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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   23883 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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You know, I'd think that I'd have gotten accustomed to this sort of thing by now, but the specifics are still galling:

In March 2015, the New York Times announced that it had hired Khan on a short-term contract, and that he would write for them about once a month.[12] The Times wrote he is "a science blogger and a doctoral candidate in genomics and genetics at the University of California, Davis. He writes about evolution, genetics, religion, politics and philosophy."[12] The same day the Times announced hiring Khan, Gawker published an opinion piece written by J.K Trotter, who noted that Khan also wrote blogs for Taki's Magazine, an online publication "founded in 2007 by Taki Theodoracopulos, the flamboyantly racist Greek."[13] As a result of Khan's history of writing for controversial publications, the Times removed him as a regular periodic contributor, but stated they remain "open to consideration of submissions from him" in the op-Ed pages.[14] The Times did not specifically mention the part of Khan's work they found uncomfortable,[15] and he wrote two op-eds for the paper before they ended his contract.[16]

Never mind that the Times should be fine with having a writer on staff that has written something controversial, the stated reason here for him getting dropped isn't even that he wrote something controversial, it is just literally guilty by association. Is he a badthinker? Oh, most definitely by these standards, but his detractors don't even need to figure out why, because it's enough that he wrote blogs for a site founded by a flamboyantly racist Greek.

Guilt by association can obviously be a bad thing, but is sometimes totally understandable, so I visited the actual website in question: Taki's Magazine. I wanted to know how much was simple guilt by association and how much was more direct. About page:

We at Taki’s Magazine take our politics like we take life—lightly. We believe political labels such as conservative and liberal are as outdated as flared trousers and Nazis. Ideology is a false god, a secular religion that seeks vainly to create a paradise on Earth. Our only ideology is to be against the junk culture foisted upon us by the woke, Hollywood, the mainstream media, and promotors of a new world order. Think of us what you will, but read us. Our writers are never boring.

Main featured story: "How Does Your Garden Grow? Upon the Corpses of Millions" by Steven Tucker. Apparently a rant about how liberals are anti-green lawns and want to cast nice lawns as racist and somehow brings Jews into it too.

Trending story titles: "Tucker’s Tome" by Steve Sailer, "A Liberal Dose of Nonsense" by Taki, "The Week That Perished, Jun 9" by Takimag, "Nazis in Moderation" by David Cole, "Fight to the Death for Death!" by David Cole, "How Liberals Pay Off Their Bimbos" by Ann Coulter

Basically it's chock full, actually almost entirely consisting of, supercharged culture war posts with belligerent and sarcastic tones, few filters, and the like. I read Ann Coulter's piece, for example, and it contains a few trivially checked falsehoods which isn't strictly relevant but I found interesting (that the NYT did not cover the John Edwards campaign finance case which is trivially false; pulls 400k out of nowhere instead of 200k, which is bizarre; claims there's unequal treatment when Edwards did in fact go to trial, hung jury and dismissed) and is basically just a forum-style rant. Another post praises Tucker as an upstanding WASP. Another freely throws around terms like "tranny" and "faggy" and wishes pride protesters would get rolled by a steamroller. You can look for yourself.

In essence, this is not "oh you dug up something small the owner said who was owner of a part time gig you did ten years ago" as the framing, which happens sometimes and is bad. Nothing is hidden. Taki himself writes pieces on the front page! It's more like "you chose to participate in a media outlet that front-page peddles antagonistic things that most of our readers hate vehemently" and honestly that seems like a totally fair metric by which to select a writer for your newspaper. In other words, it's not so much guilt by association so much as we think you have a lack of professional judgement, are a reputational risk for us, and we also think your tone might not match our established tone and conduct.

Personally I think that though his own contributions are not as highly-charged, I think it does seem to violate the NYT's own policies, which also don't seem too out of the norm. From their ethics page:

Before accepting a freelance assignment, a staff member should make sure that the tone and content of the publication, website or program are in keeping with the standards of The Times. In general, a staff member should write nothing elsewhere that could not fit comfortably under his or her byline in The Times or that implies The Times’s sponsorship or endorsement.

Though I realize this is guidance for after employment, the hiring pages point to wanting candidates to already be basically following this or a similar ethics code. Essentially, the NYT wants your outside work to basically still look similar to the NYT. His actual articles, ehhh, kind of, though one in context might be interpreted as an HBD dogwhistle. So yeah. I think his case is a bit borderline but also fairly understandable. NYT might deserve pitchforks but not for this I don't think.

Essentially, the NYT wants your outside work to basically still look similar to the NYT.

"NYT rehires Hitler-praising Soliman Hijjy to cover Israel-Hamas war" - Oct 20, 2023

I do hope that's a disproof, but, well....

I think you misunderstand. I'm not saying that the NYT is free of hypocrisy. I'm only saying that the implication that the only thing wrong with Khan, who is otherwise innocent, was he happens to know some disliked people is a bad implication. It's clear from context that he knowingly chose to write for a news outlet that trivially is observed to have very questionable ethics and a very strong viewpoint which is not at all NYT-like, so it was more his direct actions that led to his firing rather than some vague notion of distributed guilt. It wasn't like he wrote for an innocent, normal magazine whose name happens to be on a fancy New Yorker blacklist. Rather, he knowingly appeared right next to some very potent and arguably toxic stuff.

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