During the BLM race riots, Senator Tom Cotton placed an op-ed in the New York Times calling for the use of military force to stop the rioters. The resulting outrage from the woke staffers led to the purge of assorted editorial staff people, including James Bennett, the editorial page editor. Since then, the editorial section has become ever more tediously woke.
Bennett recently revisited his firing. The Washington Post’ Erik Wemple reported on it and made a stunning admission.
It’s also long past time to ask why more people who claim to uphold journalism and free expression — including, um, the Erik Wemple Blog — didn’t speak out then in Bennet’s defense.
It’s because we were afraid to.
It’s easy to sneer, but it really is a stunning admission by a media guy in a top paper. We’ve seen all sorts of backpedaling, unspoken revisions, narratives being shifted on the deck.
I don’t recall a major media figure coming out and saying that he was afraid to speak out.
Certainly not one that hasn’t been fired yet.
In this case, admitting cowardice is a kind of courage. It reminds me of some of the post-Soviet reckonings that took place in Eastern Europe and more briefly in Russia. Or some of the reckonings with the widespread Nazi collaboration in France and the resistance posturing.
Wemple is saying that he knew it was wrong, but he was afraid.
Our criticism of the Twitter outburst comes 875 days too late. Although the hollowness of the internal uproar against Bennet was immediately apparent, we responded with an evenhanded critique of the Times’s flip-flop, not the unapologetic defense of journalism that the situation required. Our posture was one of cowardice and midcareer risk management.
During his original take, Wemple leaned heavily on including angry tweets, including from the 1619 lynch mob leader herself. Now he offers the rare commentary on the routine “death threats” and “threats to safety” routine that have long since become part of media theater.
“The Twitter chain claiming “danger” to Times staffers suffered from the same journalistic failings leveled at the op-ed. It was an exercise in manipulative hyperbole brilliantly calibrated for immediate impact.”
And not just in that instance.
Does this fix anything? No. Wemple admits that. Next time around he may act just the same way. But the admission, small as it is, allows people to discuss and tell the truth about what’s going on. It will reach the sorts of people who will never see the things that we write. It will affirm the private secret knowledge that what is going on is totalitarian and abusive.
That it’s not just in their heads.
Sometimes admitting cowardice can be an act of courage. However slight. Because it makes it possible to talk about what otherwise cannot be discussed.
Profiles in Cowardice
Perfect AA, lol, and and insightful as usual from Daniel. I’ve thought similar, at least they admitted it, too late to matter, of course, and only to maintain some shred of credibility, but it’s another crack in the facade.
Outrage over the Cotton editorial, while blm and antifa were burning, looting, and murdering, yet they cheered the launching of flash bang grenades into a crowd that hadn’t really done anything at that point, and the shooting of unarmed protestor Veteran Ashly Babbitt.
“In this case, admitting cowardice is a kind of courage.”
Courage isn’t ex post facto.
On the left, you gotta follow the lockstep diktats and agendas of “your kind” else they kick you out of the club.
The club in question suggests the point of Groucho Marx resigning from a club because it accepted him as a member. That to him disqualified it. The club in in question accepts conformity, which members may volunteer. Otherwise, its members are coerced and not themselves. If they can accept not being themselves, they belong.
If they’re scared their cowardice has earned them a right to be.
Fear is how you know you’re alive.
Recently Levin is telling us in so many words not to fear because history is on our side, I have learned much from Levin but the one thing I never learned was that history chose sides.
That’s a good one, Marxists are always talking about being on the right side of history.
True. G0d might be on our side, though it is always preferable that we be on His. History, as you say, does not pick sides. It just happens and does not appear to have any will of its own.
And this goes back to the moribund conservative movement which thinks what’s asked of it is less than what was asked of its forefathers. Just vote GOP.
Very strange insult.
Constantly whining about what the Left is doing to it but far too civil to ever back a real initiative against it except for a loudmouth that accomplishes nothing.
Oh, the culture will save us. Oh, the people will save us. Oh, the backlash will save us. Oh, the great leader will save us. Oh, common sense will save us. Oh, the Red Wave will save us. Anything besides ourselves will save us.
Example: when the Spanish Armada invaded England, it was the English fleet that saved England. And before that, the new ship designs credited to John Hawkins.
The weather helped as it did in the kamikaze that blew the Mongol naval forces off the coast of Japan so that they could not invade. It’s true that the English ships were superior, but their use of fire ships (old hulks set on fire and turned toward Spanish ships) and the fact that the lumbering, deep-sea Spanish galleons could not navigate a shallow, storm-tossed sea were factors. Whenever you read of a surprising victory (like Agincourt, for a dramatic example) think of Sun Tzu’s principle of Heaven and Earth — weather and terrain.