Cathy Newman’s catastrophic interview with Jordan Peterson

We’re closing 2018 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 1: Douglas Murray on Cathy Newman’s interview with Jordan Peterson:

In the magazine this week I have written a piece about the Canadian Professor Jordan Peterson. He has been in the UK over the last week to talk about his new book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Among many other things – much more of which I go into in the piece – his visit showed up the UK’s broadcast media in a very bad light.

On Saturday morning, Peterson made an appearance on Radio 4’s Today programme. They gave him a hurried four minutes at the end of the show. They could have quizzed him on almost anything and got a point of view different from almost any other they had ever allowed their listeners to hear. Instead they decided to treat him in an alternately jocular and hostile manner. First: ‘Look at this whacky Canadian from out of town’. Then: ‘warning signs: heretic’. The Today programme wasted the opportunity.

But they scored a veritable home-run compared to the interview Cathy Newman did with him yesterday for Channel 4 News. The full half-hour interview is available online. If I was Channel 4 I would take it down. If I was Cathy Newman I would sue or seek a super-injunction. I don’t think I have ever witnessed an interview that is more catastrophic for the interviewer.

Whatever else anybody might think of him, Professor Peterson is a man of remarkable learning and experience, and does not appear to have arrived at any of his views by the now common means of ‘I reckon’. Yet Newman, who approaches the interview with the trademark sourness she employs for everyone she expects to disagree with, treats this is just another chance to burnish her own social justice credentials and expose her guest as a bigot.