Novara Media

"the gloomy sense that they’re all en route to being future Parsons and O’Neills"

What is the cause of this sense?

yeah I could imagine Bastani going totally Brendan in later middle age.

not sure precisely what i wanted to prove with this but i went off and checked their relative ages:
parsons b.1953
o'neill wikipedia doesn't say but since he wrote for living marxism my guess is not later than 1980; probably somewhat earlier (he edited spiked! from 2007)
bastani b.83/84 (unsure why wikipedia is unsure lol)
sarkar 92

butler doesn't have a wikipedia entry at all but i think he's much the same age as bastani

my half-baked point is that by now the novara kids are all some way older and set in their ways than TP and BoN were when they became entirely unreadable (i suspect BoN was always entirely unreadable)

i guess sarkar still has time to do a tony parsons but this seems quite unlikely

I think that gets closer to the problem, they're just not all that interesting. Why would you watch one of their videos? What would you learn from it?

And it shows in their view counts. Their videos on Ukraine are averaging around 30K views. This is terrible for a channel with 250K subscribers. Similar sized channels are getting 10x, 20x, 50x that, and don't have the advantage of free marketing from the BBC or Sky. High(ish) subscriber count and low view count tells its own story

They're not really adding anything, what is the reason to watch them? Who is watching them? They need to be more interesting, get better guests, show some insight. Having the 'correct' opinion on anything is irrelevant if people aren't watching

Don't really agree with that. I think if they were exploring communism, or what would make for a better world, in an interesting way I might tune in.

I think Sarkar shouting "I am a communist" at Piers Morgan is v good. If they, as a collective, explored some aspects of this, it could be better, whatever the viewing figures.

Right, and there are other channels where you can watch that, you don't need Novara for that. And there are other channels that do other things better than Novara, so we don't need Novara for that either

Which then leads to the question, who needs Novara, and for what?
And I think this is what their view counts are showing

Sakar was decent when talking about the German communists on the bbc Hitler program, it was a refreshing change to hear a perspective from someone who isn't Applebum. But then they dropped her for the chess clown Kasparov in S2, because the USSR were as bad as the Nazis etc...

"Right, and there are other channels where you can watch that, you don't need Novara for that."

Even if there are, they could do it. Instead we Luxury communism, which a dead on arrival concept.

i know we all had fun with the meme but did anyone actually read the book? (i did not)

As I've mentioned before on old UKpol threads, I don't really understand the ILX downer on Novara. Tysky Sour is really good, has excellent and informed guests on everything from Brazilian politics to macroeconomics to Covid policy - I don't think there is anything similar broadcasting regularly on UK current events. Especially during lockdown it felt quite vital?

The Downstream slot has had outstanding extended interviews with people like Andreas Malm, China Mieville, Kojo Koram etc. And now they have some funding they are actually doing useful investigative journalism - see Polly Smythe as the new union/labour movement correspondent, and apparently more to follow?

I really enjoyed China Mieville's October book

I think he is a v bad writer but Ash's Novara interview with him was outstanding!

Even if there are, they could do it. Instead we Luxury communism, which a dead on arrival concept.

I don't know what Luxury Communism is, but why does it matter whether Novara create this type of content or not when other channels are already creating it?

Lol I did hear good things about that interview! xp

well I am now tempted to watch that interview now

He’s awful, and has somehow not been visited by the MeToo fairy.

mieville or bastani?

always bet on the bad one being the baldy!

Mieville.

I never heard this before about CM, but it is never surprising.

one of the things I like about Ash is she's not afraid to ask "what does senescence mean?" because I sure as hell didn't know either!

I think one of the elements about class identity that writers and commentators are bad at understanding is that it isn't totally a conscious or intellectual stance, it's something ... erm different, borne out of decades of being shat on from a great height and never seeing things getting better. I'm not saying that criticism applies here, there was some good stuff about the latte sipping/mushy peas false dichotomy

senescence is my lived experience!

I'm definitely feeling the deterioration and loss of power

I agree with ILX poster Piedie Gimbel.

"As I've mentioned before on old UKpol threads, I don't really understand the ILX downer on Novara."

Surely it isn't hard to understand. Bastani, Walker don't sound v good on twitter. Their political positions are poor, so it's not like I want to engage with Novara's offering. Same with Owen Jones.

Butler has some nice interests in lit and I like what he says on that. I engage with him in a different way, and it's cool he found a niche in the LRB but even then how does he square his politics with the piece they published on Grenfell?

As councillors and MPs are removed, not through deselection but by undemocratic & bureaucratic measures, it’s no surprise that the New Statesman publishes a plea by a has-been broadcast journalist to become an MP. Brought to you by BT/Uber & God knows who. pic.twitter.com/J6lK8BmFun

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) October 6, 2022

nobody is really taking Mason seriously though. His half a million + twitter followers are obviously fake as well. Even the people who PM wants to take him seriously have realised he's a moron and publicly said as much. it's not exactly Big Game Hunting!

Tom Watson going to the Lords after the Carl Beech saga is absolutely extraordinary. If you think the Labour party is anything other than a vehicle for patronage for some of the most useless people in public life I've got news for you.

These people will never introduce PR. https://t.co/zUmOPpyvuT

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) October 6, 2022

"nobody is really taking Mason seriously though."

Bastani has done for longer than he should have.

He'll criticise Lab every day but come election time I will even give Bastani a follow, revive this thread and link to his tweets telling you all to vote the Tories out because they are "evil".

how does he square his politics with the piece they published on Grenfell?

Frankly all UK media does evil shit and LRB publishes more leftist thinking than anything else within that sphere, don't really think the fact that that they also publish tons of right wing guff should be a dealbreaker for ppl looking for writing gigs. It's not a situation like Novara where it advertises itself as leftist, no one picks the LRB up thinking they'll get the Socialist Take on Things.

I do.

They publish 20-page essays by Perry Anderson.

Yes but they also publish retired US generals explaining why Hiroshima was no biggie. I'm not saying there's NO socialist takes in the LRB, I'm saying the LRB is not a socialist publication.

Who are these generals?

You don't mean Edward Luttwak? He is truly right-wing, I believe. But rarely appears now.

It would be misleading to imply that the LRB has a 'balance' of right and left. The truth is that it is a liberal-left publication and, within that term, much more 'left' than most comparable 'liberal' publications.

That still makes it quantifiably different from a explicitly leftist project like Novara, which was the point.

"don't really think the fact that that they also publish tons of right wing guff should be a dealbreaker for ppl looking for writing gigs"

Except many of these writers go on social media and say they would never write for The Mail. The Grenfell piece was a low, and it should be acknowledged in time as such.

"they also publish tons of right wing guff"

Do they?

The only concrete examples I can think of just now are David Runciman and David Bromwich, who are arguably 'liberals', and one offensive US liberal type who wrote something vile about Bernie Sanders in 2020.

These are not typical, and they are not even right-wing by most people's standards.

"Tons" seems to suggest that a large part of the paper is "right-wing guff". I can't remember seeing it.

Amusing that a Novara thread has turned into an LRB thread - I feel like Mark S would have a theory for this, viz. "all threads are ultimately about the LRB and Perry Anderson" or the like.

ru thinking of this?

the moral arc of an ilx thread can be long, but it bends toward rory mcgrath

Quite.

Though my own arc, as you know, is usually towards Perry.

Except many of these writers go on social media and say they would never write for The Mail.

Well one we weren't talking about "many of these writers", we were talking about one writer in specific.

But also there is an obv difference between the two, as the Mail is unlikely to publish lenghty pieces of leftist analysis. Flattening it so they are equally bad doesn't scan to me.

If Butler should worry about squaring his politics with writing for it, shouldn't those of us who buy and read it also make that calculation?

I don't intend to flatten them (though I did pull out "the tons of right-wing guff" bit), but given we are talking about a leftist project I am wondering about where a founder goes onto another ship that can publish that Grenfell piece. This is where the people coming from it aren't trustworthy.

this is moralising shitlib nonsense alph

Yeah, looking at the UK media landscape I do think that the only place he could go that hasn't done far far worse than the LRB is unemployment.

Still unsure as to why leftists buying and reading the LRB is ok in that case tho?

I am not the one pushing guff like Luxury communism.

no you're just talking brainless anti-politcal nonsense

I am not the only one in the thread pushing the "they only want a seat in the media table" angle here. Sorry if this offends.

not too surprised as walker never seemed like the most nuanced thinker in the first place. re the yt channel, i find the fox news editorialised presenting style (lots of rhetorical questioning to the viewer etc) v off putting. my partner and I were wondering what james butler makes of it these days.

it's embarrassing enough that Bastani keeps doing these sycophantic brownnosing sessions with Hitchens. He had this guest on called Gary Stephenson, who he introduced with effusive praise ... oh this guy is so insightful and amazing ... we had a zillion views last time he was on etc. He was a tedious mockney city trader caricature with nothing insightful to say about capitalism other than the bleeding obvious. Really annoying prettyboy who loves himself and has a book to plug. If it wasn't for Ash Sakar and Moya McLean I'd probably block this channel.

There's not much good news these but Spiked contributers regularly turning up on the BBC and Sky seems to be a thing of the past. I assume that's down to the advent of GB News and Talk TV.

I am writing this statement as unfortunately Novara Media have left me little choice. In light of the organization’s refusal to address the actions of one of its senior employees that led to the persecution of three young women of color and their ultimate conviction under the…

— Mohammed El-Kurd (@m7mdkurd) April 15, 2024