Words aren’t cheap, they’re free. And in this age – of Facebook, of Twitter – they travel far and fast. Words that are intended to wound or damage are tossed off in the blink of an eye, tapped out in a few seconds flat, on a keyboard, or a phone, and then – press send, hit return, whoosh, they’re gone.
Except they’re not. They circulate forever. Their impact goes on. As I discovered on Tuesday morning. I stepped off a flight from Stockholm, turned on my phone and saw half a dozen messages with screenshots of a now-deleted tweet. It was from Andrew Neil, sent apparently at 3.15am. In response to a question about something else, he said: “Nothing compared to having to deal with mad cat woman from Simpson’s, Karol Kodswallop.”
You can delete a tweet, but you can’t delete the internet, it’s the eternal memory machine. Those few keystrokes tapped out late at night by the BBC’s political presenter to his near one million Twitter followers will dog me forever.
One day after Neil’s outburst, the director general of the BBC stood on stage at an event for public-service broadcasters in Scotland – the same event to which the BBC had invited Steve Bannon – and said how “disgraceful” it was that journalists should be targeted with abuse online. “It is an attempt to intimidate people and stop them doing their job,” he argued correctly. And he appealed to other news organisations: “We need to stand together on this.”
The BBC stood together with me against Neil’s abuse by ignoring it. “Hello Carole,” the BBC’s global PR team tweeted at me, “Andrew has deleted what he recognises was an inappropriate tweet.” It wasn’t “inappropriate”, I wrote back. It was misogynistic. The silence in response was deafening. A day later, BBC Newswatch, a programme on its news channel, chose to broadcast the tweet to its global audience. But I wasn’t permitted to comment, or say why this whole episode is so troubling.
I have no idea why. I wasn’t permitted to comment, or frame it properly as I’m trying to do here. To explain why this whole episode so perfectly illustrates the problem of information and the way it’s used, the way it has become untethered from truth or reality. And the way the first casualties are the traditional, ancient targets of hate, the categories of people – including women – who, when the Silicon Valley dudes were building the pipes and platforms of this brave new world, simply weren’t in the room.
Because this is a world where venerable media organisations, even ones as rigorous and robust as the BBC, are getting played. Bannon understands this world. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, understands this world. Arron Banks understands this world. And this is why Neil’s actions and the BBC’s response are so chilling. Because for well over a year Banks, the Bristol businessman who donated upwards of £8m to Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU campaign, has been seeking to undermine my credibility as a reporter. He’s been seeking to intimidate me and the Observer and stop us from publishing. The “crazy cat lady” image didn’t come from Neil. It came from Banks. It’s been a key piece of his arsenal in his campaign of targeted harassment against me.
And now it has been sanctioned by Andrew Neil. It has unleashed a whole new torrent of hate and abuse on to my laptop screen. Because a “crazy cat lady” isn’t a harmless animal lover with free-thinking views; it’s a woman who’s outside acceptable society. Who doesn’t conform to conventional norms. Who a few hundred years ago would have been burned at the stake. I’m a middle-aged woman, without children. And this is my lot. I occupy one of the last few remaining categories of acceptable prejudice. It’s slut-shaming for the over 30s.
Judgment and shame have always been a way to try and control women. And it works. There’s a reason why, for the first three decades of my adult life, I kept my head down. Why I couldn’t speak in public. Why I wanted none of this. But in this instance, it’s so much more. This isn’t just an attempt to silence me. It’s an attempt to silence the story. And it’s worked. If you rely on the BBC for your news, you’ll know little of Banks’ covert relationship with the Russian government; of the gold-and-diamond deals they tried to broker for him.
It was this story, about Banks’ many meetings with the Russian ambassador, about his central role in the Trump-Russia story, which the Observer broke back in June, that precipitated Banks’ furious response. A distraction story. That has worked. And worked again. Me? I’m finding other channels. I won’t be shamed.
Carole Cadwalladr presents, with Peter Jukes, a new podcast, Dial M for Mueller
