Catherine Deveny and the Tweet Feed of Doom

It’s big news, folks – Catherine Deveny, Australia’s most militant atheist (I don’t think I’m exaggerating on that score) has been sacked from her gig as a regular contributing columnist for The Age in Melbourne because of some comments she made about Bindi Irwin on Twitter. Everyone has an opinion on this. So do I. We’ll get to it in a moment.

I could have talked about a lot of things given that it has been a long time since my last entry. I’ve got a backlog of topics.

Jim Wallace is still at it, for example. 

Tim Minchin has written a wonderful song about the Pope. 

My closest friend and I are having a wonderful debate about just how much respect needs to be accorded to the religious and I want to summarise for a general audience.

The Catholic Church is seeing enemies everywhere in modern fiction.

But the hot topic for today is Catherine, and while I must admit in the interests of fairness that I have, myself, stopped following her on twitter because our senses of humour don't seem to align (after ANZAC day - nothing to do with the damn logies), I've got a question that I'd like to see dealt with by someone. Anyone, really.

I'm playing the Moir card.

DOES Nobody remember Jan Moir? Remember Jan, the British columnist who wrote the single most ignorant and horrible article I've read on the subject of same-sex civil unions in the history of the world? (What you are seeing is a heavily tidied up and edited version from the original one I read. I was unable to find a link to someone who chronicled the differences, and for this I feel deeply unprofessional).

She recieved a record number of complaints after her article was circulated around Twitter. 21,000 complaints in total. That is, get this, 4 1/2 times the amount of followers that Deveny has on Twitter at all. That's 16500 more complaints to the British Press Complaints Commission than even heard Deveny's tweets the first time around.

So, with such a heavy public response that so far outweighed Deveny's total followership, of course Jan Moir suffered a far worse fate than Catherine did, right? I mean, Jan Moir published her hateful bilge in a national newspaper. Catherine posted it on her personal twitter page. The punishments ought to be at the very least similar, right?

Oh wait. Jan Moir has written 17 published articles for the Daily Mail since the beginning of April this year. Catherine will not write for The Age for the foreseeable future.

 This may be the only photo of Catherine Deveny in existence.

TWITTER was the reason that the Jan Moir complaints were dismissed. It was suggested that, because a link to the PCC's complaints page was passed around by certain influential tweeps, that the sheer weight of public outrage was disproportionate. It seemed that many, many more people than otherwise would have complained were made aware of the incident and whipped into a frenzy by the Twitterverse, and this counted in favour of the author.

A frenzy whipped up by the Herald Sun in Melbourne had the exact opposite effect on Deveny. Many, many more people than otherwise would have objected were made aware of her tweets and whipped into a mob by tabloid journalism. This counted very much against the author of the article. She no longer has a job.

I DO not especially enjoy Catherine's humour and certainly don't agree with her views on a number of topics. But if you cannot see a disparity in the way these two incidents played out then I fear for your deductive powers. They occurred in different countries with different national publishing standards is the absolute best argument to be invoked, and that is a straw man. Moir wouldn't have been sacked in Australia, either, of this I'm pretty damn sure.

Catherine's comments were distasteful and The Age reserved the right to terminate her. No law has been broken here. But forgive the twittersphere if it is a little aggravated by this turn of events given what happened with Gately.

Twitter can't win here. An overwhleming number of tweeps objected to a print newspaper and were dismissed. A small number of tweeps objected to Deveny, which was then picked up by a print newspaper, and she loses her job. Any notions I may have had about Twitter being the great democratic medium (they were tiny, tiny notions) have been effectively snuffed out.

I need to stress that I was originally glad that the twittersphere's reaction to Moir did not get her sacked. I have been an opponent of religious zeal long enough to recognise a porgrom when I see one and I felt that the PCC did the best they could when faced with an incredibly difficult situation. Their commitment to freedom of speech won out over bowing to pack pressure. I respected them greatly for this.

But now, what of Catherine? I see the reverse. 700-odd comments on The Age website and she is gone. (She was sacked after only 200, if I'm remembering correctly). No backbone, no commitment to anything except circulation numbers. It's kind of slightly heartbreaking.

I DO not agree with what Catherine says, but I ought to defend to the death her right to say it. In the end, she has only lost the privellege of being published in a broadsheet as opposed to her right to freedom of speech. But there's something incredibly off about how the power of Twitter only counts when the 'real' media says it does. Either people's outrage is a perfectly viable reason to sack a journalist or it isn't. We do not appear to have a consensus here.

In the meantime I won't be re-following her on Twitter, as is my right. I do not think she will lose much sleep over it.

EDIT: In the few hours I spent between drafting this and posting it, Catherine gained about 600 followers. Good for her. Adjust earlier figures accordingly.

More like YAYtheist.

I went on the radio. I have never been on the radio before, and I had a lot of fun doing it - though, as most people listening will attest, I was a little nervous. But that is not what is important. Apart from a little bit of flustery umming and ahhing, I think the whole thing went quite well. I'll try to reconstruct what I remember of it to give you all an idea of what was talked about.

1 - Welcome Mitch, tell us about Atheism.

It's quite a bit of pressure representing a group of people who are so utterly unrepresentable by a single point of view. This is why, when the lovely Carol Duncan asked me for a quick summary of what it is I believe and why, I went overboard in stressing that it was my personal take on the issue. Right off the bat we dealt with the poor reputation that atheism has - something that we, as atheists, are going to have to get used to - and how it is should not be taken as a blanket representation of the entire movement. I suspect that many atheists listening, if they were of the hardcore variety, may have been disappointed at how little I fought back against this stereotypical perception. But the object of this discussion wasn't to argue or get petty about definitions - it was to have an honest chat and show everyone that a hardline atheist could actually be a nice and approachable kind of person.

2 - How atheism and faith overlap

Though it wasn't specifically referred to like this, the Dean and I had an interesting back and forth about the strength of conviction amongst people. I haven't mentioned the Dean much up until this point so I shall remedy this now - he is a very stoic individual, was much more composed than I on the microphone, though he was far more reserved than I expected. This might have been because he was expecting an atheist of the kind I was specifically trying to demonstrate I was not. I do not blame him if he was wary. Though it's entirely possible he is just a reserved man that chooses his words carefully. Anyway, I digress - the Dean mentioned that many people who consider themselves unbelievers may not have thought too carefully about their belief systems and therefore come under a more agnostic kind of umbrella. I didn't get a chance to hear what he thought of my return point that many, many more people who live under the umbrella of their parent's religions and have thought exactly as little about their religion might be put in the same category. My point being that, for a lot of people, faith versus unbelief is not going to be a day-to-day consideration. We didn't get too much of a chance to talk about this, but I thought it was at least one of the rare times I got the point I was trying to make across quite clearly. With a minimum of stuttering.


3 - Upbringing, Scripture and Respect

The Dean, at one point, mentioned the Steve Fielding is an Earthworm quote by Dawkins at the atheist conference. I didn't bite. I was tempted to defend the professor by pointing out that he was never heard saying those words and that, really, were they that offensive, but I didn't. I wasn't there to fight, and by the time the conversation naturally moved back to me the topic was somewhere else. If I had butted in, I'd have been being petty. I let it slide.

However, this particular mission statement of mine - make friends, be my normal lovely self - may have let me down at one point in particular. My early childhood upbringing was rasied (in an entirely not-hostile way) and it came out that my parents had never put me through scripture. A decision on their part that I was quite sure was not specifically an atheistic one, rather a decision to keep me separate from indoctrination. That is not to say that scripture is an indoctrinating force (it may very well be), but that my parents didn't want to take the risk. I mentioned that I will always thank them for doing that as it allowed me to make my own decision later in life as to what I believed on these terms. I would have been horrified to look back, for example, and see that I had been pegged as an atheist child just as much as if I had been labelled a christian or muslim or jewish or wiccan child. A child is none of these things, ideally. And guess what? I was the ideal.

The host then mentioned that she was sending her own children through scripture so that they will learn respect. Now, at the time I must admit, I assumed that Carol was talking about respect for other religions (particularly after she mentioned comparative religion studies). I wholeheartedly agreed with her shortly thereafter about the merits of religious studies, especially comparative religion, and mentioned that it was perfectly fine to teach children all about religions of the world, perhaps without the particular point of view that any one of them is the right one. It only struck me later when talking to people who had been listening to the interview that she may have meant respect in general, in which case I think a bit of argument and contrary talk would have been merited. I fervently disagree that studying or belonging to a religion is what fosters respect in young children - it is a value taught by parents and developed in socialisation with others. God has no part of it.

My consolation as I look back over the interview is that, if this was the intended point (especially when I recall that I was asked 'in hindsight, do you wish you were put through scripture?'), I vindicated myself by carrying out the discussion with nothing but the utmost respect for all the religious and secular parties to the discussion and listeners in the audience. Plenty of opportunities for cheap points presented themselves but I let them sail by without a word - I was not there to argue. I was not there to be controversial or contentious. I was there to try and let everyone see what an atheist really sounds like - and it is remarkably close to what a everyone else sounds like.

Wrapup

I don't mean to make it sound like this was a down point of the interview - there were no down points. I honestly had a great time in the studio and would do it again in a heartbeat, especially now that I know I don't sound like a fool behind the microphone and that the concept of being on radio isn't as scary as I had it built up to be in my head. It was a fantastic experience and, if you're reading this as a result of hearing it, thanks for following up on it.



Stay Tuned...

...over the easter weekend. I'm keeping abreast of all of the media coverage of the new atheism movement as reflected on by priests around the country. So far, there have been some really awful things said about us for no apparent reason other than it's fashionable to mention how religious atheists are.

It's remarkable to paw over the media coverage of atheism and try to find the balance. I can find, just so far, three anti-atheism articles written in the last three days and exactly zero anti-religion articles written since the GAC, unless you count a review of Catherine Deveney's 'God is Bullshit - That's the Good News' show in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. I don't count it, you may. It's still an imbalance of three to one.

Who knows what the count will be up to by the end of Sunday.