Challenge is important. No matter how well you’re dressed, if you’re an emperor. Or how great your communications strategies might be.
Tricky subject for many of us, this, but I’m here to tell you it’s a good idea to read the New York Post. And The Mail Online. And to watch Fox News. Not every day. And not for enjoyment. Unless it’s the horoscopes. Or to mock how uptight, scared, and angry everybody seems. But it’s to counter a risk amongst social justice comms people: The emperor’s new comms.
Too often on the left, or in progressive circles, we only read sympathetic outlets. And we only talk to people who agree with us. Our funders want to hear positive news about our efforts, and there are rewards for being upbeat. But if we don’t read the tabloids, it’s impossible to stress-test our messaging. Why stress-test our messaging? Because when it comes to engaging the broadest possible audience in our work, we need to win people over. Not everyone is persuadable. But it starts with asking ourselves, “what might the most skeptical person ask about my work?”
If we don’t stress test our messaging, then it’s less robust when it comes to moments of challenge. And we need our messaging, and our movements, to stand up most when they’re questioned. When they’re under threat.
I had a good training ground. I was “lucky” to grow up in a borderline constituency in Southeast London. My parents met in the Labour Party in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister during my childhood. And many of my school friends’ parents were conservatives. So I got used to having conversations with people who disagreed with me, and my parents, about a lot of things. It is shocking, I know, but some of them were even right sometimes.
One of my earliest memories of reading any newspaper at all was sneaking into the local library. My friends and I liked to steal a look at The Sun, when we were still in short trousers. They had comics and horoscopes but most important for us, they had a horrid thing called “page three.” I’ll let you Google it. Suffice to say it left me under no illusions about how the majority of media connected with the public. They appealed to our baser instincts. The parts that tend to decide who gets to be President or Prime Minister.
I worked for one day at the Daily Mail. An old school friend got me in the door. Now he works as the chief spin doctor for Boris Johnson. But he used to lean further left of me at school. His dad worked as a policeman on what we called “vice” in London’s Soho. It is what it is, I suppose. Good luck to him.
Last weekend the cover of the Post carried a piece on how the
It was sad. But it was also a good thing to read, because it made me see how the right is spinning ideas on the left. And how it’s making hay out of them. I teach yoga in my spare time and there have been lots of conversations on this stuff over the last year. Bottom line is that most yoga studios haven’t done enough to welcome Black people. But I’ve tended away from wringing my hands too much on the subject in public. Instead I’ve made sure I teach and promote myself in an inclusive way. And that I offer my practice in the right settings. I’m not perfect, and it’s a journey to getting better. I try hard not to be too delighted and tokenize the Black people who come to my classes. Avoid giving myself a medal. You know. Trying not to freak anybody out, either.
That said. I do sometimes worry white progressives are talking too much to ourselves. That by talking about our privilege so much we are marinating in it, almost. Instead, I’m looking for a better way forward. And it includes stepping more often in the arena where I’m challenged to defend my ideas.
The recent New York Mayor’s race was particularly interesting on this score. Eric Adams–a Black man the police beat in his youth, who then joined the department–appears to have won. He beat candidates on the left who lent hard on more progressive messaging. Including defunding the police. But Black voters are not a monolith. And if you look at the map of where people voted most for Adams, it’s stark to see that it’s in the Bronx and outer Brooklyn. Throughout the campaign, the New York Post highlighted gun deaths. It endorsed Mr. Adams. Meanwhile more gentrified whiter areas went for Mr. Adams’ more progressive opponents. And the Biden administration has since held extensive conversations with Mr. Adams. They’re looking for a way to respond to a backlash against the defund the police movement. And there are questions about how to respond to rising homicide rates.
I don’t have an easy way to land all this. I’m not saying it’s straightforward to listen to people who disagree with us. I do think, though, that it’s strategic to spend 30 minutes on a weekly basis thumbing through the odd tabloid. And that it’s a good start.
