Channel 4 presenter Cathy Newman says she is still experiencing the fallout from her combative conversation with Jordan Peterson.
“They are very determined, these alt-right characters,” Newman told The Yorkshire Post. “You get slightly inured to it. I’m 45 and I don’t take it to heart. I try not to look at it as much as I used to.”
Her encounter with Jordan Peterson – which looked more like a debate than an interview – took place in January 2018 and went viral immediately. People have watched it on YouTube close to 18 million times and left over 134,000 comments – a big number even by Peterson’s standards.
Newman focused on some points from Peterson’s bestselling book, 12 Rules for Life, on human hierarchy and gender inequality, which she deemed controversial. The conversation revolved around the gender pay gap, around whether women have to adopt masculine traits to succeed in career, and around whether the right to freedom of speech should trump the “right to not be offended,” as Newman put it.
Over the course of the 30-minute video, as one YouTube user calculated, Newman made at least 25 attempts to interpret Peterson’s carefully-worded statements or oversimplify them.
At one point, for instance, she interpreted Peterson as suggesting that women are too agreeable to get the pay raises that they deserve, whereas he stated that accounted for some part of the pay gap problem.
Later in the interview, she assumed Peterson was calling for the use of lobsters as a model for human society, when he actually argued that lobsters, like humans, exist in hierarchies.
It’s best you watch it for yourself.
Many supporters of Jordan Peterson and those who described themselves as neutral viewers said they were appalled at Newman’s “so you’re saying” interview strategy.
To get some perspective, these are some of the most popular comments:
- “This isn't really a debate it's just a woman trying to twist his words.”
- “If I had a dollar for every time she deliberately misinterprets what he says, I could buy myself a nice lobster dinner.”
- “I've never seen someone try to put words into someone else's mouth so many times in half an hour before.”
- “Jordan Peterson: ‘The colour blue is such a pretty colour’
Interviewer: ‘So you're saying the Holocaust didn't happen?’”
Writing in the Spectator, journalist and author Douglas Murray wrote: “I don’t think I have ever witnessed an interview that is more catastrophic for the interviewer.”
Apart from legitimate criticism and mockery, Newman claimed she had faced “overwhelming” torrents of abuse online.
“Afterwards, his army of online followers, many hailing from the ‘alt-right’, went into attack mode, calling me a c*** and a b****, threatening to execute me and circulating pornographic memes of me on Instagram, one of which my 14-year-old daughter saw,” she recounted.
Despite Peterson telling the trolls to “lay the hell off” Newman, the trolling continued, and Channel 4 said it was calling in security specialists to protect the presenter from “vicious misogynistic abuse.”
Peterson questioned this decision, saying in a May 2018 interview: “Channel 4 said that she was afraid for her life, and that the police had to be called in. You could call the police in for anything; that isn’t evidence of a credible threat. I thought, ‘Oh, now they’re going to spin this as a victim narrative’. Which I was appalled at.”
“Cathy Newman goes out of her way to be harsh and contentious as a public figure. She’s already put herself in the fray and if you’re part of the privileged elite you don’t get to do that and say, ‘Oh, look, now I’m being victimised by my fame’.”
“I tweeted out, ‘Look, lay the hell off. Enough is enough.’ Or something a little bit more civilised than that. You don’t need to beat a dead horse. I’m glad I wasn’t the one who was being torn to shreds online.”
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