Ana Kasparian, the Nelk Boys, and the Failures of ‘Objectivity’

The Nelk Boys are ‘new media’ darlings but their Netanyahu interview drinks from legacy media’s poisoned ‘objectivity’ chalice. It is The Young Turks’ Ana Kasparian who shows what is needed right now.

Less than seven days ago, I had not heard of the Nelk Boys. I say this not to be prideful or snarky, but only to acknowledge I am not in their target demographic. Nonetheless, they crossed my radar last week courtesy of their spectacular misfire of an interview with Israeli PM and International Criminal Court-wanted alleged war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Nelk Boys, a bevy of American and Canadian men all aged around 30, have a following of around 8.5 million, including two million subscribers on YouTube and are known mostly for pranking videos. This makes them popular with 18-year-old conservative-leaning men.

The pranksters have leaned into this popularity by repeatedly inviting Donald Trump to appear on their Full Send podcast (in 2022, 2023, and 2024). But last week, they turned things up a notch when, despite admitting to their own ignorance on Gaza and Palestine, two ‘boys’, Kyle Forgeard and Aaron ‘Steiny’ Steinberg, decided to interview Netanyahu.

Calling it an interview, however, is to give them undue credit. Rather, they provided their considerable platform for Netanyahu to mount a brazen attempt to admonish and discredit the droves of young people who have refused to accept the narrative Israel has been churning out for decades; a narrative that was once accepted almost unquestioningly by the mainstream American public.

Anyone wishing to see this interview for themselves can follow this link but I warn you, it is extremely difficult to stomach. As many others, from the comments on the YouTube video to the opinion pages of The Guardian have noted, it was phenomenal in its awfulness.

For more than an hour, Netanyahu gets free reign to spout one lie after another, dismissing all criticisms of Israel as ‘propaganda’ without so much as a request for proof. Fortunately, the backlash was swift, denouncing the YouTubers not for giving him a platform per se but for doing so without pushing back on his claims whatsoever.

This lack of pushback from Forgeard and Steingberg should be unsurprising for two key reasons, however. First, both hosts made it apparent early on that they harbour sympathies for Israel. Foregeard for instance, gravely notes his concern about rising antisemitism, while Steinberg shares that he is an American Jew which is ‘a very hard thing to be right now’.

In other words, in continuing to centre the feelings and wellbeing of Jewish people amidst a genocide of Palestinians, it’s not that the Nelk Boys squandered an opportunity, it’s that they revealed where their own perspective lies.

This is the legacy of western journalism’s ‘objectivity’ fallacy – the idea that journalists can and should remain entirely neutral, and that by neither agreeing or disagreeing they demonstrate their impartiality. In fact, this kind of contrived objectivity merely aligns itself with the prevailing power structure and official narrative of the ruling class – and inadvertently gives itself away.

The ‘objectivity norm’ has been criticised for decades by media scholars in the United States. In 1972, sociologist Gaye Tuchman called it a ‘strategic ritual’ that journalists place between themselves and their critics. In mobilising quotes from official sources and taking pains to remove emotionality from their writing, the journalists claim to be uninvested in the content of their own stories and thus ‘objective’ and beyond criticism.

More recently, academic Jay Rosen calls it the ‘view from nowhere’, which he defines as

a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.” Second, it’s a means of defence against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it’s an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view.

‘Objectivity’, or ‘both sides’ journalism exemplifies an underlining precept of Western society that dates back to the Enlightenment: that reason (and by implication, truth) is at odds with emotion. That staying calm, superficially neutral, and emotionless is a sign of intelligence, sanity, and even moral rightness.

The Nelk Boys showed this fallacy in its extreme. Although they don’t claim to be journalists, they nonetheless took on its role and, in their approach, its practices and guiding precepts. They were so ‘neutral’ (ie permissive) in their interview that Netanyahu was able to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza and blame Palestinians for all of it.

While the interview has been described - fairly - as a failure of new media’s laissez faire approach most exemplified by Joe Rogan, in which no topic or guest is off limits, it is also a failure of the wider Western approach to journalism to which new media supposedly provides an alternative.

The biggest fallacy that Western journalists subscribe to is that ‘objectivity’ (I use scare quotes to highlight that objectivity in journalism is a specific practice and not merely a concept), is synonymous with lack of bias when in fact the opposite is true. ‘Objectivity’ exemplifies bias because it inherently favours the perspective of the powerful.

As I wrote about The New York Times’ coverage of Palestine back in 2013:

The New York Times style of he-said-she-said journalistic 'objectivity' merely reinforces the status quo and performs a bias of its own by failing to provide its readers with enough information to form a valid opinion, which in turn ensures official US policy remains stagnant.

Yes, it presents two sides to the story but if fair journalism is about more than pretending each side's opinions are equally valid, then it becomes apparent that The New York Times is actually promoting Israeli interests, for while Palestinians have much to gain from an end to the Occupation, Israel, which is determined to expand West Bank settlements at the expense of a Palestinian homeland, has a vested interest in maintaining it.

And then there is Ana Kasparian.

Also early last week, co-host of The Young Turks, a pioneer of alternative media though with a liberal bent, appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored alongside Israeli journalist Gideon Levy and Jewish-American activist Shabbos Kestenbaum, best known for filing a lawsuit against Harvard University for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitism.

An emotional Kasparian furiously raises her voice at Kestenbaum, who defends and praises Israel for such practices as dropping evacuation orders in neighbourhoods prior to bombing them and for its handling of humanitarian aid. Netayahu had also boasted about these, but unlike the Nelk Boys, Kasparian pushes back. ‘The fact that they shoot dozens of people as they’re waiting in line for humanitarian aid, dozens of people get shot and killed every single day as they’re waiting for food.’ Kestenbaum attempts to disagree but Kasparian won’t have a bar of it. ‘No, I’m not going to let you filibuster, bitch! I’m not going to let you filibuster.’

I love Kasparian’s intervention for so many reasons. First, her use of the term ‘filibuster’. This peculiarity of American politics usually involves a Senate speaker making attempts to delay a vote on a legislative bill by making an extended speech on the floor. Some filibusters have lasted more than 24 hours.

With that term, Kasparian sums up Israel’s approach to media. It’s not that they really believe what they are saying or that they expect us to believe it; after all, we can see the footage for ourselves. It’s that in simply repeating the talking points, in forcing us to entertain them and to respond to them, they prolong the genocide. They delay justice for Palestinians as surely as a filibuster delays the legislative process.

But Kasparian wasn’t done there. Her words were both a rebuke to Kestenbaum’s hasbara and a rejection of the unreasonable notion that journalists should never be emotional. Instead, Kasparian demonstrates in no uncertain terms that what this moment in time demands is more emotion:

You guys are totally okay with IDF soldiers shooting and killing desperate people waiting for humanitarian aid. You’re okay with that. I find it so unbelievably evil, unbelievably evil. It shocks my conscience and my soul that people as evil as this exist in this world. Watching these images, looking at these videos, seeing all these kids, desperate, hungry, parentless, trapped in Gaza. And you’re sitting here and you’re defending it. I can’t, I can’t stand it. I can’t listen to it.

We must show our grief and our anger because to even persist in the fallacy of reasoned, civil and ‘objective’ discourse while people are being starved, shot to death while seeking aid, burned alive while sheltering in tents, denied their right to swim or fish in their own waters, and deprived even of the sacred rituals of burying their dead with dignity, is to permit it to continue.

In the West, ‘objectivity’ journalism is one long, never-ending filibuster.

Modernity’s obsession with a rigid approach to reason, defined as the severance of emotion from intellect, is what guides ‘objectivity’ in journalism and it provides a cover for colonial atrocities including genocides.

‘Objectivity’ and the notion of ‘civility’ from which it sprung forward have long been a mask for the viciousness and brutality of Western society’s imperialism. At the height of the British Empire in the mid to late 1800s, English women wrote and produced books like Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management and The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, instructing British women how to keep house and how to eat like civilised people even (especially) amongst the colonised hordes. These books serve as records of how European colonisers manipulated politeness to serve Empire. According to Isabella Beeton:

Man … is a dining animal. Creatures of the inferior races eat and drink; man only dines … Dining is the privilege of civilisation … The nation which knows how to dine has learnt the leading lessons of progress. It implies both the will and the skill to reduce to order, and surround with idealisms and graces, the more material conditions of human existence.

In other words, civilisation is actively performed to whitewash brutality. All this while the British Empire was expanding, mercilessly crushing any resistance. The archetype of the polite and proper, even emotionally repressed, Englishman that still makes its ways into film and popular culture (see anything by Hugh Grant and Colin Firth) masks this brutality and is a testament to the tension between the West’s words and actions: behave as terribly and violently as you wish but cover it with a civilised veneer.

Violence has always been part and parcel of the spread of Western civilisation; how else can a handful of countries take over the world? In order to make its own violence palatable to itself, the West has mastered the art of coating it with forced politeness and calmness.

This is why so Kasparian resonates with so many of us who feel like we are losing our minds as we have watched the genocide unfold even as our leaders have insisted that there is no genocide. English as a language has become so manipulated and misused that it is now a form of denial in itself. Even when one’s actions are in direct contradiction to one’s words, as long as one stays calm, then one is reasonable and rational. By extension, whoever loses their temper is irrational, uncivilised, and morally wrong.

It is the response of the colonised that is demonised and dismissed as lacking civility and objectivity. This manipulation is demonstrated in this short clip from stalwart activists Code Pink. During one of the group’s forays into the halls of US Congress, the activists ask various congressmen and women if they’re aware of the forced starvation in Gaza. This is how one of these interactions went down:

Congressman: Thank you for your input. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?

Code Pink activist: My input? This is not about input! I’m talking to you on behalf of the taxpayers in your district.

Congressman: Ma’am, are you raising your voice with me?

Code Pink activist: I am raising my voice! It’s been two years of genocide! That’s the least I can do, is raise my voice!

Indeed, it is.