American journalists are under attack — not just on the streets where they are being targeted by police but within their newsrooms where they are being targeted by each other.
It’s being called a “cultural reckoning” but as the victims tendering their resignations pile up it looks more like culture wars, or at least a racial version of the Me Too movement which engulfed some key media outlets.
And, being journalists, the biggest news story in decades becomes all about them.
The biggest stir was caused by The New York Times when opinion editor James Bennet resigned yesterday over an inflammatory piece by Republican Senator Tom Cotton calling for troops to quell the Black Lives Matter protests.
At the weekend the The Philadelphia Inquirer’s editor resigned over this headline: “Buildings matter, too”.
Overnight the editor of lifestyle publication Refinery29 resigned over complaints about discrimination and insensitive treatment of minorities at the 15-year-old online site.
On Monday the editor of Bon Appetit magazine, Adam Rapoport, was forced to resign over a 2004 “brownface” photo and criticism of not only how he treats people of colour but how he treats the food from different cultures.
Then there is the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette which banned two black journalists from covering local protests because they were perceived as too biased based on some of their tweets.
Although the controversies were sparked by sensitivity to the protests, they are causing a much broader and intense debate about the role of media in the post-Trump, Fox News world.
The NYT controversy has attracted the most attention given its role as the biggest and most powerful paper in the US. It raises not only questions of bias and safety in the workplace but the very basis of free speech.
It’s here that the obvious and most famous quote to use is “I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it” (often attributed to Voltaire but should now be attributed to author Evelyn Beatrice Hall).
The premise remains the same — except at the NYT apparently. An opinion piece by an elected Republican senator designed to stir debate was deemed too incendiary under the headline “Send in the troops”.
This led to “sickout” by a number of staff members refusing to log on because, as they explained later, the oped piece “put the lives of black NYT staff in danger”.
(And what about the danger of protests in a pandemic that killed more than 22,000 primarily people of colour in New York? Or the free speech rights of the widely condemned white, right-wing anti-lockdown protesters earlier?)
Some observers felt Bennet’s demise was brought on more by his admission at a staff town hall on Friday that he had not read the incendiary piece before it was published.
As usual the right is in full dudgeon about free speech and censorship and warning the left has gone too woke and politically correct. Some NYT subscribers have made similar comments online.
Being the Times, it ran a lengthy feature analysing its own scandal with a quote from a younger Washington Post reporter: “Telling the truth is now more important than the perception of balance.”
Really? Does that mean we can leave it to the toxic Fox News to keep the “fair and balanced” travesty of a logo?
Certainly the NYT — “All the news that’s fit to print” — can now be interpreted many ways.
To put the other side while still allowed, oped pages have previously censored “dangerous” views from paedophiles to anti-vaxxers and Klan members. Although in the UK one observer noted that bastion of the left, The Guardian, ran a piece by Osama bin Laden in 2004 in its comment section.
We are not immune in Australia. The ABC is under constant attack from Murdoch papers for too few right-wing voices, and new Insiders host David Speers is criticised for too many. (Admittedly News has its own outlet in Sky News which does not encourage rival voices.)
Last week Insiders was deemed too white. Q&A carefully tried to avoid that on Monday night.
I worked for Sky News for many years because I thought it was important to be a voice of the centre and counter some of the more ludicrous arguments that go to air from non journalists and dubious “commentators”.
Otherwise everywhere becomes an echo chamber, or as one NYT reader wrote overnight: “We must meet each other in the marketplace of ideas or retreat into silos.”
Too late.
Yes, except being a ‘marketplace ideas’, by your own admission, is expected of the greater liberal publications like the NYT – while the rest – Fox, Sky, talkback radio, the Murdoch tabloids, and, increasingly Nine – do whatever they want in pursuit of market share.
In any case, we are not really talking here about ideas or public-interest journalism, but right-wing trolling intended to generate outrage and clicks. The fact is the Republican senator’s ‘send-in-the-troops’ column was not some considered conservative policy position for broad consumption but a calculated pitch to his base from the other side of the barricades.
You also have to consider that we are no longer in some 1960s-70s media environment where they NYT or WSJ or SMH or AFR has a monopoly platform for comment. Opinion is available everywhere all the time, including on Twitter. So the scarce resource is not bloviating comment from dug-in partisans but actual journalism. NYT journalists are angry at their publication giving over valuable space to ‘well-he-would-say-that-wouldn’t-he’ trolling by careerist politicians and professional culture warriors.
Ultimately, spare us the stale Voltaire references and appeals to the mythical ‘reasonable centre’ (a conceit typical of self-important mainstream media journalists). The fact is the Right loves seeing everybody else tie themselves up in knots over this ‘free speech’ stuff, while they laugh out of the sides of their mouths.
Totally agree with you here Mr Denmore. Also add that the op-ed had substantive, I believe journalists would call these lies “inaccuracies” and was apparently not fact checked.
I’d also like to add that the NYT has no issues censoring people of the likes of Chomsky, I wonder why that is? Lastly, for decades the NYT has just been the mouth piece of power, this column is case in point.
We’re really finding ourselves in the middle of the paradox of tolerance right now.
In my view, people, politicians can opine away, but it needs to be based on facts, not baseless accusations, lies and propaganda.
Two words re the Gray Lady’s integrity & probity – Judith Miller.
It’s exactly the kind of well-written, smart and decent take you’d expect from a good, centrist pro journo, but it’s that authorial benchmark that is really the problem here. JP makes certain assumptions here which professional journalists ‘sort of’ are bound to (otherwise their professional realm can’t function). But I simply note Tom Cotton’s taunting rear-view-mirror tweet back at the road-crash-embarrassing credibility-crash he caused: (‘Is everyone alright at the NYT?’, or some such frat-boy snicker). The ‘marketplace of ideas’ ideal is a fine one, but you have to enter it in good faith, not as a wrecker. The reactionary right in the US – and here – hasn’t been arguing their (allegedly) ‘conservative’, ‘centre-right’ – even ‘centrist’ (Paul Kelly) – views in ‘good faith’ for yonks; since Hanson here, and I guess the Lewinsky matter in the US. You need well-intentioned participants for different views to engage well, not Foxes in the CNN-house (see what I did there? *cheesy grin*). The old slogan ‘Fair and Balanced’ was a standing raised middle finger at that Voltaire/Hall aspiration, just as Cotton’s taunt reveals the disingenuousness of his original Op Ed. That’s what its better critics actually objected to – its meta-intent – not its content, as such (it wasn’t the worst opinion the NYT has ever published). Cotton (and that editor) have well-known form on this ‘who, me?’ mock-innocent misuse of public debate space. ‘Bad faith’ is the problem, not bad content. The same applies here, for example to the endless whining about the ABC by News Corps. It’s a meta-tactic; it’s information bullying. Nothing to do with ‘free speech’ or ‘open debate’, or genuine engagement. It’s just another Meeja Incumbency Play, a shouting and whining and stamping of feet, to get into the room where the grown-ups are chatting quite civilly, so they can troll and taunt and interrupt. Mostly because they know their ideas and their ability to argue them alone simply aren’t good enough to cut it. The Greg Sheridans and Gerard Hendersons (our Tom Cottons) do not enter our ‘marketplace of ideas’ (such as the Insiders couch) to engage in genuine ideas trade and barter, but to flog tacky propaganda, heckle and graffito and disrupt the better shops, and act as distracting marketplace louts, while their unseen chums quietly loot the joint.
By the way: this debate is so, so tedious and anachronistic. In the internet era, the whole ‘free speech’ argument – when it lasers in like this on the legacy meeja – is actually quite bizarre. The internet IS a ‘marketplace of ideas’. The most amazing one ever created. It’s universal, 24-7, instant, interactive, fully linked, wholly-autonomous, un-censorable, almost cost-free and available to anyone with a smart phone. Suggesting that either ‘publishing’ or ‘not publishing’ Cotton’s piece in the NYeffingT is somehow still going to have any discernible impact on Humanity’s ‘freedom of speech’, ‘open-minded debate’ or the ‘interaction of ideas’…is just forlornly-hopeful, self-important nonsense. Yep, I get it, folks, it’s very melancholy for you: but the Voltairian (Hallsy) ‘free speech’ Main Game has long, long moved on from your newspapers, mags, TV and radio. Your Legacy Meeja editorial choices are of vanishingly-tinsy relevance to these issues, with an editorial kerfuffle like this one no more problematic or attention-worthy to most of us here in Teh Interwebz* than if, say, The Powers That Be were to announce they were planning to gag the Last Town Crier On Earth, ban the Scriveners Guild, or police the painting of hand-prints on cave walls.
* hiya, Rupert’s regional and metro masthead dudes: welcome aboard, make yourselves at home! Oodles of space, here. Gets a bit hairy sometimes, but if you’re thick-skinned, funny and info-good…you’ll do well. Lots of cute cat pix and naughty nekked bods to keep your journos amused on slow news days…:-)
’nuff said.
Well it turns out “Voltaire” was wrong. I don’t have to defend people’s right to say they want to hurt other people.
Bingo.
Until that gagging is turned against you – see Niemöller.
The sheer gall of this site to fulminate about freedom of speech when two articles today with NO COMMENTS ALLOWED.
And one last week about Blot and other past occasions, as well as removing whole threads.
As is frequently pointed out, the commenters usually are better informed and far more interesting than the banal, by-the-numbers articles.
Given the numerous typos, poor grammar, dodgy fact-checking and overbearing censorious nature, I find it hard to believe that people pay to be treated with such contempt.
Yes I was puzzled that two articles likely to provoke a lot of discussion, some of it probably thoughtful and well-informed, has comments turned off. I wonder how many potential participants thought, “Oh well if that’s what you think of your readers, I can find a better use for my subscription money.”
Can this writer really not see that pusillanimous phrase “fair & balanced” has become the antithesis of “truth”?
When falsity is presented as the equivalent of fact it is not balance but poltroonery, as if the writer does not have a clue or dare not state the simple truth.
BTW, the cliche is “HIGH dudgeon”, not full.
May I please borrow your second sentence? I can think of plenty of times I would like to use it.
Be my guest, glad that you appreciated it.
This is an unsavoury and distasteful article, The mad right in the USA wants the freedom to wound, with words, money, guns, knives, position, and the other buggers, not fit to be tolerated can have the freedom to bind up wounds, if alive. Self aggrandisement, self preferement, self positioning, all self.., Today, truth everywhere seems crushed, barely discernible, invisible in some media which poses as honest. If Murdoch, among others, is honest, then crap is candy and sugar is shit. Hunting for some facts, truth, balnace, importance, each day, is wearing, tiring, essential. Our ABC, declining, white anted with turds, rigged, fixup up, nobbled, is our last ditch. The Costello, Murdoch, Stokes type shitskulls betray us, the nation, civilised attitude and behaviour. But, being flushable, expendable, we deserve it, or do we? It is such a corporate, executive, grabbing, gouging, getting, poking, prodding, hoarding, malleable, distorted world.
“Paradise” lights roads . . . Contemplating term ‘over – reach’. Today’s Crikey. “A bridge too Antifa” / Trump / Black Lives Matter.
America. Citizen’s pretence, tolerance, intolerance one of another? Corralled by and for greed and power. Contempt, a glue holding nation, together. Knowing always, unless ‘own’ a lawyer of note, opinion worth splat.
It took only a short, straight arm to a 75 year old’s chest, and then walk on . . bar a cursory glance?
From incline/decline(?) here in land of the righteous ‘OZ.’ Itself approaching a cusp. Not unlike an earlier, younger USofA. Vision/belief so clear . . .
America. Good ol’ Yankland. Over-reach. No problem. But there is a problem. An all encumbrancing problem. America, no longer a Democratic Nation? “Over -reach”. . . my oath! When will free global nation(s) speak out? And if not . . .?