray. Are activists for other rights causes accused of being reckless and harmful? Mentioning Nazis is often suspect, though common and not taboo in reference to feminists or 'grammar nazis'. He did not depart from reason and descend into being like the people who threaten and abuse women's rights activists; it's not the equivalent that Freeman portrays, rather facilely.

He hasn't lost his reputation. It's nonsense. Some others in the industry may have lost theirs. He got caught up and is a man of principle. A stubborn refuser. Someone posted above about Shaw's observation: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Isn't that true of pioneers and campaigners? He knows he's blunt and combative but what is being overlooked in this article is the substance of what he is dealing with and what he has achieved.

What's going on at the Sunday Times is a bit puzzling. The NEWS REVIEW this week seems more like space-filling gossip and trivia than in-depth news and analysis.

Nice to hear a re-run last night of BBC Radio4Extra's 2014 Chain reaction show in which Linehan is interiewed about his comedy creations by Neil Innes. The format of the show means that he will appear next week as the interviewer in a show about another comedian (Adam Buxton I think).

Not sure whether they have neen repeating his appearences in this slot during all the sidelining of him, or whether this marks a new willingness to 'allow' him on the airwaves.

Well the print version certainly sounds like a classic hit piece @Abitofalark . Grim. As was the awful Newsnight bullying rant by Sarah Smith. I watched it again recently to remind myself why Linehan is 100 % right on this.

Only recently learnt that Sarah is the daughter of my old hero , John Smith. I wonder what on earth he'd have made of it all?
Interesting about radio 4 Extra @GoodOldEmmaNess . Perhaps GL is being let out of quarantine as you suggest.

Yeah, she's been execrable on this. As I recall, she's tweeted in support of a male prisoner being moved to a woman's prison. There's no excuse for that.

I'm shit sick of the London Murphia on this subject. Prisoners of the Catholic past perhaps? Overcompensating . With a side order of hunker sliding to the liberal media.

I am aghast at the printout copy of The Sunday Times

Neil Innes interviewing GL? I know what I'll be listening to next on BBC Sounds

I used to like Caitlin Moran but I started to gradually go off her quite a while ago and recently she's proved that I was right to think that she was little more than a self-serving arsehole.

It just seems as though she’s been on repeat for years talking about the same simplistic feminist topics while managing not to express an opinion on the biggest threat / topic to women’s rights in her lifetime. Unless I’ve missed it?

No you haven’t @DogsAkimbo in fact she decided that the thing she needed to write about far more than this was - men.

it’s a bit hard to portray yourself as a fearless no nonsense working class feminist whilst ignoring the enormous elephant in the room….

I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that a Jewish woman who lost many family in the Holocaust (as did i) doesn't understand what he meant by the references to Mengele.

My mental health is not at a point right now where I can look it up in order to post details here of what he did.

But however appalling, unethical and distressing the current 'gender affirming surgeries are, to compare them to Mengele is just wrong. It really is.

@RealityFan

Excellent post. Agree wholeheartedly!

No, he hasn't lost his reputation in my eyes - or do I not count? No, he hasn't lost his career - he has a best-selling memoir coming out. No, he hasn't 'lost' his family

Oh come on, in the world he previously inhabited, he certainly has.

Ditto career - and by his own admission, too. He has spoken about having scant to no earnings.

Family - I happen to know GL's family (original family) and am aware of the toll this has taken. I'm not going to say more about that. Regarding his wife & children, he's again, on record at describing the damage wrought.

Whether it was the right choice, for him, ultimately, is for him to decide.

Thanks for the description of the print article, @Abitofalark. It inspired me to google * *the expression "pour decourager les autres".
I learned that it's "pour encourager les autres", from Voltaire's satirical reference to the execution of Admiral John Byng, who didn't get home from war in time to rebut the rumours about him which led to his execution. Very pertinent to the media's treatment of Graham Linehan.

Thanks from me too, @Abitofalark.

That was a very illuminating and comprehensive description - thank you for taking the time to write it on here. I had a look to see if there had been recent editorial changes at the News Review section, but my googling skills aren't up to it. It looks like there been a change of editor this year - but I can't see who the new one is.

As @Abitofalark says, it's an interesting decision to categorise this as a 'news' article.

He hasn't 'lost' his career or his reputation, he's not involved in a scandal. He had a blip in his career caused by the fact that he's stood up for women's and children's rights. Just like the US screenwriters who suffered under McCarthyism in the 1950s, things change, they're vindicated and they go one to bigger and greater things and are remembered after their deaths not just for their work but for the principled stand they took.

Graham will be shown to have been one of the leaders who fought on the right side of history and in a couple of years will be completely vindicated — and I hope will make a lot of money with Father ted the Musical and a long-running sitcom about characters living in an Orwellian nightmare.

Yes, his earnings have been affected. But any of us can have our careers and our earnings impacted by bad faith actors at any time. It doesn't reflect badly on us.

@VWdieselnightmare

He has lost his earnings, and he is reputationally damaged.

The reasons for this don't have to be due to negative behaviour from him.

I admire him, his stance & his frequent examples of bravery.

I do not exalt him to a level of sainthood that people do here.

While he makes cogent, valid points, that I concur with, he is also at times obsessive, bombastic & personally derogatory. Other GC voices, who have had their careers wrenched from them, at least for a period, like Kathleen Stock, avoid this.

There is little hope of GL's voice being truly heard, by those who disagree with him (clearly he is loved & admired by those who agree with him).

He has paid a high price, and I feel sorry about that. I feel HF was making that exact point. Regardless of the outcome in the future, some of that, he will not get back. I think it's greatly under-estimating the situation to describe it as a 'blip'.

I also cannot consider it healthy to have given over everything to the pursuit of this issue, notwithstanding how relevant and significant it is. I think HF makes that point too.

I feel everything he has endured must have taken an enormous toll on him, that I fear will be lifelong. Some of that is due to his own choices.

You're doing a Hadley Freeman, aren't you? Are you Hadley Freeman?

You admire him but you pity him and the character/ personality flaws (bombastic, obsessive) that have lost him his reputation. That's exactly what HF does in her article: 'so talented, so much potential, such a shame he couldn't have handled it like I have, flawed character, I fear for him now his reputation's in tatters...'

His reputation's not in tatters. He's thought of more highly by thousands more people who know him now than he was as a comedy writer whom most people hadn't heard of, even if they loved his shows. As someone else upthread has noted of HR's article, this is mean, patronising crap. 'I cannot think it healthy....' you say. And you accuse him of being bombastic!

I've met Graham on several occasions. He's not a saint and no one who's ever met him would think it, but obviously it suits you to be hyperbolic about those sticking up for him. He's a complicated, classic creative (and I know, I worked in the creative industries for much of my career) and like many creative people he doesn't always think or behave in the way that dull people like you and me and Hadley Freeman do. He says what he sees. Call that brave or foolish, the last thing he needs is you and Hadley talking down to him de haut en bas, telling him he needs to be more like that nice Kathleen Stock. He's done more for the GC cause that Stock with her guarded academic approach, let alone Hadley Freeman with her tentative let's-not-rock-the-boat articles. I'm not knocking Kathleen Stock or her ordeal, but let's not pretend that if everyone had taken that always polite, always reasonable line we'd be anywhere near where we are today.

As has been said multiple times up thread, it is entirely possible to like, admire and support someone while at the same time observing aspects of their behaviour and character that may cause detriment to themselves.

People who fight back against a prevailing fashionable sentiment need to be very brave, quite ornery in fact.

Such people are rarely 'nice'

There's a lot of middle class coded distaste for GG in the media, a lot of wrinkled noses. A lot of snide comments about his marriage.

I do wonder where the GC movement would be if we left the debate up to naice, sanctioned feminists such as Caitlin Moran and Zoe Williams. Or even, god forbid, the purist snobs like Jane Clare Jones.

I've not read this full thread but Hadley was not bloody writing about this in 2018 - we were all here looking at the Guardian's reporting, I don't think anyone from the Guardian did until Suzanne Moore.
What a mean article she's written. The thing is Graham is right. He's been right since the start and if he seems passionate to the point of obsession it's because kids are being steralised and left with no sexual function.

I do wonder where the GC movement would be if we left the debate up to naice, sanctioned feminists such as Caitlin Moran and Zoe Williams.

Well it was left to Zoe Williams women would be fucked. She's very much with the trans activists on Twitter.

"if he seems passionate to the point of obsession it's because kids are being steralised and left with no sexual function"

This is the main thing. In ten years time when there are class actions from injured and disabled young people, and those same young people are angrily demanding why medical professionals and government did not protect them....will the middle class meeja types still be wrinkling their noses over Glinner's being 'distasteful'?

I'm not being facetious but one of the Unit 731 (widely acknowledged to be 'worse' than Mengele) experiment clusters was the amputation of healthy genitals and sewing them onto prisoners of the opposite sex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

Yes, this has been on my mind too. I was on Mumsnet feminist threads from around 2016-7 (various different names, banned at least once) and it seemed to me Hadley Freeman was, for a lot of the time after that, fence-sitting — occasionally publishing articles that might be seen as GC but could always be defended. I was never on Twitter so perhaps she was saying more on there, but for years we lived in hope of her coming out fully and it wasn't for a long time that she could have been definitely said to be GC. So here she is, a woman who chose to prioritise staying where she was and paying the mortgage — which is fine. But to then be all pitying and blamey towards Graham, who spoke out loudly and clearly when she didn't, and to implyn she was somehow on a par with him in alerting people to the danger... Give me Suzanne Moore any day.