UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — The New Yorker has dropped Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steven Bannon from its annual New Yorker Festival, the publication announced in a statement from Editor In Chief David Remnick.
The New Yorker Announced on Monday that Bannon would be interviewed by Remnick at the Upper West Side’s New York Society for Ethical Culture in a headlining event of the upcoming New Yorker Festival. The announcement sparked outrage and a number of festival participants such as comedians John Mulaney and Jim Carey, musician Jack Antonoff and director Judd Apatow said they would back out of the festival.
The Bannon event was canceled the same day it was announced, Remnick said in a statement. Remnick disclosed that a New Yorker interview with Bannon had been in the works for months before Monday’s announcement, and disputed the fact that an interview with Bannon would elevate ideas such as “white nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism and illiberalism.”
“But to interview Bannon is not to endorse him,” Remnick said in a two-page statement. “By conducting an interview with one of Trumpism’s leading creators and organizers we are hardly pulling him out of obscurity. Ahead of the mid-terms elections and with 2020 in sight, we’d be taking the opportunity to question someone who helped assemble Trumpism.”
The New Yorker editor planned to “put pressure” on Bannon’s ideas during the upcoming “rigorous interview,” he said in the statement.
Remnick alluded to the critical reaction on social media and from New Yorker staff members as reasons to cancel Bannon’s interview. He also added that at events such as the New Yorker Festival, speakers are paid and their travel and lodging expenses are covered by the publication, which caused concern among New Yorker staff.
“There is a better way to do this,” Remnick said in the statement. “Our writers have interviewed Steve Bannon for The New Yorker before, and if the opportunity presents itself I’ll interview him in a more traditionally journalistic setting as we first discussed, and not on stage.”
Bannon, who rose to prominence as the head of far-right publication Brietbart News, called Remnick’s decision “gutless” in a statement sent to the Associated Press.
“The reason for my acceptance was simple: I would be facing one of the most fearless journalists of his generation,” Bannon told the AP. “In what I would call a defining moment, David Remnick showed he was gutless when confronted by the howling online mob.”
Read Remnick’s full statement below:
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