By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
The New York Times, an organization devoted to
gathering and publishing information, doesn’t want people to gather or publish
information inconvenient to it.
A group of Trump-supporting operatives has been finding
and archiving old social-media postings of Times employees and other
journalists for use in the ongoing brawl between the president and the press.
There’s no indication that this is dumpster diving rather
than an effort to scour readily available sources for stupid, embarrassing, or
offensive things that journalists have said publicly under their own power.
The Times broke the news of the campaign in an
alarmed-sounding report. It related that “the material publicized so far, while
in some cases stripped of context or presented in misleading ways, has proved
authentic, and much of it has been professionally harmful to its targets.”
It’s not clear what makes this different from what
happens in our public life … every . . . single . . . day. Headhunting based on
past offenses, real and imagined, is the norm, indeed one of the Left’s favored
forms of ideological combat.
Nonetheless, the press and its progressive allies act as
though the First Amendment is being endangered if journalists apologize for
past things they’ve written or — depending on the decisions of their own
organizations — get cashiered for them.
“The goal of this campaign is clearly to intimidate
journalists from doing their job,” thundered Times publisher A. G.
Sulzberger, “which includes serving as a check on power and exposing wrongdoing
when it occurs. The Times will not be intimidated or silenced.”
A spokesman for CNN went further, saying that when
government officials, “and those working on their behalf, threaten and
retaliate against reporters as a means of suppression, it’s a clear abandonment
of democracy for something very dangerous.”
MSNBC host Joy Reid tweeted (then deleted), “Welcome to
the age of digital brownshirtism.”
This is the usual hysteria yoked to the usual foggy
thinking. The First Amendment is an important protection of press freedom. Yet
nothing in it protects members of the press from criticism, let alone criticism
over things they have written. Such criticisms are exercises of free speech in
response to other exercises of free speech — i.e., public debate.
If the Times and others don’t like the
weaponization of foolhardy and untoward social-media postings, they can start
pushing back against it across the board.
The left-wing organization Media Matters for America
exists to publicize (allegedly) controversial statements by conservative media
figures toward the end of getting them fired or ushered off the air. If
recirculating the past tweets of employees of liberal news organizations is
undemocratic, why isn’t the work of Media Matters also dangerously
authoritarian?
The Times may say that it won’t be “intimidated”
by pressure over past postings, but it has readily surrendered to such pressure
from the left. The paper pulled the plug on its hiring of tech writer Quinn
Norton last year when it emerged that she had tweeted offensive terms about
gays and blacks, albeit sardonically.
The hounding of conservatives isn’t considered beyond the
pale; it’s considered sport. Much of the Left would be rendered practically
mute if it weren’t braying for people to be fired.
When The Atlantic had the temerity to hire my
colleague Kevin Williamson, a fearless and brilliant libertarian
controversialist, seemingly every liberal outlet in the country joined in the
pile-on. Williamson’s hiring was swiftly revoked, with none of his critics
detecting a threat to democracy in the episode. (Williamson has written a keen
book about his experience, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in
the Age of Mob Politics.)
I think it’s a bad idea for either side to rummage
through old social-media postings and writings looking for firing offenses.
It’s an inherently punitive project, and often an unfair one (no one is the sum
of their tweets). But the rules of this game were established by the Left long
ago. It should either change them — or stop whining.
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