Times abandons free speech for progressivism
Last Wednesday, The New York Times published an op-ed by U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., in which he suggested that the federal government should use federal troops to quell the destructive riots that had occurred as a result of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police officers.
Cotton is a military veteran and an elected official with over 3 million constituents. Regardless of anyone’s opinion on the matter, Cotton is a credible person and his column was thoughtful.
“These rioters, if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives. Many poor communities that still bear scars from past upheavals will be set back still further,” he wrote.
“One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers. But local law enforcement in some cities desperately needs backup,” Cotton continued.
Indeed, federal troops have been used in the past to keep the peace and the thought of doing it during the apex of the riots, though jarring to some — is certainly not a fantastical or unprecedented notion.
But then things got bizarre. New York Times staffers took to social media to register their displeasure with their employer for publishing the piece.
Jazmine Hughes, an editor at the Times, tweeted, “as if it weren’t already hard enough to be a black employee of the New York Times.”
A handful of staffers followed suit, tweeting, “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.”
Times reporter Nikole HannahJones tweeted, “I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but to not say something would be immoral. As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this.”
And so the day went, with the clamoring continuing from the angry Times employees until management had had enough.
New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger wrote a lengthy email on Thursday morning to employees in an attempt to calm their fears. He assured staffers that he heard them and noted that it was important “to listen to each other, and support each other.”
But reporters wrote back, with hundreds signing a letter suggesting that Cotton’s op-ed would “no doubt encourage further violence.”
The Times then caved.
In a statement the paper explained that a “review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards.”
By Friday, during a virtual Town Hall with employees, Sulzberger told his staff that Cotton’s op-ed was “contemptuous” in tone and that he should not have published it.
The mob won. The sacred line between news and opinion had been crossed and indeed the opinion section had been hijacked. Staffers had taken the paper hostage.
It is a dangerous thing for the free press to be overrun by evangelists of radically progressive ideologies that were once safely relegated to the halls of academia.
The constructs and belief systems in the social justice lectures in colleges and universities create unrealistic and pernicious environments when infused into newsrooms of America’s journalists.
Free speech is not violence, even if one does not agree with it. Whether this phenomenon is generational or cultural, it is spreading and it is unhealthy for our discourse.
Those in media should always want more speech instead of less. They should temper their impulse to quell voices they do not endorse because their own rigid parameters may one day be imposed upon themselves.