‘Mainstream’ Media Shows Its True Colors
‘ In truth, Williamson’s comments are beside the point.'
ATLANTIC magazine editor Jeff Goldberg’s decision last week to fire writer Kevin Williamson drives home a discouraging point about the “mainstream” media: Conservatives need not apply. Williamson came to The Atlantic from the conservative National Review, and his hiring sparked an uproar on the left. After combing through over a decade of his writings, detractors found a tweet where he called for death, by hanging, for abortion. When Goldberg learned Williamson also had referenced the tweet on a podcast, he gave in.
Surely Williamson’s quip was mere hyperbole, meant to provoke. After all, he never wrote an actual column making that argument, despite having written extensively, including about abortion. And his first tweet simply argued that “the law should treat abortion like any other homicide.”
Only when he was asked what kind of punishment he had in mind did he tweet back: “hanging.” He was “absolutely willing to see abortion treated like regular homicide under the criminal code.” You don’t have to agree with that; I don’t. But Williamson’s position (not all pro-lifers’) is that abortion is murder (literally, the killing of a baby), that it should be made illegal and carry a punishment equal to that of similar crimes.
Is this more radical than Ruth Marcus’ view in The Washington Post? “I’m going to be blunt here: That was not the child I wanted,” she wrote about how she would have aborted her child if the baby was found to have had Down Syndrome. Her view is disgusting to conservatives, yet there was no move to get her fired.
In truth, Williamson’s comments are besides the point. In the last few months, conservatives have watched The New York Times get pilloried for hiring two fairly moderate columnists, Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens. There was also an uproar over the brilliant libertarian opinion writer Meghan McArdle being hired at The Washington Post.
No, the message couldn’t be clearer: Conservatives are unwelcome in the mainstream media.
Never mind Goldberg’s doubletalk: When the controversy erupted, he claimed he didn’t want to overreact based on someone’s “worst tweets, or assertions.” Indeed, when he hired Williamson, he claimed he “disagreed with him” more than not but saw The Atlantic as “a big tent for ideas.” By last week? “I have come to the conclusion,” he says, “that The Atlantic is not the best fit for his talents.”
Why would any conservative leave the comfortable confines of the conservative media knowing such treatment awaits them?
Fact is, Kevin Williamson is one of the finest writers around — witty, intellectual, original, eloquent. Even star Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates is a fan. And as David French notes at National Review, Coates has written plenty of controversial things himself, defending violence during the Baltimore riots, for instance, and admit- ting that he saw the 9/11 responders as “not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature” — no different than a cop who shoots an unarmed black man.
The late longtime Atlantic columnist Christopher Hitchens called Islam “the most depraved religion” and made comments like “women are not funny.” Would Hitchens get a job at The Atlantic today? Doubtful.
In a 2015 speech at Hillsdale College, Williamson addressed the brouhaha over his tweet, calling it “intellectual dishonesty.” He said he is against capital punishment, abortion, lynching. But the canard that he wants to round up women who had abortions persisted.
“People want to believe bad things about people who are different from them,” he said.
According to liberals, there is media — and there is conservative or liberal media. Conservative media is National Review, Fox News, The Federalist. Liberal media is The Nation, Mother Jones, MSNBC. But The New York Times, CNN, The Atlantic, etc. are just plain “media.” They have no bias, they are mainstream, moderate. They welcome a range of views.
Conservatives find this absurd. To a conservative, it’s plain that nearly all mainstream outlets lean left in their reporting and overwhelmingly so in their opinion sections.
On CNN’s “Reliable Sources” with Brian Stelter, conservative Ben Shapiro noted the extensive media bias. Stelter, skeptical, challenged conservatives to “try to get jobs at The New York Times. If you don’t like the coverage, try to be a part of the solution.”
As the Williamson affair makes clear, that idea is simply laughable.