How They Do 'Journalism' at New York Magazine

Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

In my recent Wall Street Journal essay on the politics of Twitter mobs, I noted that the episode was accompanied by a great deal of sloppy journalism—remarkably lazy journalism. Of all the mostly denunciatory articles about me that appeared in the big-name press (at least four in the New York Times alone) not a single writer of any of them bothered to ask me about my views on the subjects in question: abortion and capital punishment. Naturally, practically all of them got it wrong (see the corrections) never having bothered to perform the characteristic act of journalism and, you know, ask a question or two.

Ed Kilgore, a dreary partisan dolt in the employ of New York magazine, thought he saw an opening, and sent me a one-question inquiry: “What is your ‘public policy recommendation’ on appropriate punishment for women having abortions in a hypothetical criminalized abortion regime?” As any reasonably intelligent person will immediately detect, that question isn’t actually a question; it is a rhetorical stratagem in the shape of a question, deployed for the purpose of lame partisan point-scoring in the form of blocks of texts shaped like journalism. It isn’t discourse, but a facsimile of it, the journalistic equivalent of the Gemütlichkeit Spamwich created by Lisa Dziadulewicz of Sheboygan, Wisconsin: Just not quite right.

It is, as I have noted, a dishonest strategy, because the question cannot be intelligently answered in a single sentence or two. (The French law on the subject, for example, runs quite a bit longer than that.) Try to summarize it in sound-bite form and you’ll produce something that is easy to caricature—which is, of course, the point of asking the question. So I wrote as much to Kilgore:

We have fifty states with fifty different political environments, and I would be surprised if, in a post-Roe world, the statutory situation in Oklahoma looked very much like that of Connecticut. People on the pro-choice side seek to shift the conversation to the question of the specifics of criminal sanction for obvious and shallow rhetorical purposes—because that’s an easy way to whip up emotional hysteria, preempting meaningful discourse rather than enabling it. The obviousness and stupidity of that gambit should be fairly obvious to any reasonably intelligent and fair-minded adult, but those are in unfortunately short supply.

As noted, my original observations on this subject, including the Infamous Tweet, speak to the very dishonesty and stupidity of the stratagem upon which you are here relying. I can’t believe that you are in fact unaware of my opposition to capital punishment.

That, in turn, gave New York magazine the opportunity to write the headline Kilgore wanted to write: “Kevin Williamson Won’t Tell Me What He Thinks Should Happen to Women Who Have Abortions.”

But that isn’t the whole truth, either. I made a great effort to tell him—and his editor, Adam Moss.

What you will not read about at New York magazine is the fact that I offered them a full account of my views on the subject, in the form of an essay on exactly how I think we should go about dealing with the legal prohibition of abortion. (In the interest of making this easier for New York magazine, I offered this at no charge, something I almost never do. “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” as Dr. Johnson observed.) Why take one or two sentences, filtered through the unreliable sensibility of a hostile columnist, when you could have the whole thing? Because, as New York editor Adam Moss told me, that is “as much on the subject of your views on this matter as we want to publish.”

And there you have it.

New York magazine, in the words of its own editor, prefers a truncated, incomplete account, which is of course easier to distort and to misrepresent. Whatever that is, it isn’t journalism.

A subject to which I expect to be returning in the near future is the way in which social media functions as a tool for the prevention of discourse rather than an instrument enabling it. One of the lessons of the 20th century is that authoritarian movements are happy to use the instruments of liberal democracy as weapons against liberal democracy: Newspapers, mass media, political parties, even elections themselves can be used to undermine genuinely liberal and democratic institutions.

Imagine an election in which the majority votes to disenfranchise some despised minority group and then defends the results as “democracy.” In a similar way, social media is purportedly an instrument for the enabling of discourse that is in fact used to prevent actual exchange—and, unhappily, the same desire to preempt genuine dialogue can be found throughout the ordinary news media. That is even true at prestigious publications such as New York magazine, which either is or is not interested in what I think about abortion and capital punishment, depending on which is more politically useful at the moment.