Cancel culture working overtime this month
The New york Times is an influential newspaper with a worldwide readership and 130 Pulitzer Prizes for excellence in journalism to its name. It is known to have a liberal bias, but it has still generally been recognized for reporting the news, rather than for making it.
This month, however, the Times itself has been the stuff of headlines. Cancel culture is reaching disturbing heights all around, and the Times is at the centre of many of the stories. On Friday, the paper announced that two of its high-profile journalists were resigning: veteran health and science writer donald G. Mcneil Jr. and audio producer Andy Mills. both men had been the subject of previous controversies, yet their departures took place long afterward, apparently the result of more recent internal and external pressure on management to hold them further to account than was initially felt necessary for the past transgressions.
The loss of Mcneil is especially troubling because he has done a stellar job of reporting on the COVID pandemic, foreseeing the lockdown and effects the virus would have on North America long before most of his peers. His sin occurred a couple of years ago. The reporter was serving as an expert guide for a group of high school students on a trip to Peru. One of the students asked him his opinion on whether a classmate should have been disciplined for using a racial slur. Mcneil answered the student by asking for more information, repeating the racial slur as he did so.
The Times conducted a review of the incident at the time and chose not to fire Mcneil. but they started to change their minds on Jan. 28 of this year after a daily beast report made the episode public. At first, New york Times executive editor dean baquet emailed Times staff that Mcneil’s remarks “were offensive” and Mcneil “showed extremely poor judgment,” but “it did not appear to me that his intentions were harmful or malicious.”
“I believe that in such cases,” baquet’s message continued, “people should be told they are wrong and given another chance.”
It was a position that did not last long amid complaints from staffers, who demanded a renewed investigation into Mcneil, and an apology from the reporter. before long, baquet had cosigned a letter promising those offended by and angry about Mcneil’s behaviour that they would “see results.” A couple days later, Mcneil was gone. The CEO of PEN America, a non-profit dedicated to protecting free expression, commented: “For reporter donald Mcneil to end his long career, apparently as the result of a single word, risks sending a chilling message.”
The departure of Andy Mills on the same day was somewhat cloudier. Caliphate, a podcast Mills produced, had withstood an embarrassing blow in december when the Times officially announced the award-winning program had failed to meet the newspaper’s “standards for accuracy.” but Mills maintained a prominent position in the New york Times podcast world despite the problems — which led to complaints that he was being treated better than the female journalist host of Caliphate, who had been reassigned. That is when allegations of inappropriate behaviour about seven years before at a past job were reinvigorated, and Twitter exploded with what Mills has characterized as “gross exaggerations and baseless claims.” The public shaming, some of it engaged in by Times staffers, was enough to cause his departure.
Mcneil and Mills are not alone. Just today, actor Gina Carano was fired from The Mandalorian over a frowned upon Tweet, and it’s becoming hard to keep track of who is cancelling whom in the recent controversy over a Variety movie review of actor Carey Mulligan’s performance in Promising young Woman.
(Mulligan accused the reviewer of sexism for implying she was not attractive enough for her role, the reviewer expressed bewilderment and promised that as a gay man he was not evaluating women’s hotness, Variety issued an apology for the review, then the National Society of Film Critics condemned Variety for its shabby treatment of the reviewer and demanded Variety remove the apology.)
Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald has written a disturbing post about how New york Times tech reporters have essentially become professional speech tattletales, with reporter Taylor Lorenz recently excoriating a Silicon Valley entrepreneur for using a slur in private group conversation — which he did not use.
The circumstances of each of these incidents can be reasonably debated, and one need not come out on the same side every time, but the overwhelming trend of repressing free discussion is disturbing, and never more so than when exercised by an institution such as the New york Times, which is supposed to view free expression as its raison d’être.