Op-Ed Sections, Threat or Menace?

I have a little experience sitting in these op-ed board meetings. You bring up an idea that’s not endorsed by the rest of the borderline upper-class white journalists on the board, and you’re laughed out of the room. It’s a joke how some of these places claim to be behind the working class, when the closest any of the ed board members got to “working class” was slumming it and buying Rolling Rock or IC one night while they were partying in college. I have no time for these types.

 

We are exercising our right to speak around the gatekeepers that included old, white, male, privileged, powerful, closed newspapers and editorial boards and they resent it. ​

I helped swing that gate wide open in the years leading up to my ouster by giving a lot of marginalized Trentonians unfettered (within reason) access to the nerve center.

It's the perspective and nuance that often gets overlooked but hey, whattaya gonna do.

To the larger point, we've forgotten how to talk to each other and there are non-gatekeeper reasons for that.

 

It always made me laugh when newspapers would argue on behalf of workers in an editorial and treat their own workforce like crud.

 

Criticism is protected speech, too.

Suggesting resignation to someone who doesn't understand the most fundamental part of their job seems a particularly mild form of criticism.

 

Regarding public civility, the most scathing, salacious, vicious lies and slanders long precede the founding of the Republic. And there's absolutely nothing new about combative, incendiary, libelous opinions in the newspaper.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch...display/57de997b-0356-4acd-8334-4701fff76cb8/

Callender had been forced to flee England after printed attacks on George III. He would wreak in America what Jefferson biographer Fawn M. Brodie called "more mischief than any newspaper man of his age."

Callender initially had been in the camp of Jefferson and what was then known as the Republican party. In 1797, Callender exposed an adulterous affair involving Alexander Hamilton, leader of the opposition Federalist party. Two years later, Callender assailed Federalist President John Adams as a "hideous hermaphroditical character."

But in 1801, after being fined and jailed by the Federalists and hailed as a "martyr" by Republicans, Callender turned his sights on newly elected President Jefferson.

 

While I do agree that toxic rhetoric/actual verbal assaults and threats have always been a part of the landscape in America - it should be pointed out that the literacy rate in the US at the time was 70 percent and the number of people made aware of the scurrilous charges were probably less than 15 percent or so (though they made up the "elite" politically connected and wealthy who read newspapers. Also, a lot of this language would only be found decades later in private correspondence only discovered and published decades later by historians.
Now - it's on 24-7 on our radios and tvs and the internet.

 

Technology changes. Human nature doesn't.*

That the democratization of speech across social media sounds a lot like an angry Tower of Babel should surprise no one.

Nor should it result in a series of false equivalencies promulgated by the Editorial Board of the New York Times.


* Socrates - The Athenian ideal of free speech

What can safely be said is this: the trial of Socrates is the only case in which we can be certain that an Athenian was legally prosecuted not for an overt act that directly harmed the public or some individual—such as treason, corruption, or slander—but for alleged harm indirectly caused by the expression and teaching of ideas.

 

interesting thread

 

I'd argue that even giving credence to people arguing that "cancel culture" is a problem - is an outgrowth of cable news doing the "both sides" thing giving credibility to the most inane, flawed arguments. When you are a "political strategist" and some show booker from a cable news show calls seeing if you are available for a segment, most are a "yes" before they even know what the topic is, or which side they have to argue.

 

I read this in a way I know it's not intended ... as a professional which-sider (judges accept what-abouter) ... could be the foundation for a TV/movie/SNL character.

 

This is the threat to free speech. (And the 1st Amendment.)

Not Bari Weiss's hurt feelings.