By John Lloyd
Friday, January 05, 2024
Cancellations of
people and events are most damaging when authorities surrender to the demands
of the cancellers without a fight. When a university fails to insist that a
“controversial” speaker be assured of a hearing in the teeth of noisy protests,
it does more than cede victory to the protesters in return for a (temporarily)
quiet life. This kind of capitulation tears another hole in the fabric of civil
society, the free existence of which demands respect for a rule of free speech
and publication, however unwelcome some speech and some publishing may be.
Should the observation of this rule be replaced by a claim that speech on
selected themes can cause fear and “pain,” public debate—especially in
universities—will find itself at the mercy of self-appointed commissars tasked
with sparing people psychological and emotional damage.
The
US media enjoys the world’s strongest protections of speech and publication, so
it might have been counted on to oppose this movement in the name of those
freedoms. But instances of journalists being fired or forced to resign for
writing or saying the wrong thing have been growing, and these cases tend to
follow a similar pattern. First, a writer or editor publishes a piece that is
deemed offensive to one or more groups of “marginalised” individuals. Second,
activists, influencers, celebrities, and not infrequently the writer’s/editor’s
own colleagues informally collaborate in a sustained social-media mobbing of
the publication in question and any staffers unwise enough to defend the
article at issue. Third, following a period of agonised indecision, the
writer/editor is pushed out and the publication releases a craven apology
detailing the hurt caused and the lessons learned. Upshot? The mob is greatly
empowered and the spectrum of permissible opinion shrinks.
***
When
James Bennet was ejected from his post as head of the New York Times’s
opinion section in June 2020, the sequence of events followed this template
exactly. Just four days earlier, Bennet had published an op-ed by the
Republican senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton. Cotton argued
that the army should be deployed to protect citizens and businesses
from the burning and looting that followed the death of George Floyd during
Floyd’s arrest by Minneapolis police officers. Though Cotton’s column was
careful to emphasise that soldiers would only be deployed for protection, it
was misrepresented and misunderstood as a call to pit armed troops against
defenceless protesters. A substantial number of the paper’s younger journalists
duly objected to the appearance of Cotton’s column, and took to Twitter to
express their outrage. A statement from the newspaper’s branch of the
journalists’ union, the News Guild, announced
that the op-ed was “a clear threat to the health and safety of the
journalists we represent.”
Bennet
has now told the story of what happened to him in a
lengthy essay for the Economist, the British news magazine
where he has since been given a home as a columnist. He recalls that his
decision to commission and publish the Cotton op-ed was initially supported by
both the executive editor, Dean Baquet, and the paper’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger.
Indeed, when the row first erupted in the newsroom, Baquet seemed to be
bemused by the behaviour of his outraged colleagues, and by the notion that the
expression of opinion could be “a clear threat” to journalists’ safety. “Are we
truly so precious?” he asked Bennet rhetorically. The answer turned out to be
an unequivocal “yes,” and Baquet had to withdraw his support following after
three days of histrionic online uproar. “Sulzberger called me at home,” Bennet
remembers, “and, with an icy anger that still puzzles and saddens me, demanded
my resignation.”
The
rest of Bennet’s vast essay is consumed by a scathing denunciation of the paper
he once served (and of which he was spoken as a possible future executive
editor). It is a loosely crafted exposé of cowardice and bad
faith—stylishly written, overlong, and occasionally self-serving
and repetitive. Nevertheless, the essay is replete with stinging insights
and memorable aperçus:
·
“The Times’s
problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an
inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut it
down altogether.”
·
“[The Times now
lacks] the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and
to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm
its cause.”
·
“[L]eaders
of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier
to compromise than to confront—to give a little ground today in the belief you
can ultimately bring people around. This is how reasonable Republican leaders
lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents
lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New
York Times is losing control of its principles.”
·
“Since
Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896, one of the most inspiring things
the Times has said about itself is that it does its work
‘without fear or favour.’ That is not true of the institution today—it cannot
be, not when its journalists are afraid to trust readers with a mainstream
conservative argument such as Cotton’s, and its leaders are afraid to say
otherwise.”
·
“A
journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers, it seemed to me then,
and seems even more so to me now, can be far less valuable to the reader than a
journalism that starts out with a humbling awareness that it knows nothing.”
·
“The
old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of
views had given way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of
American voters. New progressive voices were celebrated within the Times.
But in contrast to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington
Post, conservative voices—even eloquent anti-Trump conservative
voices—were despised, regardless of how many leftists might surround them.”
·
“Even
columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects
when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy.”
·
“[T]o
the shock and horror of the newsroom, Trump won the presidency. ... Many Times staff
members—scared, angry—assumed the Times was supposed to help
lead the resistance. Anxious for growth, the Times’s marketing team
implicitly endorsed that idea, too.”
·
“Americans
can shout about their lack of free speech all they want, but they will never be
able to overcome their differences, and deal with any of their real problems,
if they do not learn to listen to each other again.”
The
former journalist and novelist (Primary Colours) Joe Klein picked up the
themes of Bennet’s essay and made them still more pointed in
a shorter piece on his Substack titled “The Times at
Ebb Tide.” For Klein, a lifelong reader and (now qualified) admirer of
the New York Times, the paper has been afflicted for four decades
by “a growing intellectual rot … a debilitating moral pomposity.” Klein and
Bennet agree that the Times has been captured by illiberal and
inflexibly dogmatic journalists intolerant of disagreement on a suite of moral
and policy issues. More clearly than Bennet, Klein identifies that
rot as a failure—shared by the Democratic Party—“to speak the truth about
[topics like] race, crime, welfare, poverty and education.”
A
new generation of Times journalists believe they are
responding to a higher calling than the pursuit of truth and understanding.
Once the world has been neatly divided into good and bad, the only important
question left is how to isolate and punish the latter. As a result, the
American political landscape has become a Tolkienesque world of morally
sound tribes (hobbits, dwarves, elves) battling bands of morally deformed
beasts (the Nazgul, orcs, uruks). It is to the latter tribe that Tom
Cotton is believed by Times journalists to belong.
Tom
Cotton hails
from a farming background in Arkansas. He went to Harvard, but showed
an early distaste for its liberal pieties and wrote
for the Crimson “against sacred cows, such as the cult of
diversity, affirmative action, conspicuous compassion and radical participatory
democracy.” After three years in a law practice, he joined the US army
and fought
with distinction as a junior officer in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2013,
he became a Republican congressman, then a senator two years later, where
he opposed
cutting incarceration levels and disputed the view that the US justice
system is systemically racist.
It
is for these reasons more than anything he actually wrote in his Times commentary
on the Floyd riots that Cotton attracted the hatred and contempt of the paper’s
journalists. But because they could not cancel a sitting US senator, they
settled for the scalp of his commissioning editor instead. Bennet had come to
the Times from the executive editorship of the Atlantic magazine,
and was therefore one of the highest prizes of the cancelling classes.
Social
media is widely blamed for collapsing complex matters into the Manichean
world in which the cancellers believe we live, but it is probably not
blamed enough. The online magazine Tablet carried
a story earlier this month about a New York public-school teacher
who was told by a student that she would “never believe” that the Al-Ahli
hospital in Gaza was hit by a stray Palestinian rocket, even if Hamas told her
so. Distrustful of the mainstream media and political plurality, such students
prefer to get their news from TikTok and Twitter. “They don’t read anything,”
the teacher complains. “They just read headlines and pictures and memes. And
they base their whole worldview on a set of memes.”
Presumably,
Bennet’s sternly accusing colleagues do read something. They
are New York Times journalists, after all, most of whom have
graduated from the Ivy League colleges, where reading is said to be
unavoidable. But social media has blunted their critical faculties,
incentivised tribal and mobbing behaviour, and helped to reshape curiosity into
an impulse to sniff out deviation from approved in-group norms, prompting
punishment for apostates wherever possible. This continues, Klein
observes, even when a claim that a column like Cotton’s has “threatened their
safety” exposes them to ridicule. “I thought of Dexter Filkins,” Klein writes
of Times reporters, “risking his life in Iraq and Chris
Chivers doing the same in Afghanistan … and John Kifner dodging rocks and
bottles with me during the housing riots in Boston—and I had to laugh.”
Also
ludicrous is the failure to be consistent about what constitutes supposedly
dangerous speech. Reflecting on the paradoxical nature of his former employer,
Bennet wrote in his conclusion that a few months after he had been pushed out,
the paper ran a “shocking op-ed praising China’s military crackdown
on protestors in Hong Kong … but there was no internal uproar.” As if to
underline the point, on Christmas eve, the Times published
an op-ed by the Hamas-appointed mayor of Gaza City. Neither editorial
decision resulted in internal upheaval, much less a senior defenestration.
Last
month, Sulzberger issued a
curt statement in response to the Economist’s essay, in
which he insisted that he “could not disagree more strongly” with “the false
narrative [Bennet] has constructed about The Times.” But he provided no
specifics, preferring to rely on boilerplate generalities about how his paper
was “holding the powerful to account,” “seeking to shed light rather than
heat,” and so on.
***
The
publication of Bennet’s extended revenge by the Economist was
a statement in itself. The British magazine had some form on this. In 2018,
Steve Bannon, an influential former adviser to President Trump, was invited by
David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, to take part in the
magazine’s annual festival—a showcase for liberal artists, journalists,
writers, and politicians. Bannon would be interviewed by Remnick himself, and
the editor promised that he had “every intention of asking him
difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation.”
But
once it became known that Bannon would be participating, several prominent
figures expressed their displeasure in public and/or pulled out, citing their
unwillingness to sully themselves by being in the same festival as Bannon.
Chelsea Clinton tweeted
that the event showed what the “normalization of bigotry looks like.”
Kathryn Schulz, a New Yorker staff writer, spoke for many of
her colleagues when she
tweeted that she was “beyond appalled” by Bannon’s inclusion.
The Guardian reported
that “The Hollywood names Jim
Carrey, John
Mulaney, Patton
Oswalt and Judd
Apatow were among scheduled guests who said on social media that they
would withdraw from the 19th festival, which will run from 5 to 7 October.”
Remnick
rapidly backed down. The same day that Bannon’s appearance was announced,
Remnick issued a statement to confirm that his guest had been disinvited. “I’ve
thought this through,” it
concluded, “and talked to colleagues—and I’ve reconsidered. I’ve changed my
mind. There is a better way to do this. 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.” That moment has
yet to arrive. “In what I would call a defining moment,” Bannon
replied, “David Remnick showed that he was gutless when confronted by the
howling mob.”
A
little later in the year, Bannon found himself engaged in a “serious and
even combative conversation” on a platform in London, supplied by
the Economist. The assembled were treated to an
argumentative interview by the magazine’s editor, Zany Minton Beddoes, and
she pressed him hard on immigration policy, on racism, and on his support for
the far-Right in Europe. It was enlightening, and no one to my
knowledge found the occasion unsafe. Annoyingly, an eloquent defence of
this kind of journalism was provided by Remnick himself at the very moment he
was disavowing it. In his statement explaining the decision to disinvite
Bannon, Remnick wrote:
The question is whether an interview has
value in terms of fact, argument, or even exposure, whether it has value to a
reader or an audience. Which is why Dick Cavett, in his time, chose to
interview Lester Maddox and George Wallace. Or it’s why Oriana Fallaci, in
“Interview[s] with History,” a series of question-and-answer meetings with
Henry Kissinger and Ayatollah Khomeini and others, contributed something to our
understanding of those figures. Fallaci hardly changed the minds of her
subjects, but she did add something to our understanding of who they were. This
isn’t a First Amendment question; it’s a question of putting pressure on a set
of arguments and prejudices that have influenced our politics and a President
still in office.
The
value of Bennet’s essay about the Times lies in its revelation
of how great the damage inflicted by the cancellers has become. When
journalists at America’s liberal paper of record can get a senior editor
dismissed for publishing a column by a sitting US senator, it has a
catastrophic effect on the media’s claim to be a pillar of
democracy. These should be men and women dedicated to the illumination of
public policy from every side; instead, they are behaving as the stewards of
acceptable discourse, and see it as their duty to turn out the lights.
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