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.

#AtheistCon - The Aftermath

So, a decent few days back from AtheistCon and the ripples we caused in the media are beginning to subside. It's been incredibly interesting to look at the fallout from a humble two-and-a-half days' discussion on what we don't believe in. I'd like to make a couple of (brief as possible) points.

•  Questions of Faith - I'm genuinely torn over the coverage of AtheistCon by the Radio National blog 'Questions of Faith'. My previous posts will reveal a short exchange I had with the owners of the blog about the role ridicule has to play with religion - it was mostly go-nowhere, but then again, most blog comments are. The best way to summarise my thoughts is to probably go from negative to positive, because it will leave a better taste in the mouth of any impartial reader.
  
  Negative - Much was made initially about the militant tone that atheists take with the religious and, while I acknowledge that this tone exists amoung some of them, I found the hypocrisy to be a bit annoying. In the first few posts before the convention even began, we had Margaret Coffey and Gary Bryson making clicking noises with their tongues. Two accusations of discourteousness within two posts, followed by a cynical accusation against Richard Dawkins that he was likely going to be spruiking his latest book (anyone in attendance will tell you that this was certainly not the case). I was ready to give the Questions of Faith team the benefit of the doubt, but they made their stance on the convention known early. Something along the lines of "It might surprise us, but we expect it to be a bunch of muck-slinging and back patting" (NOT a quote). It was not in the spirit of the mutual cooperation they sought. Briefly on the negative side also: It bears mentioning that by allowing the Questions of Faith team cover the convention, the ABC let the whole point of atheism skip over their heads. Would they let the Grandstand team cover the This Is Not Art festival?
  
  Positive - As the posts went on and, particularly, when guest bloggers were invited to make contributions, I found the general quality of the blog went up. Some of the information provided could best be described as 'selective' (for example, mention of the terrifically moving speech by Taslima Nasrin was limited to a single post, in which the terrifically banal rationale 'there is no more that needs to be said' was employed. There is plenty that needs to be said on the issues Taslima Nasrin is facing), but overall there were plenty of points of view on offer. Like the general media coverage I found it to concentrate disconcertingly on the negative at times, but this is part of fair and balanced reporting and I take no issue with it here.

•  General Media Coverage - There was a myriad of coverage about the conference that was, as I mentioned above, intially quite negative. In fact, for the first few days, it was left to convention speakers to defend the merit of the convention. If you have no time to follow the links, I'll summarise them for you: Dawkins gave a talk called 'The Pope is a Nazi and Steve Fielding is an Earthworm', then did the dead parrot sketch live on stage but replaced all the names with 'Mary McKillop. I was very disappointed to see this as the chosen line of reportage.
  
  Dawkins' talk contained extremely few references to god or religion. When directly asked by an audience member what he thought of canonisation, he indeed responded that it was pure Monty Python - but he did not refer to the current Pope as a Nazi. Rather, he was referring to Pope Pius XII, himself up for canonisation around the same time as Mary McKillop. Pius XII was the Pope during the second world war. Dawkins forgot his name and referred to him as Pope Nazi, due to his time as Pope during the regime of Hitler. It is worth noting also that Dawkins' supposed reference to Senator Fielding as having an IQ lower than an earthworm was entirely hearsay, attributed to him by a secondary source. Decide for yourself whether this, out of three days worth of lectures and discussion, was worth the headlines it got.
  
  Recently some more positive coverage has come out - interestingly, alot of them from British and online sources - that took a less sensationalist view of proceedings. I was happy to read these articles and to accept the messages embedded in them. The last thing we want is to be inaccessible to anyone but ourselves.

• 'Atheism - Another Religion' - You'll see it in the articles I've already linked to and generally in discussion about the place. Atheism, it seems, is taking on all the hallmarks of a religion. I mean, look at those atheists - they've had one conference at which they categorically denied the existence of the supernatural! That's incredibly reli...oh...well, I suppose it isn't.
  
  
  There is nothing religious about atheism. This might take longer than I have to explain, but the differences are important. It's too easy to say that religions require faith where atheism requires nothing like that. It is more deep than that. Atheism is about critical thinking, arriving at conclusions that are independent of institutional doctrine, and inquiring freely on any given topic be it a secular or religious one. This is why, for example, one can appreciate Christopher Hitchens' views on religion yet disagree with him on his support of the Bush Administration during the invasion of Iraq. There is no dogma in atheism because there is no scripture, no structure, and most of all, no enforcement. As it was put by NonStampCollector (I suggest you look at some of his videos), 'If atheism is a religion, then not stamp collecting is a hobby, bald is a hair colour, and off is a TV channel'.
  
  I guess I don't have the time to go into it in full detail. Anaolgies between atheism and religion are cheap to make - I suggest a bit of careful thought before diving in headfirst.

Aaaand that's it for tonight. More coming, everyone - for now...sleep. 

Update - The Young Australian Skeptics, as usual, have said this way better than I could have.