Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Right about Roseanne

- Bret Stephens Bret Stephens is a New York Times columnist.

Of course ABC and its parent company Disney were right to cancel the sitcom Roseanne after its eponymous star, Roseanne Barr, wrote a racist tweet. There are necessary taboos and essential decencies in every morally healthy society. Writing that Obama administra­tion aide Valerie Jarrett was the baby of “Muslim brotherhoo­d & planet of the apes” violates these in the foulest of ways.

This is not a First Amendment issue. Constituti­onal rights are what you’re entitled to in the public sphere, not as an employee of a private corporatio­n. Barr’s speech has not been curtailed; she remains free to opine (and mostly free to tweet) to her heart’s content. She’s just not free to do so while getting $250,000 a show from an employer whose reputation she stained and whose values she traduced.

This is not a free speech issue—using “free speech” in the broader, less legalistic sense of the term. University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer has made the case that institutio­ns like his, though not strictly subject to the First Amendment, should nonetheles­s encourage the free and vigorous exchange of ideas for the sake of fostering intellectu­al excellence. That’s right. But what Barr tweeted wasn’t an idea. It was a slur.

This is not a double-standards issue. With his trademark combinatio­n of puerile self-pity and fang-toothed nastiness, Donald Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday to denounce Disney chairman Robert Iger for not apologizin­g to him for the “HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC.” But he’s the ultimate public figure, whereas Jarrett is a private citizen subjected to unprovoked racial attack by an ABC employee. That the president fails or refuses to appreciate the distinctio­n is the 1,000th reminder of his unfitness for office.

This is not a one-bad-tweet issue. In March, I argued that Kevin Williamson, the conservati­ve writer briefly hired by the Atlantic, should be judged by the totality of his work, not by a vile tweet (and, as it later turned out, a discussion on a podcast) in which he seemed to suggest that women who get abortions should be hanged.

Williamson insists his comments were misunderst­ood, but that’s another story. The relevant question here is: What’s the totality of Barr’s work, at least when it comes to political and racial questions?

Barr’s tweet about Jarrett wasn’t the odd needle in the haystack. It was the last straw.

What about the argument that liberals—and, in this case, I—use another double standard when we applaud Barr’s dismissal while defending the rights of football players who take a knee to protest police brutality during the singing of the national anthem? The players, after all, also don’t have unrestrict­ed First Amendment protection­s while wearing the jerseys and playing in the stadiums of the teams that pay their salaries.

It’s true the players don’t have the legal right. But they have the moral one, especially when their gesture is dignified, considered and silent (even if I also think it’s mistaken); and when the NFL has aggressive­ly blurred the lines between its commercial interests and the totems of American patriotism. To love freedom is to exercise it. That’s not a function of standing for a song.

Barr, too, has exercised her freedom to tell us what she thinks—without, however, the virtues of dignity and considerat­ion, never mind silence. And Iger and the ABC Entertainm­ent president Channing Dungey exercised their freedom in denouncing her tweet and canceling her show.

To their credit, Dungey and Iger appeared to be acting on moral principle, and not—as has too often been the case lately—merely surrenderi­ng to the verdict of a social-media mob. That’s an important distinctio­n. The intelligen­t defense of free speech should not rest on the notion that we must tolerate every form of speech, no matter how offensive. It’s that we should lean toward greater tolerance for speech we dislike, and reserve our harshest penalties only for the worst offenders. That requires considered adult judgment, not profession­al defenestra­tion via a bad Twitter ratio.

Also to their credit, Dungey and Iger acted despite Roseanne being a ratings hit. Something mattered more than a bottom line. The show was supposed to help explain and humanize Trump’s base to a frequently unsympathe­tic and uncomprehe­nding public. Through her tweet, Barr managed to do so all too well. Perhaps the reason Trump voters are so frequently the subject of caricature is that they so frequently conform to type.

OK, that’s much too sweeping a statement. I know Trump supporters who don’t conform to type, and many of them are writers or talking heads. Let’s hear from them on this—presumably, something other than the muttered excuses and tendentiou­s whatabouti­sm of a political movement that is capable of saying and doing anything except look itself in the eye.

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