Back in November, I wrote a brief post here about white-ethno-nationalist Richard Spencer's appearance on NPR's All Things Considered. In part, I said: "having [Spencer] go on largely ideologically unchallenged aside from a weak-ass trigger warning and a couple of silly questions about symbolic hate is mind-boggling. I do not understand the willingness of the mainstream to treat a vicious minority with such kid gloves, no matter how astonished they pretend to be by the things they say." I went on to question the value of even giving someone of Spencer's fairly modest influence, who hails (and heils) from the clownish fringe, access to the amplifying platform of NPR. But if you're going to put him on, you'd better offer up a strong and unqualified challenge to his abhorrent views.
This brings us to the current conversation in media circles about Megyn Kelly's upcoming interview with Alex Jones on NBC (https://nyti.ms/2tk1W9D). From Vox:
"Reporting on Jones makes sense; he has indeed gained prominence since the last election. But a serious sit-down interview was a poor choice of format for covering him. It’s extremely difficult to have a reasonable exchange with a person who regularly rants and spews nonsense, as Jones does. It’s like running a straight one-on-one with a climate change denialist or someone who refuses to accept the Holocaust happened." (https://goo.gl/7HkAGx)
Putting aside the silliness of a concerned think-piece of media commentary that happens *before* the interview actually airs, I am sympathetic to the idea that Jones shouldn't be treated like any other journalist or media figure. (I am less sympathetic to the phrase "climate change denialist," but that's for another time.) I do not further believe that the mere act of having him sit down for a one-on-one interview is itself an inherently flawed approach.
Alex Jones is not Richard Spencer. While his professed beliefs are reliably absurd and often hateful, he also commands an audience that rivals or exceeds that of any "mainstream" news outlet. Any reference to his influence in the mainstream press is almost certainly understated. Whereas the simple act of putting Richard Spencer on NPR raises his profile and automatically exaggerates Spencer's cultural standing, having Jones on a brand new NBC news magazine show--where he'll absolutely be slumming it in terms of audience size--does not overstate Jones' influence, but reflects it.
No greater harm is done by "giving Jones a mainstream platform"--he already reaches *millions* of people every week, far more than Megyn Kelly at this point, it's worth noting. If she simply lets him be himself and doesn't challenge his falsehoods and absurdities, of course she'll have done a bad job, and having him on will have proven to be ill-advised. But there is plenty of good that can come out of a conversation with Alex Jones--perhaps most relevant to our current political culture is the question of why there is such a huge market for his brand of hollow, angry, screaming, aggrieved victimhood. His badness didn't arise in a vacuum, it fills a need in the market. That should be explored! And not just as some circus freakshow, but as a question of import to the future of our country. Far more harm is done by "banning" Jones, which will only play into his narrative of the evil truth-silencing mainstream media. (That he will play it both ways, claiming that the interview was turned into a hit piece and unfairly edited to make him look bad is beside the point. He will always play the victim, no matter what.)
He is not a mere provocateur, he is not merely outrageous for the clicks and the views. There are millions of people who believe that he and those in his vast media ecosystem are the lone truth-tellers in a media/politics world of liars. Unlike a lot of provocateurs, whose primary audience is actually those who are aggrieved and offended by their outrageous statements (think Ann Coulter), Jones has a massive audience of credulous human beings on the receiving end of his rantings. Trolls like Coulter (and, ahh, our president) provoke the outrage because their audience loves anything that gets "the establishment" all flustered and blustering. Jones, on the other hand, is speaking directly to his people, no Outraged Middleman required.
Looking at Jones' career in the last twenty years, it would be outright foolish to believe that he'd simply go away if the mainstream ignored him. He, his whole shtick, is ascendant. Just as untruthful as the tabloid trash, maybe, but infinitely more impactful. If Barack Obama had been reading printouts from NaturalNews before making decisions about health policy, you bet we'd need to have a conversation about it, and any journalist would have been correct to seek out and speak to the site's quack editors. You didn't see Obama or Bush referring to the Enquirer as a reputable source of information, or calling up to chat with Jones on air about the evils of globalism--Trump has done both of these things. We ignore Jones' brand and influence at our own peril. Not because of who he is or what he says, but because of what his success says about us, what it says about the appetite of the public. How did ignoring The Deplorables work out last time?
To borrow from something I wrote about an entirely different subject a couple of years ago--I think that my larger concern here is about how self-defeating it is to deny people with whom we strongly disagree access to the discourse. This shouldn't be confused with taking sides, or even granting credibility to the claims of the "other side"--only granting credibility to the humanity of the people making those claims. Or, in this case, recognizing the actual human beings of Jones' core audience--if not the clown prince himself--as actual human beings.
If I had a chance to ask Jones a question/make a statement at him in front of a national audience, as Megyn Kelly will, as I most certainly will not, it'd go something like this:
The chaos of the world instills a fear in people that they try to quell by imagining a willful hand at work making order. You are an agent of that Imaginary Order, Alex, and you build narratives about evil puppet-masters controlling the human universe because you know this appeals to people seeking relief from that fear. You defend this as critical thinking, or open-mindedness, or devil's advocacy. But this isn't rationality--rather, it's pandering, defective thinking. Though an understandable instinct, this is a sort of psychosis, in which fear overtakes reason and alters reality. The real world impact of your work renders your "just asking questions" not just pointless, but malevolent. And in situations like these horrific tragedies, where the only chance at real understanding (limited though it may be) is through human empathy, "just asking questions, just playing devil's advocate" (to an audience of millions) goes from a silly, arguably harmless "academic" exercise to a callous, dehumanizing one that makes it less likely that the audience will ever get to the truth. It serves only itself, only to feed its own delusions. And in your case, it also serves your wallet, as you've done quite well for yourself, haven't you?
