The New Yorker Festival has dropped Steve Bannon as a headliner after Jim Carrey, Judd Apatow, John Mulaney, and other famous panelists pulled out of the event in protest. While the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, defended the idea of interviewing Bannon at length, he said in a statement Monday, “I’ve thought this through and talked to colleagues — and I’ve reconsidered. I’ve changed my mind. There is a better way to do this. Our writers have interviewed Steve Bannon for The New Yorker before, and if the opportunity presents itself I’ll interview him in a more traditionally journalistic setting as we first discussed, and not on stage.” Remnick laid out his reasoning for making Bannon a headliner throughout the memo, arguing that “to interview Bannon is not to endorse him,” and that “by conducting an interview with one of Trumpism’s leading creators and organizers, we are hardly pulling him out of obscurity.” Remnick changed course only after “many of our readers, including some colleagues” pointed out that “the Festival is different, a different kind of forum” than a traditional interview. “It’s also true that we pay an honorarium, that we pay for travel and lodging. (Which does not happen, of course, when we interview someone for an article or for the radio. ),” he added. “I don’t want well-meaning readers and staff members to think that I’ve ignored their concerns.” Remnick’s statement, which was first sent to staffers and then published online, came shortly after some of the festival’s high-profile panelists began to drop out. Mulaney was first to pull the plug, tweeting, “I’m out.” He added, “I genuinely support public intellectual debate, and have paid to see people speak with whom I strongly disagree. But this isn’t James Baldwin vs William F Buckley. This is PT Barnum level horses—. And it was announced on a weekend just before tix went on sale.” Apatow dropped out next, writing, “If Steve Bannon is at the New Yorker festival I am out. I will not take part in an event that normalizes hate. I hope the @NewYorker will do the right thing and cancel the Steve Bannon event. Maybe they should read their own reporting about his ideology.” Carrey then confirmed his own exit with, “Bannon? And me? On the same program? Could never happen.” And musician Jack Antonoff wrote, “I’m no longer going to be speaking/performing at the new yorker festival as long as Steve Bannon is there.” Bannon, a former senior adviser to the president, had been scheduled to sit down with Remnick for a conversation dubbed “The Ideology of Trumpism.” In further tweets, Antonoff echoed Mulaney’s complaint about Bannon’s last-minute addition. “Found out about Bannon’s inclusion when you did. I would have appreciated to make a decision on this before it was announced. I would ask the New Yorker to consider in the future that participants in the festival deserve to make a choice to appear alongside someone this hateful.” He added, “I always saw The New Yorker Festival as a wonderful moment to celebrate culture. So when they told me it would Kacey Musgraves, Zadie Smith and Mike Birbiglia etc — I was all in. Steve Bannon — respectfully that’s a full no for me and normalization of white supremacy.” Apatow later reacted to Carrey’s resignation, writing, “Sounds like @JimCarrey is out too. Maybe they could do an event about child separation and immigration policy and ways to help those poor children.” After Remnick changed his mind, Apatow celebrated, tweeting, “That is very good news. There is no reason to have a hateful person at this festival. Thank you @NewYorker for listening and making an adjustment.” The New Yorker’s handling of the controversy has also been criticized. “Either way, huge win for Bannon. Once invited, he’d get either attention and legitimization OR attention and claim to victimization. I’d guess he’d prefer the latter, which is what he now has been gifted,” Turkish writer Zeynep Tufekci tweeted. Apatow responded to one critic who wrote, “The more I sit with this, the more troubled I am. This is such an important dialogue, one that needs to happen. It’s really upsetting to see so-called ‘progressive’ voices using their platforms to lobby for censorship. You’re way off on this one, Judd.”<doc-sep>On Monday morning, the New Yorker Festival announced the lineup for its annual weekend of live cultural events in October. The schedule included a conversation between former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and the magazine’s editor in chief, David Remnick. By midafternoon, high-profile festival participants including Jim Carrey, Judd Apatow, and Patton Oswalt had publicly pulled out, citing their objection to taking part in an event that “normalizes hate,” as Apatow put it. By dinnertime, Remnick issued a lengthy statement explaining that Bannon had been disinvited. Our short national nightmare was over. Advertisement The New York Times, whose story about Bannon’s appearance kicked off the outrage cycle, did not appear to view it as a major piece of news. The story quoted only Remnick and was essentially a warmed-over press release. Advertisement Advertisement The reaction to Bannon’s appearance clearly took the magazine off guard, too. In his interview with the Times, Remnick portrayed the event’s structure as one that might elicit a purer grade of frankness from Bannon than a traditional magazine interview. “The audience itself, by its presence, puts a certain pressure on a conversation that an interview alone doesn’t do,” he told the paper. “You can’t jump on and off the record.” The questions might have been unsparing, even aggressive, but the packaging would be unavoidably friendly. Remnick wrote that he first reached out to Bannon months ago to sit for a lengthy interview for The New Yorker Radio Hour. (Bannon has been featured in the magazine itself numerous times.) Bannon agreed, but they apparently didn’t set a date, and later, Remnick added, the idea “arose” (how?) of doing the interview in front of a live audience. In his statement on Monday evening, Remnick made a robust and convincing argument for the general idea of interviewing Bannon. “The point of an interview, a rigorous interview,” he wrote, “is to put pressure on the views of the person being questioned.” A few years ago, that would have been too obvious to state. But one gets the feeling Remnick was addressing that part of his statement toward the alarming number of news consumers who view any airtime or page space as the gift of a “platform,” making little distinction between sunlight and free publicity. Advertisement Advertisement But the event’s many vociferous critics sensed what Remnick apparently did not: Sitting onstage at a festival is different from sitting for a profile or a radio interview. Remnick, a sharp critic of the president, would surely not have treated the supposed architect of Trumpism gently. But in a way, it wouldn’t have mattered. Remnick would be sitting across from Bannon in a lushly appointed theater that would have conveyed all the institutional credibility of the New Yorker upon the man onstage. The questions might have been unsparing, even aggressive, but the packaging would be unavoidably friendly. It would be like running a tough piece of investigative reporting with a slobbering headline and a sexy photo. Canceling Bannon’s event solved the immediate problem for the magazine: The rest of October’s events seem to be back on. (Though comedian Hasan Minhaj said Monday night that he will not participate despite the cancellation.) The deeper problem for the New Yorker and other publications (including Slate) is that live events are an increasingly important income stream for many of them. In an era of shrinking revenues from traditional journalism, ticket sales and sponsorships for festivals, conferences, panels, performances, and meet-and-greets are boosting profits for many a legacy brand. Of course, the risk of featuring only like-minded thinkers is that the events become boring. But if these events cloak their participants in the credibility of the host institution, then media brands will have to think hard about whether the same kind of people who belong in their pages belong on their stages. Advertisement Advertisement Meanwhile, the man who has successfully fomented a particular brand of populist fury toward Wall Street and the press has plenty of time for them himself. Bannon sat for an onstage interview at CNBC’s “Delivering Alpha” conference in July, for example, and is still scheduled to appear at something called the “Open Future Festival,” hosted by the Economist, on Sept. 15. Neither of those events have made the kind of headlines the New Yorker debacle has generated. Late on Monday evening, Bannon released his own statement to CNBC, in which he said he had responded to the New Yorker’s “seven weeks of continual requests” for the event “with no thought of an honorarium.” He did it, he wrote, because he wanted to face Remnick, “one of the most fearless journalists of his generation.” In rescinding the invitation, Remnick “showed he was gutless when confronted by the howling online mob.” The statement lays bare the fact that every step of Monday’s tempest was as good as foreordained: the backlash, the cancellation, the dueling statements, the reference to “the mob,” the think pieces. Bannon arguably got everything he needed out of the magazine just by being invited. The disinvitation may have been even sweeter.<doc-sep>On Sunday, the New Yorker announced that a live interview with Steve Bannon would be a centerpiece of the magazine’s in-person conference, called the New Yorker Festival, in early October. The backlash was fierce and immediate. As the controversy built and marquee speakers began dropping out of the festival, the magazine’s widely respected editor, David Remnick, disinvited Bannon from the event. “I thought this through and talked to colleagues — and I’ve reconsidered,” Remnick wrote. “Our writers have interviewed Steve Bannon for the New Yorker before, and if the opportunity presents itself I’ll interview him in a more traditionally journalistic setting as we first discussed, and not on stage.” Bannon wasted little time in firing back. “The reason for my acceptance [of the New Yorker Festival] was simple: I would be facing one of the most fearless journalists of his generation,” he said in a statement. “In what I would call a defining moment, David Remnick showed that he was gutless when confronted by the howling mob.” This might seem like a story you’ve heard before: A controversial speaking invitation is met with a predictable backlash, leading to a canceled invitation and cries of liberal censorship. But the New Yorker case is particularly interesting. The core questions the incident raises are profound ones: How should journalists think of their jobs in an era when one of America’s governing ideologies is, at root, thinly veiled white nationalism? And how should the media engage with figures who routinely deride them as enemies of the people? How do you report on Bannon’s America? The New Yorker Festival is a moneymaking event. The publication brings in famous and/or interesting people, has them sit on panels with New Yorker journalists, and charges readers who are interested in attending. Several other major publications, including the Atlantic and Vox, host similar events. These kinds of events are, by their very nature, difficult to manage. They need to be attractive to audiences, which means booking interesting and/or controversial speakers. The events need the speakers to show up, which often means paying them, and they might not want to walk into the lion’s den of an adversarial interview in front of a live audience. At the same time, the interviews themselves can’t betray the core journalistic mission of the publication — they can’t somehow do reporting and brand promotion at the same time. That means the journalists onstage shouldn’t (in theory) just suck up to the speakers and sing their praises — though that’s all too often what happens — but rather should respectfully challenge their ideas and arguments. This was the spirit in which the Bannon speech was arranged. Initially, the idea was to have Bannon on a podcast, but Remnick realized that a sit-down with Bannon would be an interesting addition to the festival. He openly advertised that he would be challenging the former White House senior strategist on stage. “I have every intention of asking him difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation,” Remnick told the New York Times on Sunday. “The audience itself, by its presence, puts a certain pressure on a conversation that an interview alone doesn’t do.” Remnick’s comments did little to quell the controversy. Prominent festival panelists, like director Judd Apatow and actor Jim Carrey, threatened to back out if Bannon appeared. New Yorker writer Adam Davidson tweeted on Monday that Remnick had spent “all day today on the phone with writers and staffers telling him he’s wrong.” Kathryn Schulz, a Pulitzer Prize–winning staff writer, publicly called for readers to email Remnick and tell him to disinvite Bannon: I love working for @NewYorker, but I'm beyond appalled by this: https://t.co/WlZdsBpF1R I have already made that very clear to David Remnick. You can, too: themail@newyorker.com — Kathryn Schulz (@kathrynschulz) September 3, 2018 The reasoning behind the backlash was straightforward. Bannon is not just an interesting person in American public life; he is, and long has been, an ideologue who has devoted his life to furthering a particularly noxious strain of right-wing populism. While editor-in-chief of Breitbart, he claimed that he wanted the site to be “the platform for the alt-right.” He elevated Milo Yiannopoulos, making him a top writer and the editor of Breitbart’s tech section, regularly stoked fears about Muslim and Latino immigration, and published a piece titled “5 Devastating Facts about Black-on-Black Crime.” In the White House, Bannon was most infamous for writing the initial draft of the travel ban — an extremely sweeping document that threw American airports into chaos and was repeatedly struck down in court as discriminatory. His current project is building an organization in Europe, melodramatically called “the Movement,” designed to bolster Europe’s xenophobic far-right parties in advance of the 2019 European Parliament election. “Let them call you racists,” Bannon told Europe’s far-right National Front in one speech. “Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor.” For these reasons, the dissenting New Yorker staffers argued, Bannon is not someone who deserves a spot on at the New Yorker Festival. Bannon’s worldview won’t be defeated by a tough New Yorker interview, and pretending that he is intellectually deserving of one works to normalize the indefensible. “I don’t think an advocate for ISIS would have been invited to the Festival. I don’t think a literal Klansman would’ve,” Osita Nwanevu, another New Yorker staff writer, tweeted. “But Bannon was, reflecting an implicit judgement that what Bannon believes lies on the acceptable side of some unspecified but clearly real moral boundary.” A version of this argument carried the day. In his statement explaining his decision to rescind Bannon’s invite, Remnick said that a live interview at a festival was different than an interview for a print piece in the magazine (which the New Yorker has done before). He stood by the idea of interviewing Bannon, casting it as a valuable exercise for the historical record, but had been persuaded by his own staffers that this was the wrong venue. Some New Yorker writers publicly disagreed with Remnick’s final decision. Lawrence Wright and Malcolm Gladwell, arguably the publication’s two most famous working writers, sent out dissenting tweets: Journalism is about hearing opposing views. I regret that this event is not taking place. New Yorker Festival Pulls Steve Bannon as Headliner Following High-Profile Dropouts, via @nytimes https://t.co/8KoYDZvR71 — Lawrence Wright (@lawrence_wright) September 4, 2018 Huh. Call me old-fashioned. But I would have thought that the point of a festival of ideas was to expose the audience to ideas. If you only invite your friends over, it’s called a dinner party. https://t.co/VwkL4zOrbX — Malcolm Gladwell (@Gladwell) September 4, 2018 Joe McCarthy was done in when he was confronted by someone with intelligence and guts, before a live audience. Sometimes a platform is actually a gallows. — Malcolm Gladwell (@Gladwell) September 4, 2018 Set aside the questionable history in Gladwell’s tweet — it’s not clear that “have you no sense of decency?” actually took down Sen. McCarthy — and you get to the crux of the issue. The question isn’t whether Bannon is odious, but rather how journalists ought to interact with an odious person who has, in fact, played a major role in significant political events. The Gladwell/Wright view is that Bannon needs to be heard and challenged in order for people to be able to understand the world around them. Ignoring him is tantamount to sticking one’s head in the sand; journalists need to expose all important views, even repugnant ones, and hope that sunlight is the best disinfectant. It’s a legitimate way of approaching this particular moment in political time. You can’t ignore that the president of the United States is a practitioner of Bannon-style populism, or that it’s widely popular around the European continent. You need to engage where these people are coming from in order to grasp the direction of American and European politics, something I’ve tried to do extensively in my own work. Journalism requires interviewing people to understand their views, even if you think those views are wrong or even offensive.<doc-sep>
The New Yorker rescinded its invitation to Steve Bannon to headline its annual festival after a swift backlash from big-name participants who said they would not attend if Bannon remained on the schedule. There was also fierce resistance from within the ranks of the magazine. Numerous staffers felt that having Bannon on stage would be inappropriate. Bannon responded to the uproar by criticizing the magazine and the "howling online job." The about-face happened in the span of a few hours on Monday. But the booking had been in the works for months. The magazine's top editor, David Remnick, had been seeking an interview with Bannon. Eventually he was invited to appear on stage at the festival in early October. He accepted, and The New York Times revealed Bannon's appearance in an article on Monday morning. Some New Yorker staffers objected. And so did an assortment of voices on social media. Some of them asserted that The New Yorker, both in location and orientation, stands in opposition to many of Bannon's agenda items. They urged Remnick and the magazine to reconsider. In the 5 p.m. hour on Labor Day, several prominent celebrities who were also on the festival schedule said they would drop out if Bannon were to appear. "Hard pass," John Mulaney tweeted. Jim Carrey, Judd Apatow and Patton Oswald were among the others. "If Steve Bannon is at the New Yorker festival I am out, I will not take part in an event that normalizes hate," Apatow tweeted. By then, Remnick was already working on a response letter. Around 6:15 p.m., he emailed staffers to say "I've thought this through and talked to colleagues — and I've re-considered. I've changed my mind." He said Bannon was being uninvited from the festival. "If the opportunity presents itself I'll interview him in a more traditionally journalistic setting as we first discussed, and not on stage," he wrote. Remnick's response memo included multiple justifications of the originally scheduled session. "To interview Bannon is not to endorse him," Remnick wrote. But he also had to think about practical factors like ticket sales and severe dissent within the magazine. Staff writer Adam Davidson tweeted that Remnick "spent all day today on the phone with writers and staffers telling him he's wrong. He listened, he heard." Davidson and others defended Remnick's leadership skills despite the controversy. Alexandra Schwartz, another staff writer, tweeted, "My feeling is that David Remnick has good journalistic motives for wanting to interview Bannon, but that such an interview should never have been part of the Festival. I don't think he buckled or caved or whatever. He listened & thought the thing through again." But even within the magazine's ranks, there was spirited debate. Longtime staff writer Malcolm Gladwell responded to one of Schwartz's comments and said, "Huh. Call me old-fashioned. But I would have thought that the point of a festival of ideas was to expose the audience to ideas. If you only invite your friends over, it's called a dinner party." Meanwhile, conservative activists ridiculed the magazine for the back-and-forth and said barring Bannon from the festival was another example of "deplatforming." In a statement, Bannon said he accepted The New Yorker's initial invitation after multiple requests. "After being contacted several months ago and with seven weeks of continual requests for this event, I accepted The New Yorker's invitation with no thought of an honorarium," he said. "The reason for my acceptance was simple: I would be facing one of the most fearless journalists of his generation. In what I would call a defining moment, David Remnick showed he was gutless when confronted by the howling online mob." Bannon, President Donald Trump's former chief strategist and the former editor of far-right news site Breitbart.com, is slated to attend The Economist's Open Future Festival in New York on September 15. He also appeared as a keynote speaker at a Financial Times event in March. --- Here is Remnick's full letter to staff: In 2016, Steve Bannon played a critical role in electing the current President of the United States. On Election Night I wrote a piece for our website that this event represented "a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism." Unfortunately, this was, if anything, an understatement of what was to come. Today, The New Yorker announced that, as part of our annual Festival, I would conduct an interview with Bannon.