Are "Neutral" News Outlets Propping Up Political Agitation? Graham Linehan and Linguistic Obfuscation
How a "suspicion of inciting violence" was falsely framed as a "free speech" issue
Let's talk about "linguistic obfuscation,” Graham Linehan, and freedom of speech.
Linguistic obfuscation is found in various fields we can examine with social science — such as propaganda, organizational misconduct, pseudoscience, and other areas — to describe "agitation done with words." I'll define some terms. First, linguistic obfuscation involves using weasel words, confusing language, and agitation techniques (which I'll define momentarily) for the purpose of perception management. "Perception management” describes discourse and acts designed to cause or influence shifts in understanding and behavior.
By "agitation" and "agitation techniques," I mean something fairly specific, drawing from Frankfurt School theorists Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman. They studied media extensively, which gave them keen insight into things like propaganda. Their work Prophets of Deceit is a helpful book on this subject.
I analyzed Löwenthal and Guterman in a chapter called Applying and Extrapolating Prophets of Deceit: Heuristics of Agitator Identification, wherein I outlined markers that can help, well, identify agitators. I want to use this as a lens to examine Graham Linehan's recent arrest in the UK — which we’ll get to momentarily.
Let's first see how agitators operate. The following quotations are from the Applying and Extrapolating Prophets of Deceit chapter:
Agitators allow subscribers to be appeased-via-association with statements or ideologies for which they themselves would normally suffer social consequences. Some examples could include conspiracy theory, denial of history, and racism or xenophobia. In common parlance, a listener harbors tension because they are not allowed to “say the quiet part out loud,” but they can listen intently as an agitator does.
Many people — due to repression, ignorance, or lack of empathy — feel hatred towards certain classes of people (one such group has to do with Linehan’s recent foray into the news). However, anti-discrimination laws and polite society prevent many people from being as outspoken as Linehan has been on the news and social media. Hateful people are eager to support Linehan, usually on places like Twitter, or even through headlines in respectable news articles. Agitators also do another thing, which has to do with plausible deniability.
From the perspective of those “outside of the know,” these individuals form protective boundaries or social plausibility deniability for subscribers. This is because agitators have “crackpot” characteristics (Löwenthal and Guterman 1970: xv), and therefore lack general credibility in some parasocial informational front (Madison et al. 2018), though their rhetorical power flows out of this. Statements that wider social circles consider to be too extreme can be hand- waved away by apologists claiming that they are just “provocateurs” or that it is simply performance. They “suggest a quack medicine salesman,” with “many characteristics of a psychological racket: they play on vague fears,” and yet, “they give their admission- paying audience … a kind of act – something between a tragic recital and a clownish pantomime – rather than a political speech.” This allows agitators to “get away with” extremist “jokes to doubletalk to wild extravagances” because they navigate in a “twilight zone” spectrum between “the respectable and the forbidden” (Löwenthal and Guterman 1970: 4– 5).
So, let’s talk about Graham Linehan, a profoundly unpleasant and obsessively bigoted individual. He was recently detained by the Metropolitan Police on “suspicion of inciting violence.” According to official reports, this arrest followed social media posts in which Linehan allegedly suggested that people should "punch" certain individuals he doesn’t like "in the balls.”
This case provides an instructive example of how media framing can obscure rather than clarify causal relationships. The factual narrative is straightforward:
Linehan made statements online
Authorities determined these statements constituted potential incitement to violence
The statements lead to Linehan’s arrest.
However, media coverage consistently employed linguistic obfuscation techniques that merit systematic analysis. Here are some examples found in headlines:
From Lucy Jackson in Yahoo News: "Graham Linehan 'arrested at Heathrow Airport over gender-critical tweets.'"
From Caroline Davies and Dan Milmo at The Guardian: "Father Ted creator Graham Linehan arrested over posts on transgender issues."
Here's a particularly problematic one by the AP: "TV writer Graham Linehan's arrest over transgender posts sparks free speech outcry in the UK."
Ah. So there’s something trans involved. Spoiler alert: it’s trans people who Linehan allegedly suggested should be assaulted.
These headlines illustrate a pattern of emphasis that obscures the operative legal factor (alleged incitement to violence) while foregrounding ideological content (transgender-related posts and supposedly stifled free speech). This framing technique exemplify Löwenthal and Guterman ‘s agitator methodology. The emphasis on "transgender posts" rather than "incitement to violence" creates plausible deniability for both media outlets and audiences. Editors can claim they are simply reporting on trans-related content while avoiding direct engagement with the legal substance of the allegations.
Worse, this framing causes people to latch on to the wrong sets of issues. For instance, anti-trans people are calling this a “free speech” issue, because they’re (wrongly) assuming the arrest was on account of persecuting someone for not being Woke™️ enough, or something. And, people who feel threatened by the existence of trans people and The Woke™️ use this story’s framing as evidence to fuel their Industrial Persecution Complex. Headlines aren’t neutral.
This case illustrates issues often uncovered through critical media analysis: the conflation of chronological sequence with causal relationship, along with false or collapsed conclusions (e.g., assuming this is an issue about free speech, which it’s not). In social science, and in logic, we distinguish between these concepts to avoid attributing causal significance to simplistic temporal proximity.
The logical structure of this case can be represented syllogistically:
Accurate legal framework:
Alleged legal infractions warrant detention
An individual commits an alleged legal infraction
The individual is detained
But, here’s the obfuscated media framework:
Expressing controversial views on transgender issues warrants detention
An individual expressed controversial views on transgender issues
The individual is detained
The second framework contains a false premise. Expressing controversial opinions, however objectionable, does not constitute grounds for arrest under UK law. The operative factor was the alleged incitement to violence, not the transgender-related content per se.
To demonstrate this distinction in another way, consider Linehan's documented history of anti-trans posts that did not result in arrest. The variable that changed in this instance was not the presence of transgender-related content, but the inclusion of an alleged incitement to violence.
This can be conceptualized as:
Previous posts: Transgender-critical content = no arrest
Contested post: Transgender-critical content + alleged incitement to violence = arrest
The additional variable (alleged incitement) represents the operative factor, yet media coverage consistently obscures this crucial distinction. Had he posted his typical bigoted content without making threats, he likely would have suffered no consequences. We have numerous examples of this: which are all the times Linehan previously said bigoted things, without getting arrested.
This analysis reveals how established news organizations can function as agitators themselves, parroting hot-button sloganeering rather than informing the public. The pattern of emphasizing inflammatory aspects while obscuring legal distinctions serves to generate engagement rather than understanding. It’s about ads, clicks, and revenue, rather than reporting, and ultimately, editors and writers picking headlines are ethically culpable for any Overton Window shifting that comes as a result of their incorrect and agitation-fueled framing.