Ava Evans and the weaponisation of victimhood

Is there any public determine extra irritating than the well-coiffed, well-paid and extremely seen journalist lamenting folks being imply to them?

The Pulitzer board ought to institute a brand new class: Greatest Sufferer. If it did, Ava Evans, political correspondent for Joe.co.uk, would absolutely be in with an opportunity. She has given a tour de drive efficiency following Laurence Fox’s nasty feedback about her on Dan Wootton’s GB Information present final week.

‘I’m just a commodity in this story’, Evans nobly mentioned, in a podcast on the ‘Politics Joe’ YouTube channel the day after Fox’s feedback. On the threat of being solid as a traitor to my intercourse, I discover the best way wherein Ava and different well-known ladies journalists now routinely resolve to showcase their victimhood, to play the position of harassed waif, deeply unedifying.

Sure, sure, sure. Laurence Fox’s feedback – that no man in his proper thoughts would sleep with Evans – had been deeply offensive and crass. He may say this was merely an emotional outburst, given he was responding to feedback Evans made on BBC Two’s Politics Reside, wherein she pushed again on the thought that there’s a particular drawback with male suicide and recommended that the thought of a ‘minister for males’ is bandied about by politicians ‘to make an enemy out of women’. However Fox saying that he wouldn’t need to shag her is hardly going to do something to additional the reason for males’s psychological well being, not to mention add to the controversy about male suicide.

Nonetheless, I’m much more offended by our cultural elites’ frequent tactic of weaponising damage emotions to advertise a selected agenda. On this case, to marketing campaign for the closure of a information broadcaster, particularly GB Information, that gives one thing completely different to the mainstream.

Name me loopy, but when I’m completely pressured to decide on, I’d moderately a society wherein a dude might sometimes make dumb, odious feedback on tv about my sexual viability than an Orwellian society the place what we are saying is policed by omnipotent, nameless bureaucrats. Lord is aware of, I’m offended each day by the drivel I see from far too many media shops. However I don’t need a state-backed regulator to silence them.

‘Politics Joe’ YouTube host Ed Campbell described the feedback made by Fox on Dan Wootton’s GB Information present as ‘horrific’. That’s a bit hyperbolic, Ed. Fox’s feedback had been deeply disagreeable, positive. However let’s reserve adjectives like ‘horrific’ for issues that truly are.

Certainly, we stay in a society riddled with double requirements and hypocrisy, wherein ladies who do expertise actually horrific issues, like being sterilised of their teenagers or being imprisoned with male intercourse offenders, are at finest ignored by the exact same folks now crusading on Evans’ behalf.

Campbell additionally hilariously claimed that no journalist needs to develop into the story. Right this moment’s journalists are incentivised to develop into the story, because it brings them extra Twitter engagement and raises their profile. In actual fact, Evans herself happily tweeted the clip of Fox saying vile issues about her on GB Information. It’s most likely the best way most individuals had been alerted to that grim little trade within the first place. Furthermore, if Campbell actually thought that it was so dreadful for Evans to be ‘made into the story’, then why have her on the podcast to rake over the voicemails she obtained on her private cellphone from an apologetic Dan Wootton?

We are able to maintain three ideas in our heads on the similar time right here. Specifically, that whereas what Laurence Fox mentioned was gross, so is Ava Evans’ efficiency of her victimhood, and so is the censorious campaign to take down a broadcaster for no different motive than it offends the sensibilities of the nice and good.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Go to her Substack right here.