Ten years ago, my mother came from Cuba to visit me in New York. One day, she started describing the awful situation in Havana. Without noticing it, she lowered her voice to a whisper while criticizing the Cuban government. After living for half a century under a totalitarian regime, she was used to the lack of freedom that still prevails in Cuba.
I wonder too if people working at the New York Times are starting to whisper when expressing ideas not consistent with the “party line.” Recently, James Bennet, the editorial page editor, ‘resigned’ days after the newspaper’s opinion section published an Op-Ed by a United States senator calling for a military response to civic unrest in American cities.
The cause of his resignation, according to A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher, was that the publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s column had shown “a significant breakdown in our editing processes.”
The column contained no major factual errors and reflected the opinion of the majority of Americans according to a survey taken during that time. You can think Cotton was trying to sell a very counterproductive plan. You can think that using the military to control civil unrest at this point would be a disaster. But the message The Times leadership sent was that the idea wasn’t up for discussion and they would fire anybody that thought otherwise.
The decision to fire Bennet came after more than 800 Times staff members signed a letter protesting the publication of the piece. It was a case of “censorship from below.”
Katie Kingsbury, Bennet’s interim replacement, told staff shortly after her appointment:
“Anyone who sees any piece of Opinion journalism, headlines, social posts, photos — you name it — that gives you the slightest pause, please call or text me immediately.”
What kind of editorial page will they have based on those criteria?
We got a taste of the future last Sunday when The Times ran an Op-Ed piece by Mariame Kaba with the title “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.”
Short of abolishing the police in the United States, the author wrote that there’s “an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equal fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people.”
Commenting on Senator Cotton’s column, several Times reporters retweeted that “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.”
Any reasonable person would think that abolishing the police — or half of them — will put many lives in danger. So far, no Times staffers have expressed any misgivings about Kana’s column. I wonder if they don’t feel as threatened by the column or if they are just afraid to say anything that contradicts the party line. Is it possible that some of them are whispering about it like my mother did when she was criticizing the Castro regime?
This is not happening just at The Times. Two weeks ago, Stan Wischnowski, the top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, resigned after the newspaper published a headline lamenting damage to businesses amid protests against police brutality. The headline — “Buildings Matter, Too” — was certainly tone-deaf but it is hard to believe that the cause is just editorial malfeasance instead of offending the predominant line of thought.
Western civilization started 2,500 years ago when Greek philosophers decided that dialogue was the way to find the truth. That decision was based on the idea that none of us is the absolute owner of it. We can see today a growing inclination to think the best way to deal with our problems is to silence any idea the prevalent ideology deems unacceptable.
I don’t think this will be the end of freedom and I think our better angels will prevail, but in this horrible spring, these episodes are another cause for sadness and concern.
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June 18, 2020 at 11:50PM
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The End of Freedom? - The Tablet Catholic Newspaper
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