Caitlin Johnstone. Oakley Rankin
Checking in on the Grapevine’s chosen cultural analyst, Caitlin Johnstone, some of you may already discovered who she is and what her background is but for those who haven’t, here is her own very limited overview.
Caitlin is an Australian living outside Melbourne with her American partner, Tim Foley. She writes of herself on Medium: ‘I am Australian, lived in Melbourne nearly all of my life, two kids, twice married and once divorced. I got a journalism degree in 2003 but figured out long before completing the course that the media deck is stacked so far against truth that I wouldn’t be able to do the kind of work I wanted to do, so I did some environmental activism while paying the bills with corporate work. I had a bunch of transformative personal experiences during that time period, then in 2016 I got a job at a self-publishing news outlet where I quickly gained an audience for my opinion articles about the Bernie Sanders movement (which arose from a commentary void I’d noticed needed filling while I was participating in Bernie Facebook groups)’.
She notes on her website that she ‘. . . became a fully crowd-funded writer who is answerable to no one, a privileged position I exploit to its fullest in saying things I think need to be said regardless of the taboos against saying them.’
Although she insists that her partner does not write her articles, she is ‘joined at the hip’ with him and her ‘work is the product of two minds, not one’. Johnstone styles herself as a ‘socialist’ but nowhere can I find an explanation of events that led her to believe in either socialism or in a stacked media deck—information which would be useful in assessing her articles.
Now I always believed that although a single name usually appears on a piece of investigative journalism or cultural analysis, behind the author is a collaborative structure of researchers, lawyers, proof readers, and an editor, often demanding two or more sources to corroborate claims made—in short, good investigative journalism relies on a team of persons even if the writer gets all the glory. What we can infer from the little information she gives us is that she believes the teamwork of responsible journalists only gets in the way of truth—truth which can only be found by an individual in a ‘privileged position’.
So what does she give us, the readers, from her privileged position? The same angry list of cultural demons, some common to all of us and some her own particular ones, over and over again. I can detect no critical reasoning about any of her particular bête noires, she never takes one of her claims and attempts to account for it in critical detail. Her blanket answer to motivation and process for all her claims is a ‘profoundly sophisticated propaganda machine’ (The Island Grapevine. Feb. 22, 2024). Her most egregious claim that millions of us are ‘brainwashed’ dupes of some exterior agent insults her readers and exempts her from any critical explanation of how events and actions in our culture come about. When she attempts to answer the question as to what she would propose to do about these demons she can only come up with ‘change yourself’. (The Island Grapevine. Sept 12, 2024). People do, of course, change but they are helped along by cultural attitudes including some enshrined in government legislation; think seat belts, healthcare, highways, public schools, next to non-existent capital gains taxes, lower taxes for unearned income, corporations as persons, etc.
But if you would like a comparison of the real critical thinking that Johnstone encourages but never demonstrates, there are plenty of examples; a particularly good one is a short book entitled ‘The Asset Economy’ by Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings. Of course, you should park your bias and use a bit of your own critical thinking in reading the book but it demonstrates a clear, detailed analysis of a few of those demons—inequality, the 1%, home ownership. The authors provide these familiar cultural observations with a framework of analysis that makes sense of their process and effects. There are, of course, other critical frameworks on the same problems which the authors responsibly acknowledge in some detail as critical reasoning demands. Taken together such efforts can lead us towards truth.
Johnstone exemplifies the ethos Susan Faludi writes of, an ethos ‘pervasive in so much of contemporary reporting—that the personal can save us from the political, that the world of objectivity will be humanized by the “authentic” feelings and sleeve-worn convictions of its chroniclers—has proved corrosive to journalism’s fundamental purpose: to examine “the system” and hold it accountable’. (NYRB. August 15, 2024. p. 50). Johnstone never really examines “the system” and along with dozens of similar contemporary ‘reporters’ leads us to a place where opinion has become a source of ‘truth’ and ‘feeling’ always trumps critical reasoning. Such an emphasis on the ‘truth’ of opinion is rationalized on the basis that all of us are ‘biased’ and our efforts to overcome bias have never worked. Social media enables anyone to broadcast their opinions to the world without critique of any sort and, within a matter of hours if not minutes, a large number of people can then pick it up as their own truth. This ‘crowd sourcing’ works to kill legitimate criticism and when enough people take up an idea quickly it lends a specious verisimilitude of truth to the idea and becomes the critique—if all those people believe it it must be true.
If the Grapevine’s intention is to inform rather than inflame it remains a mystery to me why Gwynne Dyer, a internationally acclaimed investigative journalist, Middle Eastern specialist, and professional historian, was replaced in the Grapevine by a relatively unknown agitprop artist who brooks no criticism of her extraordinarily biased ranting on our culture. And mind you, I am not talking of perfection here; Dyer is an honest cultural reporter using the best means we have devised for minimising bias. Johnstone prefers to give her emotive bias full rein over any critical reasoning. Her unpleasant attempt to emulate Jonathon Swift (The Island Grapevine. Sept. 19, 2024) only drives home both her irrationality and her dispiriting writing style. As a child in the forties and fifties we were often exhorted to put on our thinking caps; Johnstone has never found hers.
Editor’s note: Gwynne Dyer’s regular appearance in TIG has not been “replaced” by Caitlin Johnstone. A former contributor to TIG had a paid subscription to Dyer’s work that included permission to reprint his material. Mr. Rankin’s ad hominem attack of Johnstone is ironic in that it projects his own biases toward corporate legacy reporting that can be found everywhere else.
