I have previously written about the fact that the credentialed media rarely actually lie to us, but tend to conceal facts that might not fit in well with Teh Narrative. Did Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jonathan Zimmerman not know about Stan Wischnowski, or simply forget, or was he told not to mention him?

What universities can learn from former New York Times opinion editor James Bennet

There is a core lesson for higher education in the journalist’s recent essay: The best route to progress is a full and free dialogue — even when it hurts.

by Jonathan Zimmerman | Wednesday, December 27, 2023 | 8:08 AM EST

Earlier this month, I read the single sharpest criticism of the American university I’ve encountered in many years. And it wasn’t even about the American university.

It’s an essay that appeared in the Economist by former New York Times opinion editor James Bennet, who was forced out in 2020 after he published an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) calling for the use of the military against violent protesters. Bennet ran the op-ed not because he agreed with it (he didn’t) but because he believed the newspaper had a duty to provoke debate, and — most of all — because he thought his readers could come to reasoned conclusions about it.

That’s the foundation of the small-l liberal creed: Since none of us has a monopoly on truth, we need to let everyone determine it on their own. But in the era of Donald Trump, who thinks he’s right about everything, journalists started to imitate him. They knew the truth, especially about Trump, and their job was to make sure other people knew it, as well.

We have previously noted a couple of Dr Zimmerman’s columns, columns in which he championed freedom of speech and of the press, as I most certainly do, but was also upset that some people were being held accountable for the content of their speech, namely people losing jobs for anti-Semitic postings on Twitter, and deep-pockets donors closing their checkbooks to universities that allowed nearly unchecked anti-Semitism on campus.

The “Buildings Matter, Too” headline was published June 2, 2020 on page A12 of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Click to enlarge.

In his current column, he uses another example to lead in to his point, but it certainly pegs the irony meter. In mentioning what happened to James Bennet, 95 miles northeast of the City of Brotherly Love, he somehow neglected to note what happened to Stan Wischnowski of The Philadelphia Inquirer, when he wrote a catchy headline, and was fired resigned as senior vice-president and executive editor of the newspaper, following a newsroom protest after the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” was used in an article on the loss of historic architecture in the riots over the unfortunate death-during-arrest of the fentanyl-and-methamphetamine-addled, previously convicted felon George Floyd in Minneapolis. Appearing on June 2, 2020, as the riots were really taking off, the “Buildings Matter, Too” headline was catchy, and designed to get people to actually read the article, something that its replacement headline, “Damaging buildings disproportionately hurts the people protesters are trying to uplift: ‘People over property’ is a great as a rhetorical slogan. But as a practical matter, the destruction of downtown buildings in Philadelphia – and in Minneapolis, in Los Angeles and in a dozen other American cities – could be devastating for the future of cities” certainly doesn’t do.

The obvious question is: why would the columnist bring up a story that non-media news junkies probably didn’t know concerning the Times, when the readers of the newspaper for which he writes would have been more likely to remember what happened in Philly? Yehoshua ben Yosef addressed this issue, almost 2,000 years ago:

“And why seest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye; and seest not the beam that is in thy own eye? How sayest thou to thy brother: Let me cast the mote out of thy eye; and behold a beam is in thy own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam in thy own eye, and then shalt thou see to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” (Matthew 7:3-5)

Back to Dr Zimmerman:

And if you demur (from the liberal agenda championed in the newsroom), you are a bigot. Ditto for anyone who provides a “platform” — that is, airtime — to the haters, which places their targets in danger.

That’s what Bennet was told when he ran the op-ed by Cotton. The next day, the Times’ writers’ union declared that Cotton’s op-ed was “a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent.”

In the heat of the moment, Bennet apologized for the “pain” he had caused them. But now he regrets that statement, as he wrote in the Economist. “Opinion journalism that never causes pain is not journalism,” Bennet explained. “It can’t hope to move society forward.”

Well, we’re getting plenty of opinion journalism these days, but I have to ask: just how much tolerance, in a company with the hardest left of the leftists like Will Bunch, and the #woke^[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading who forced Mr Wischnowski out at the Inky still in place, would there be for an OpEd submission which stated that Israel needed to keep on fighting, to utterly destroy Hamas in Gaza, regardless of the amount of damage to the area and death of the ‘civilian’ population?

Then there was Bari Weiss, then of The New York Times, who, after Mr Bennet was fired resigned, and deputy editorial page editor James Dao was demoted reassigned to the newsroom over the same story, tweeted “The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same.” A few days later, Miss Weiss was gone, too.

I would note here that Miss Weiss made no mention at all of any conservatives at the Times, but that’s no surprise.

Miss Weiss noted, in her resignation letter, that:

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

Dr Zimmerman wrote his column in defense of freedom of speech on college campuses, but the more important audience ought to be the credentialed media. He skipped over the Inky’s own history, but perhaps, just perhaps some of his colleagues will remember what happened locally.

Mr Wischnowski landed on his feet, and is now Executive Editor and Vice President at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, so he’s probably too busy to read the Inquirer these days. But if he does happen to catch Dr Zimmerman’s column, he’d probably say something along the lines of, ‘It figures,’ that the Inky would have hidden its own history.