When it was announced on Tuesday that Steve Bannon would headline The New Yorker Festival—to be interviewed by David Remnick, the magazine’s editor—many people were vocally dismayed. Roxane Gay withdrew a piece she was writing for the magazine’s website. Comedian John Mulaney announced that he was pulling out as a guest, describing the inclusion of Bannon as ‘PT Barnum level horseshit’. Filmmaker Judd Apatow did the same, proclaiming that he would ‘not take part in an event that normalizes hate’.

Several hours later, Bannon was disinvited. In a statement, Remnick wrote that while the festival was hardly ‘pulling [Bannon] out of obscurity’, and that the point of the interview would have been to ‘put pressure on the views of the person being questioned’, he accepted that ‘the Festival is different, a different kind of forum’. By this, I take him to mean that while a traditional journalistic interview should not constitute an endorsement of its subject, the geniality of the festival setting can legitimise or even elevate those on the bill.