The Trojan Horse Affair: A Defence of Resolute Nuance
The fallout from the new blockbuster podcast illuminates a messy web of issues connecting journalism, misogyny, and racism in the UK.
“A mysterious letter shocked Britain in 2014, alleging an Islamist plot to take over one city’s general schools. But who wrote it?”
The above is the teaser blurb for the latest viral hit podcast, The Trojan Horse Affair. The 8-episode series is a collaboration by two of the world’s most significant podcasting teams: Serial Productions, whose first season is frequently cited as breaking podcasts into mainstream culture; and the New York Times, the now-print-and-digital-media-company-of-record.
It’s unsurprising that the piece is a hit. Sure, due to the calibre of the producers involved (one of the producers is podcast royalty Brian Reed, whose series S-Town was the viral hit of 2017; the other is Hamza Syed, a tenacious doctor-turned-student journalist who originated the story and graduates during production), but also to the resources in play here. Across these two companies, the story has both the marketing reach and editorial expertise of God themselves.
Or does it?
People Have *Concerns*
Observer columnist (and former UK government advisor) Sonia Sodha’s piece this week, The Trojan Horse Affair: how Serial podcast got it so wrong, has been the subject of fierce debate. It’s prompted other commentators, and concerned citizens, to claim that the podcast’s central premise - the Trojan Horse letter was a hoax that both highlighted and massively exacerbated the scope of Islamophobia in Britain, particularly in the government’s response - is at best unreliable and redundant. One op-ed opens: “The New York Times has it in for Britain”.
Their argument (paraphrased) is that there were and are legitimate claims in the Trojan Horse letter; that the significant issues with ‘radical influences’ in Birmingham state schools were downplayed by the producers.
In Episode 5, Syed and Reed visit a white couple who both worked in one of the Birmingham schools, and had written their own concerned letter to Ofsted about the behaviour of certain teachers.
One teacher was grooming students. He had informed the boys, in a sex-ed class, that wives owed husbands sex. That same teacher groomed a 15-year-old girl at another school. Worksheets were being distributed about the correct ‘roles’ for men and women in society.
There was a WhatsApp group of teachers at a school in which they openly distributed sexist and homophobic messages.
Basically: Things That Are Bad.
I, Too, Have *Concerns*
Reading responses from Sodha et al helped me to reflect on my own reactions to certain moments of the podcast.
For anyone who hasn’t heavily scrutinised my byline image, here is a bombshell worthy of an episode 2 cliffhanger: I am a white woman (and the kind of person who would title a blog post “A Defence of Resolute Nuance”).
The producers do not spend a huge amount of time dwelling on the Bad Things. The idea they were being overlooked gave me pause. Attacks on womens’ rights immediately pique an emotional response based on my lived experience. So when the white couple that Syed and Reed interrogated spoke of their concern for young schoolgirls, I initially saw no issue at all.
Plus, when Sodha noted that they had spoken on condition of anonymity, as a (kind of) journalist that bothered me. This - assuming it is true - is absolutely one of the things that the Trojan Horse Affair got wrong.
However, the whistleblowers’ actions, as a response to their initial legitimate concerns, would also give me pause.
Syed’s Resolute Nuance
As is the production companies’ specialty, the podcast is an enormous feat of narrative non-fiction that shows in a way few will have ever before experienced the ways racism can be so effectively wielded. The illumination of modern Britain’s endemic racism, weaponised by the powerful and ingested by and through the ‘concerns’ and ‘questions’ of the mild-mannered-well-meaning, is unmatched.
It’s a study in nuance, and clarity, of both wider society and journalism, that may well be taught in j-school for years to come.
While she raises a couple of tiny concerns that reflect my own (so well, off my shiny white surface) Sodha and her critical peers ignore the fact that Syed addresses these issues explicitly in Episode 5:
“By no means was Park View school devoid of sexism or patriarchy.
Women we've spoken to from Park View have been clear, there were problems, just maybe not the way [the whistleblower] has been portraying it.”
And again in Episode 6:
“I'm not saying homophobia or sexism doesn't matter, because [Muslims are] not the only ones.
I'm saying, it does matter, because we're not the only ones.”
The New York Times is not beyond reproach (see: its now-retracted Caliphate podcast, and the libel case that they just underwent - but won - due to journalistic mistakes). And there are some issues that I, personally, felt that they skipped over - such as these worksheets, which were mentioned once and never again.
But the podcast was about the Trojan Horse letter, the immediate understanding by pretty much everyone that it was a hoax, and how it was still used to pave the way for years of state-sanctioned racism and bad faith action against an entire community and its children. Not about specific instances of sexism and homophobia in schools.
Nuance is Very Annoying. So is Being a Journalist.
It would be really easy, satisfying, and convenient to just say Sodha/the whistleblowers have zero good points and They Are The Ones Doing Bad Things. In many ways, that’s what Sodha and fellow commentators have in effect been saying about the podcast because, guess what - it plays better as a headline.
Unfortunately, human people suck massively, and the only way you can get the vast majority of them to engage with news or commentary that you think is important, but they don’t because their kid won’t eat their yoghurt, or their tyre is flat, or their parent is dying or whatever, is to make it very easily digestible and immediately gripping.
This is a core premise of all commercial, and almost all financially successful, journalism.
Syed and Reed, and fellow progressives engaging in the fallout, have been discussing the failure of British journalists to properly report on this hoax and its results at the time. This failure is almost certainly a result of the same racist atmosphere that launched the letter onto such a regrettably successful trajectory.
But it’s also a problem with the British media as a commercial structure. The response from Media Diversified claims, “the whole of British journalism acted like stenographers, instead of the investigative journalists they are supposed to be.” But they aren’t.
Hardly any of the UK media are hired as investigative journalists, because no one has New York Times-level cash to fund a three-year investigation. There are a few UK-based organisations managing to do this work, and many of us are trying to rebuild that sector. But as it stands, I can agree with Media Diversified in sentiment only.
The British media relies heavily on banks of young reporters who haven’t yet become jaded enough to have capitulated to the idea that they need to get a ‘real job’ if they are ever going to be able to afford a pension or keep any personal savings. (Or they’re rich.) They’re underpaid, and constantly on the reactionary, commercial clock.
I agree with Ash Sarkar’s take, largely, although I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘Sodha has no sources’ (and the only way to prove this would be to demand she reveal them), or that Reed and Syed are arguing that the proven sexism/homophobia among groups of Birmingham school teachers was redundant. (I still don’t think they should have named the whistleblowers, assuming that their agreement to participate anonymously is true.)
To suggest either completely undermines the idea of any complexity or nuance in the world. But while embracing complexity and nuance, you have to be resolute in what you believe, and what you can see is real. Sometimes, it takes a three-year investigation (plus a large dose of radical humility) to unpick and understand the specific ways in which what you know to be real is true.
And sometimes it makes for excellent journalism, that is both gripping and accurate, the way it should be, in that ideal world we keep Sisyphically reaching for.
But for now, let’s sit around in our pants scrolling our idiocracy feeds, giving off strong Fox News, no-go zone vibes.
For more media industry news subscribe to Chompsky: Power and Pop Culture for free OR pay less than £5 ($7) a month to get all my articles and the weekly news/campaigns roundup newsletter 👇👇👇 Thanks!
If you can’t subscribe, you’re still very welcome here. Please share to show your support instead! 👇👇👇 Thank you.