Well if you feel that strongly about it

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

Now David Remnick has changed his mind and canceled the Bannon gig.

There are many ways for a publication like ours to do its job: investigative reporting; pointed, well-argued opinion pieces; Profiles; reporting from all over the country and around the world; radio and video interviews; even live interviews. At the same time, many of our readers, including some colleagues, have said that the Festival is different, a different kind of forum. It’s also true that we pay an honorarium, that we pay for travel and lodging. (Which does not happen, of course, when we interview someone for an article or for the radio.) I don’t want well-meaning readers and staff members to think that I’ve ignored their concerns. I’ve thought this through and talked to colleagues––and I’ve re-considered. I’ve changed my mind. There is a better way to do this. Our writers have interviewed Steve Bannon for The New Yorker before, and if the opportunity presents itself I’ll interview him in a more traditionally journalistic setting as we first discussed, and not on stage.

–––David Remnick

So that was interesting.

Comments

One response to “Well if you feel that strongly about it”

  1. Karellen Avatar
    Karellen

    An interesting dissection on the kerfuffle from John Scalzi:

    As a former journalist, I can understand Remnick’s thinking on this one: He’d been angling to interview Bannon for a while, and the idea of getting that festering lump of white “supremacy” on a public stage where he couldn’t equivocate or finesse his way out of his shitty racist ideas seemed like a good one. The problem was that Remnick was thinking with his journalist brain and not his event coordinator brain.

    […]

    Remnick never saw the backlash coming, I suspect (and I fully admit that this is me being charitable to Remnick), because he never got out of his journalist brain. He saw someone he wanted to interview, saw the dynamic of the live stage as one where he was likely to get more truth out of Bannon than otherwise, and didn’t think of anything else about the situation until it was too late.

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