Tone-deaf to #MeToo

This is an excerpt from a column by Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post.

As I read Isaac Chotiner’s perfectly fair, quietly relentless interrogation of the editor of the New York Review of Books in Slate last weekend, I found myself wondering: Could Ian Buruma survive his own responses? The answer came fast. Buruma stepped down on Wednesday.

There’s a backstory here that has a lot to tell us about journalism in the #MeToo era. The interview was about Buruma’s decision to publish a piece by Jian Ghomeshi — a former Canadian radio host who was accused by over 20 women of punching, choking and sexually assaulting them.

The factually flawed piece — part of an issue devoted to “The Fall of Men” — allowed Ghomeshi to hold forth on how tough it’s been for him to be exiled and, as he claims, misunderstood.

The outrage that followed came not only because a scandal-plagued radio host was given this rarefied outlet, but also because he was allowed to gloss over or minimize the facts of the case.

Why? Among the cavalier answers from Buruma is this gem: “The exact nature of his behavior — how much consent was involved — I have no idea, nor is it really my concern.”

Buruma may believe he was pushed out of his job because of “a Twitter frenzy of histrionic women,” as New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino put it on Twitter. But, she aptly added, that’s not the point: “The Ghomeshi essay & Slate interview added up to a truly abysmal professional performance: you can’t be a good editor with such a pathological distance from the texture of the world.”