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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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So...WaPo just published the opinion piece: James Bennet was right on the firing of editor James Bennett for...posting an op-ed from a sitting US Senator advocating for the use of the Insurrection Act during the post-Floyd riots which permanently, publicly marked out the Times as a partisan org (as if it wasn't already) that was caught up in the moral craze.

“He set me on fire and threw me in the garbage and used my reverence for the institution against me,” Bennet recently told Ben Smith of Semafor. “This is why I was so bewildered for so long after I had what felt like all my colleagues treating me like an incompetent fascist.”

That might sound like the angst of a guy who’s still disgruntled at losing his job. And it is, for a compelling reason: Bennet is right. He’s right about Sulzberger, he’s right about the Cotton op-ed, and he’s right about the lessons that linger from his tumultuous final days at the Times.

His outburst in Semafor furnishes a toehold for reassessing one of the most consequential journalism fights in decades. To date, the lesson from the set-to — that publishing a senator arguing that federal troops could be deployed against rioters is unacceptable — will forever circumscribe what issues opinion sections are allowed to address. It’s also long past time to ask why more people who claim to uphold journalism and free expression — including, um, the Erik Wemple Blog [the author is Erik Wemple] — didn’t speak out then in Bennet’s defense.

It’s because we were afraid to.

TBH: nothing about this op-ed is novel. We already knew what happened: Cotton published an op-ed well within the bounds of discourse at the time, Times' employees lost their shit and started adding pressure and eventually an editor's note was added and Bennett was fired for letting the other side speak. Significant numbers of people were just absolutely cowards about this - including the author of the article who has apparently now come to his senses when the damage has already and Bennett who groveled when that is the worst thing you can do - publicly - been done. As always.

The only interesting bits for me was the implication that the rampant misuse of the term "danger" was apparently deliberately to appeal to workplace safety regs (laughably) so they could have a legal basis for slamming their newsroom and how exactly they manufactured an apologetic editor's note despite being unable to find much wrong with the op-ed itself:

As Sulzberger flip-flopped, an astonishing up-is-down moment unfolded at the paper’s upper reaches. Whereas media outlets typically develop arguments to defend work that comes under attack, the opposite scenario played out over the Cotton op-ed: Top Times officials, according to three sources, scrambled to pulverize the essay in order to vindicate objections rolling in from Twitter. A post-publication fact-check was commissioned to comb through the op-ed for errors, according to the sources, even though it had undergone fact-checking before publication. The paper’s standards desk spearheaded work on an editor’s note.

Deputy editorial page editor James Dao, who pushed for publication of the piece, spent more than an hour on the phone with a Cotton aide that Thursday night to inventory alleged problems. Dao, says the aide, was pointedly unenthusiastic about the pursuit. “It sounded like he had a gun to his head and he had to find something,” the aide — who is no longer with Cotton’s office — told this blog.

Sulzberger seemed disappointed upon being told that the post-publication fact-check hadn’t punctured the op-ed, according to a source involved in the process. The Erik Wemple Blog asked the Times for another example of an editor’s note apologizing for nonfactual issues. The Times didn’t answer that question, among others.

To be honest: I don't know how I can trust these companies after this.

Whenever a seemingly egregious firing or cancelling happens there's always some apologist who comes out to tell us that either we're missing the holy Context and that X, Y and Z awful and "problematic" things happened behind the scenes or it's basically just made up, playing on conservative hysteria

But this is not the first time I've seen evidence of them basically working backwards, like any inquisition: person is accused of one thing and then they go over their entire career with a fine-toothed comb until they can find anything to make it stronger (this happened to the journalist accused by Felicia Somnez - who, ironically, used to work for WaPo. There was one accusation, probably not enough to do anything. Then suddenly Somnez - upon hearing the story - decided that a sexual encounter that would appear consensual to any reasonable outsider - was abuse and now it's not "an accusation" it's "multiple accusations").

For a leftist tactic it actually seems Trumpian: you cannot change the egregious act so simply muddy the waters until you run out the clock. The taboo has now been set, no matter what anyone (including the suddenly brave Wemple) thinks.

To be honest: I don't know how I can trust these companies after this.

You should never have trusted these companies well before that. I mean I want to say "Walter Duranty", but there are probably examples way before that to establish the necessity of distrust (and hundreds after that, too). And here we aren't talking about petty squabble about who printed what, we're talking full blown support of genocide, gulags and murder of literally millions of people. Since then, they've been doing it again, and again, and again, and again. Nobody ever should trust them about anything.

person is accused of one thing and then they go over their entire career with a fine-toothed comb until they can find anything to make it stronger

That's literally how cancellation always works. If there's a manual for cancellation, that's what is says.

One of the really nutty things about the Cotton op-ed tantrum was where some of the internal pushback came from at the Times via Slack, Twitter, etc. The op-ed page weighing the concerns of the company’s tech workers was a big departure from the past.

To be honest: I don't know how I can trust these companies after this.

I didn't trust them long before this. They have given me no reason to trust them. The media's credibility has nosedived since 2015 when Trump became a threat , but even before it was bad. (link to my blog There is no reason to trust the mainstream media ) An obvious example being the Iraq War , such as the reporting of non-existent WMDs and chemical labs, which The Times has since apologized for being so wrong. In fairness, the conservative media was equally bad in this regard. Apologizing probably is not good enough, because the damage has already been done and they profited from it. The media just cares about turning hype and controversy into clicks, while innocent parties suffer the consequences of hoaxes and other bad reporting.

person is accused of one thing and then they go over their entire career with a fine-toothed comb until they can find anything to make it stronger (this happened to the journalist accused by Felicia Somnez - who, ironically, used to work for WaPo.

They certainly did this with Trump. Wapo, NTYs had an entire staff designated with going through every piece of minutia of his financial history and every person he associated with.

You cannot trust these people, and not just limited to the media. Anyone who is employed by think tanks or organizations can be dismissed for the smallest or imagined of transgressions like Jim DeMint in 2017 being fired from The Heritage foundation https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-heritage/conservative-u-s-think-tank-heritage-foundation-fires-leader-idUSKBN17Y2IH . David Shor comes to mind as an obvious example of this.

You cannot trust these people, and not just limited to the media.

Yup.

It's not saying that you can't read what they right, or you can't take it into account. But frankly, anybody with any sort of actual position, no matter what that position is, happens to be facing loads of social, cultural and economic pressure in terms of their writing. People want to make it partisan...right? Act like only their opponents can be swayed by "audience capture", as an example. But nope. It all has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. No exceptions.

I didn't trust them long before this. They have given me no reason to trust them. The media's credibility has nosedived since 2015 when Trump became a threat , but even before it was bad.

My own personal... awakening? endarkening?- to American political media was a period in the early 2000s where CNN and such has a partisan distinction in how they reported political scandals on the talking head segment headers and intros. Generally, if a politician scandal was about a Republican, it would front-end 'Republican' or Name(R), where the party was obvious and in the framing. If it was a Democrat, however, the party affiliation was often buried into the body and not on the TV text, so things like 'Congressman in scandal' or 'Senator Name'.

There was also a (less consistent) trend of order of affiliation when bipartisan good or bad news occurred. If it was good news, Democrats and Republicans. Bad news was more often Republicans and Democrats. Democrats offered reforms, Republicans cuts or changes, etc.

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