Campus War on Free Speech Spreads to U.S. Newsrooms – By Mark Hemingway (Real Clear Politics) / June 9 2020
Two weeks ago, if you’d asked what American institution was most intolerant of dissenting opinion, preoccupied with promoting radical ideology, and prone to erupting into disruptive temper tantrums, the answer would have been easy. Now it’s not so clear – the hysteria on college campuses has spread to America’s newsrooms.
Over the weekend, the opinion page editor of the New York Times, James Bennet, resigned under pressure, and another opinion editor, Jim Dao, was reassigned to the newsroom. Their offense was soliciting and publishing an op-ed by GOP Sen. Tom Cotton last week on invoking the Insurrection Act. After recent protests in over 700 cities, polling showed a majority of Americans, including nearly four in 10 African Americans, were amenable to using the military to restore order.
Whatever you think of the need for the Insurrection Act, which was last used during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992, Cotton’s op-ed had undeniable news value. That didn’t matter to the more than 1,000 employees of the Times who signed a letter objecting to the Cotton op-ed. “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger,” was the message that upset Times employees spread across Twitter.
According to Times media columnist Ben Smith, the paper’s union advised the employees to make their complaint a “workplace safety” issue to prevent retribution by management, but it’s no coincidence their argument dovetails with the illiberal rhetoric emanating from college campuses.
Ironically, three years ago Bennet published an op-ed by an academic making the suspect argument that some kinds of offensive speech are “literally a form of violence.”
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