Tag Archives: #FreedomOfThePress

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Do they not even see themselves?

I have previously noted how the Associated Press surrendered to political correctness on language, saying that, when referring to race, it will capitalize “black” but leave “white” in lower-case.

After changing its usage rules last month to capitalize the word “Black” when used in the context of race and culture, The Associated Press on Monday said it would not do the same for “white.” The AP said white people in general have much less shared history and culture, and don’t have the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color. Protests following the death of George Floyd, which led to discussions of policing and Confederate symbols, also prompted many news organizations to examine their own practices and staffing. The Associated Press, whose Stylebook is widely influential in the industry, announced June 19 it would make Black uppercase. In some ways, the decision over “white” has been more ticklish. The National Association of Black Journalists and some Black scholars have said white should be capitalized, too. “We agree that white people’s skin color plays into systemic inequalities and injustices, and we want our journalism to robustly explore these problems,” Daniszewski said. “But capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.”

I found the whole thing not only obviously silly, but poor grammar. The use of “white” or “black” is simply shorthand for large racial groups, Caucasian and Negro, which are properly capitalized. Irish or French should be capitalized, as they refer to the inhabitants of countries as well as ethnic groups, while white should not be. Similarly, I would capitalize Kenyan or African, but not black. That the Associated Press would treat the words differently is just not very bright.

And now The Philadelphia Inquirer has provided, through its apparent adoption of the Associated Press stylebook, the silliness of it. In an article entitled “Why the term ‘legal votes’ is racist,” Jeffrey Barg wrote:

News media use the descriptor Black three times as much as white, which normalizes white and others Black. Similarly, legal vote others ballots from areas that aren’t predominantly white.

One would thing that a writer who styles himself The Angry Grammarian would have the capitalization of “Black” without a similar capitalization of “white” almost jump off the page at him as an obvious error. More, it would be discordantly harsh on the perceptions of the reader, especially the white reader whom one would expect Mr Barg to wish to influence.

Then again, one would not expect someone who claims to be a “grammarian” to write sentences such as, “It’s the insinuation of illegality in service of eliminating Black votes”, or “Adding the adjective legal implies the presence of illegal votes, which lawsuits, the Department of Justice, and even super-sleuth Rudy Giuliani have been unable to provide evidence of.”

Then, in the article “Haverford students end strike after getting demands met,” Inquirer writer Susan Snyder wrote, “But concerns about the college’s treatment of Black and brown students had been mounting long before the college leaders sent the email”, and “Raymond, who is white, announced last week that she would step down as the interim chief diversity officer, a position she didn’t intend to keep, and that provost Linda Strong-Leek, who is Black, would step into the position.”

https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_yahoo.gif I suppose that the Associated Press’ and the Inquirer’s stylebook failed to consider whether “brown,” when used as a racial identifier, should be capitalized. One wonders: will “brown” readers of the Inquirer be offended?

In the end, the decision by the Associated Press, one followed by many but not all media organizations, paid homage to political correctness, but wound up exposing the folly of it. In arriving at their decision, the AP might have limited their discussions to what they said in their press statement, but when the stylebook change effects are seen in print, in actual stories meant to inform or persuade the reader, the ridiculousness of it becomes apparent.

Cross-posted on RedState.

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The lunatics are running the asylum The New York Times surrenders to the 'woke'

Those of us who pay attention to the media have been aware of the turmoil in Times Square. Most amusing is the fact that the New York Post has to report on The New York Times.

The Gray Lady’s convulsions continue.

Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson says she’s dismayed by the troubles surrounding the New York Times op-ed section, particularly the departure of its editor James Bennet after he published a commentary by a U.S. senator calling for military force to quell riots.

“I don’t think that James Bennet should have been forced out at The Times,” Abramson told The Post, adding she “felt terrible” about it.

“He and I worked together in the Washington Bureau of the Times and I think he is one of the great journalists of our time. So I was very sad to see him pushed out,” Abramson said.

Abramson, who led the Times newsroom from September 2011 to May 2014, expressed sympathy for Bari Weiss, who shockingly resigned from the op-ed desk this week in a blistering open letter to publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Weiss said she’d been bullied and criticized by a Twitter-obsessed Times culture increasingly intolerant of any ideas outside its progressive, leftist orthodoxy.

There’s more at the original.

We have previously noted the ‘turmoil’ at the Times, and that, just a few days later, editorial page editor James Bennet was fired resigned, and deputy editorial page editor James Dao was demoted reassigned to the newsroom. We noted Bari Weiss Twitter thread that “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.

And, of course, we noted how the Gray Lady retained young reporter Ali Watkins, even though she had been sleeping with one of her sources, though the Times at least tried the fig-leaf cover of reassigning her to a different beat.

Well, there is a rather simple solution. Get rid of your child staffers!

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.

Miss Weiss used the terms “unlawful discrimination” and “hostile work environment” in her letter, something which should have immediately alerted the Times management and its attorneys that there is a huge potential legal problem. Assuming that Miss Weiss’ allegations are true, the Times maintained and paid for an internal chat system which some employees used to harass, on the basis of religion and ethnicity, another employee, to the extent that it forced the employee to resign. How is that not a firing offense?

At the very least, the Times ought to research and discipline all employees who created the hostile work environment, and specify that inter-company communications systems may only be used for professional communications.

But it’s worse than that: The editors of The New York Times quickly surrendered to the woke in its newsroom:

New York Times Says Senator’s Op-Ed Did Not Meet Standards

After a staff uproar, The Times says the editing process was “rushed.” Senator Tom Cotton’s “Send In the Troops” essay is now under review.

By Marc Tracy, Rachel Abrams and Edmund Lee | June 4, 2020

Executives at The New York Times scrambled on Thursday to address the concerns of employees and readers who were angered by the newspaper’s publication of an opinion essay by a United States senator calling for the federal government to send the military to suppress protests against police violence in American cities.

James Bennet, the editor in charge of the opinion section, said in a meeting with staff members late in the day that he had not read the essay before it was published. Shortly afterward, The Times issued a statement saying the essay fell short of the newspaper’s standards.

And here comes the money line:

“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication,” Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, said in a statement. “This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short-term and long-term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”

There you have it: Not only are the editors going to ‘expand’ their fact-checking of other people’s opinions, but they are going to reduce the number of outside opinion pieces they publish.

It was a matter of safety, don’t you know!

The new York Times is the most respected newspaper in the country, with a reputation for seriousness, sobriety, and maturity. But by surrendering to the “woke,”¹ the Times is surrendering to silliness, drunkenness and immaturity. The Gray Lady has repainted herself with the rainbow.²

The only way for the Times to regain its seriousness is to get rid of the unserious people. Just fire them all, and hire sensible reporters and writers to replace them. When your staff are significantly composed of people sympathetic with antifa and the crazies who set up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, they are too far gone and too lacking in sane judgement to be working for you. Let them serve coffee at a Starbucks or something, and hire some of the good reporters out there, some of whom have lost their jobs due to industry downsizing, who have demonstrated some common sense.

A hint for the Times: the #woke and #BlackLivesMatter and #CancelCulture aren’t your customers in the first place! Those people get their news from television and internet click bait.
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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 the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
² – Yes, by using the rainbow, I am mocking the “LGBT+” movement, which I consider to be scientifically unsound, morally wrong and culturally stupid. Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal on earth can distinguish between males and females of their own species, but the LGBTQ+ movement have lost that ability.
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Once Again, The New York Times Opines Against First Amendment Protections . . . For Wrongthinkers

In 1971, President Richard Nixon sought a restraining order to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from printing more of the so-called “Pentagon Papers,” technically the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, a classified history and assessment of American policy and operations in the Vietnam war. The Times and the Post fought the injunctions in court, the Times winning in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). The Times was all about the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press.

Well, that was then, and this is now:

Free Speech Is Killing Us

Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?

By Andrew Marantz¹ | October 4, 2019 | 6:01 AM EDT

There has never been a bright line between word and deed. Yet for years, the founders of Facebook and Twitter and 4chan and Reddit — along with the consumers obsessed with these products, and the investors who stood to profit from them — tried to pretend that the noxious speech prevalent on those platforms wouldn’t metastasize into physical violence. In the early years of this decade, back when people associated social media with Barack Obama or the Arab Spring, Twitter executives referred to their company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Sticks and stones and assault rifles could hurt us, but the internet was surely only a force for progress.

No one believes that anymore. Not after the social-media-fueled campaigns of Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump; not after the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va.; not after the massacres in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a Walmart in a majority-Hispanic part of El Paso. The Christchurch shooter, like so many of his ilk, had spent years on social media trying to advance the cause of white power. But these posts, he eventually decided, were not enough; now it was “time to make a real life effort post.” He murdered 52 people.

That the editors of the Times considered this an important article is demonstrated by the title graphic, a bit more ornate than is typical:

It was spread full sized across the screen, taking up both the width and depth of my fairly large-sized monitor. This was a can’t-not-notice display, something the editors use to grab your attention.

Mr Marantz, the author, continued:

Having spent the past few years embedding as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood.

The question is where this leaves us. Noxious speech is causing tangible harm. Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it. Namely, what should we — the government, private companies or individual citizens — be doing about it?

He has now made the argument of speech causing tangible harm, pretty much the opposite argument made by the Times in 1971, when the government claimed a “clear and present danger” in publishing the Pentagon Papers. Speech, at least the unregulated speech of “trolls and bigots and propagandists,” has caused direct harm, and, of course, he argued that free speech, in the form of “social-media-fueled campaigns,” helped elect right-wing leaders Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, and, of course, the evil Donald Trump. No wonder Mr Marantz is appalled!

The author’s bias is apparent in so many ways. The speech he decries is all from the right side of the political spectrum. Not a word was published against the speech of Antifa, which has led to violence from the far left in this country. There was no criticism of speech by those supporting the socialist regime in Nicaragua or advocating the same socialism which led to totalitarianism and as many as 100 million deaths in the old Soviet Union, in Communist China, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and North Korea. No, he was concerned that a social media campaign helped elect Donald Trump!

Mr Marantz, while exercising his First Amendment rights, clearly does not like the unregulated speech of others:

After one of the 8chan-inspired massacres — I can’t even remember which one, if I’m being honest — I struck up a conversation with a stranger at a coffee shop. We talked about how bewildering it was to be alive at a time when viral ideas can slide so precipitously into terror. Then I wondered what steps should be taken. Immediately, our conversation ran aground. “No steps,” he said. “What exactly do you have in mind? Thought police?” He told me that he was a leftist, but he considered his opinion about free speech to be a matter of settled bipartisan consensus.

I imagined the same conversation, remixed slightly. What if, instead of talking about memes, we’d been talking about guns? What if I’d invoked the ubiquity of combat weapons in civilian life and the absence of background checks, and he’d responded with a shrug? Nothing to be done. Ever heard of the Second Amendment?

So, he believes that it is a problem, is out of character, for a self-identified “leftist” to support freedom of speech? We did learn about his feelings concerning our rights under the Second Amendment; is it any wonder that conservatives don’t trust leftists?

Using “free speech” as a cop-out is just as intellectually dishonest and just as morally bankrupt. For one thing, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies. Even the most creative reader of the Constitution will not find a provision guaranteeing Richard Spencer a Twitter account. But even if you see social media platforms as something more akin to a public utility, not all speech is protected under the First Amendment anyway. Libel, incitement of violence and child pornography are all forms of speech. Yet we censor all of them, and no one calls it the death knell of the Enlightenment.

No, actually. We punish the consequences of such speech, but we do not censor it. We do not have all speech going through government-controlled channels to nip such things in the bud before they ever hit people’s computer screens, but we can punish people for causing harm by speech. But perhaps that government-controlled channel is what he wants:

Congress could fund, for example, a national campaign to promote news literacy, or it could invest heavily in library programming. It could build a robust public media in the mold of the BBC. It could rethink Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — the rule that essentially allows Facebook and YouTube to get away with (glorification of) murder. If Congress wanted to get really ambitious, it could fund a rival to compete with Facebook or Google, the way the Postal Service competes with FedEx and U.P.S.

Facebook and YouTube get away with the glorification of murder? Might as well mention Hollywood, and the body count racked up by Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s Terminator series, Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo movies and, let’s be honest, every action-adventure movie ever made. Heck, even the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movies were filled with death and destruction, albeit that it was mostly orcs and goblins who bit the dust therein.

But I digress. Mr Marantz apparently sees some great good in a government-controlled social media network, forgetting, perhaps, the old Russian saying, В Правде нет новостей, и в Известиях нет правды.² Government organs of information are controlled by the government, and if the BBC is mostly innocuous, it isn’t completely. Given how the British have criminalized certain speech, something happening in the United States as well, perhaps Mr Marantz might remember just who is President. Perhaps had such existed when Barack Obama was President, the government could have censored all of the information about Hillary Clinton and gotten her elected President, which would have made Mr Marantz happier, but Donald Trump is President now, and might be for the next 5¼ years. I’m guessing that he wouldn’t like an official social media channel controlled by conservatives.

Free speech is a bedrock value in this country. But it isn’t the only one. Like all values, it must be held in tension with others, such as equality, safety and robust democratic participation. Speech should be protected, all things being equal. But what about speech that’s designed to drive a woman out of her workplace or to bully a teenager into suicide or to drive a democracy toward totalitarianism? Navigating these trade-offs is thorny, as trade-offs among core principles always are. But that doesn’t mean we can avoid navigating them at all.

Those first two examples already have legal problems, in that they aren’t subject to prior censorship, but the speakers can be held liable for illegal actions.

The third, “drive a democracy toward totalitarianism?” That is what bothers Mr Marantz, given that he seems to believe that was what happened in 2016. I could argue that it is the policies enunciated by the various Democratic candidates, which include confiscation of some firearms, and restrictions on personal actions and vehicles with the “Green New Deal” proposals; why shouldn’t those be censored?

Mr Marantz suggested that it needn’t be the government, that private companies could “ban inflammatory accounts, take down graphic videos, even rewrite their terms of service.” That’s something they already do, far too much, with a decided tendency to censor conservatives much more than the left. Twitter bans “deadnaming” and “misgendering”, not allowing any discussion of whether the ‘transgendered’ really are the sex they claim to be rather than their biological sex — something The New York Times gave Chad Malloy space to claim actually promotes freedom of speech³ — and Mr Marantz himself noted, with some apparent glee, that two far-right speakers, Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, “have been permanently banned from all major (social media) platforms.”

The notion of banning “egregious actors” on the left?  That got no support, or even mention, by Mr Marantz.

Mr Marantz’s totalitarian impulses were evident in his concluding paragraph:

In one of our conversations, (John A. Powell, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley) compared harmful speech to carbon pollution: People are allowed to drive cars. But the government can regulate greenhouse emissions, the private sector can transition to renewable energy sources, civic groups can promote public transportation and cities can build sea walls to prepare for rising ocean levels. We could choose to reduce all of that to a simple dictate: Everyone should be allowed to drive a car, and that’s that. But doing so wouldn’t stop the waters from rising around us.

The philosophy of the left is the impulse to control, to control everybody. It’s supposedly all for our own good, of course, so we couldn’t possibly object to that.

The New York Times has a long and distinguished record of being champions for First Amendment protections and freedoms . . . for itself. For other people? Not so much. The editors of the Times appear to believe in the freedom of speech for those who rightthink, but for those who commit the thoughtcrime of wrongthink, well, they don’t really deserve to be able to speak, do they? After all, it’s harmful to our civil society!
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¹ – Andrew Marantz (@AndrewMarantz) is a staff writer for The New Yorker. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.”
² – There is no news in Pravda, and no truth in Izvestia.
³ – Chad Malloy is a male claiming that he is female, calling himself “Parker” Malloy.
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