Society

Cockburn is long enough in the tooth to recall when it was uncontroversial to defend the 'free exchange of information and ideas.’ Not so many moons ago, it seemed obvious to the point of boring to say that 'the way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.’ Not anymore. In 2020, that is edgy stuff, as the group of 150 writers who just wrote a joint letter to Harper’s have proved. Their letter, a defense of free expression, makes the perfectly clear and fair point that ‘as writers, we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.

Actor and comedian Terry Crews is taking heat for criticizing the Black Lives Matter organization over its tendency to hone in on police brutality and ignore far larger issues in the black community. He recently tweeted that he wants to make sure 'black lives matter' doesn't turn into 'black lives matter more'. Predictably, he was met by reactionary shrieks of ‘Uncle Tom’ and ‘coon’.Crews appeared on CNN on Monday night to explain his objections to BLM, and instead received a lecture from Don Lemon about the grievous errors in his line of thinking.

For decades, people worldwide have dreamed about being famous. What would it be like to live like a celebrity? To have even a glimpse of celebrity life? Well, as technology has been democratized, so has fame and the many trappings that come with it. People flock to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube to share their random thoughts, uninformed opinions, dance moves, animal photos, children’s names, and much more. The masses want to feel special. They want to be celebrated. They seek out an R.O.E. — return on ego — which comes with digital likes, comments and a hit of dopamine, instead of an R.O.I. —  return on investment — which allows you to pay your mortgage.

Some of America’s biggest businesses are withholding their ad spending from social media sites, in order to pressure these platforms into restricting or fact-checking posts from conservative users — under the guise of ‘opposing hate online’. On Friday, Unilever, the company behind household brands Lipton, Dove, and Axe, announced it would stop buying ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to encourage those sites to be a ‘trusted and safe digital ecosystem’. Unilever joined several other major brands boycotting social media advertising, such as Coca Cola, Denny’s, Honda, and Starbucks. This corporate pressure campaign is an unfortunate example of businesses bowing to the online mob.

Parler, the right-wing conservative public Slack channel, saw a surge in users last week after Twitter banned popular meme-maker Carpe Donktum. It’s all the rage in social media world, especially among free speech enthusiasts and the political right. It’s managed to not just pick up Twitter exiles like Laura Loomer, Milo Yiannopoulos, Jacob Wohl and Twitter’s most famous Resistance Reply Guys, Ed and Brian Krassenstein, but more mainstream conservatives such as Megyn Kelly or Fox strongman Dan Bongino. It also has attracted politicians — Ted Cruz has endorsed the platform multiple times.

It’s not the best of times to be a statue — or even an icon. Last week Shaun King, a well-known campaigner on racial issues, wrote that icons and statues which depict Jesus as white should be removed. 'They should all come down,' King said. These icons are 'tools of oppression and racist propaganda...all murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down’. King received an enormous amount of abuse and even death threats — including from a group of retired police officers in Long Beach, California. Shaun King is an influential figure.

The internet is not a private place, but news outlets have decided that it's up to them to determine when someone loses their right to anonymity. Quite often, the media gets this calculation wrong and destroys lives in the process. Scott Alexander, the pseudonymous blogger behind 'Slate Star Codex', deleted all of the content on his popular website after the New York Times revealed it was going to publish his true identity. In a long post explaining the debacle, Scott Alexander said that he was talking to a Times reporter last week who was planning on writing an article about his blog. The Times reporter apparently discovered Scott Alexander's identity in the course of reporting and cited a 'New York Times policy' requiring him to publish his full name.

When the Public Broadcasting Act was signed into law in 1967, the stated goal was to provide public financial assistance to producers and broadcasters of educational programming. And so PBS and NPR came into existence. They enjoy public funding from taxpayers today. But should taxpayers continue to fund these enterprises, when they clearly focus less on educating the public, and more on pushing commentary and opinion, and now, even libel?Public media has long been defended. Frequently it’s pointed out that public funding for NPR is only about two percent of their federal operating budget, the same excuse we hear when Planned Parenthood pushes back against calls to defund it. Just as frequently, right-leaning outlets seek to point out a clear bias in publicly-funded coverage.

When I spoke with NBC News earlier this week to talk about the media industry’s role in combating misinformation, I worried that the story might gain undue traction if any footage happened to get posted from my Zoom interview. In it, I was sitting in front of a bookcase full of chainsaw operation manuals and guides to dealing with invasive plant species. (Hello from COVID exile in rural Maine, where every day is Groundhog Day. Literally. A family of groundhogs has taken up residence outside the living room window.)Instead, the story turned out to be the fruits of a partnership between NBC News and a nonprofit called the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

The traditional newsroom is finally coming to terms with its slow metamorphosis into a college campus, taken hostage by younger progressive activist staffers.When Sen. Tom Cotton was granted op-ed space in the New York Times last week, many of the millennial staff were triggered into issuing social media claims that lives were being put in danger, namely those of their African American colleagues.The fallout has been swift and will have a chilling effect on speech and commentary in major newspapers for years to come. James Bennet, the Times’s editorial director, resigned from his position after defending the paper’s decision to run the column.

As civil unrest reverberated throughout virtually every corner of American life, culture, and industry this week, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian announced that he was resigning from the company’s board of directors. He hopes that his seat will be filled by a black person. ‘I’m doing this for myself, for my family, and for my country,’ Ohanian (who is married to tennis legend Serena Williams) wrote on Twitter. ‘I’m saying this as a father who needs to be able to answer his black daughter when she asks, “What did you do?”’Later, Ohanian tweeted, ‘I'm seeing more and more people in tech who are frustrated and have been hitting a wall in their companies leaving!

What has happened to New York media? Just as the New York Times was experiencing its own Inner Mongolia Moment over the now notorious Sen. Tom Cotton ‘Send in the Troops’ op-ed, the Maoists at New York magazine were going after their best columnist, Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan revealed on Twitter yesterday that his column wouldn't be appearing. The reason? His editors are not allowing him to write about the riots. https://twitter.com/sullydish/status/1268564124423933953 Presumably Sullivan’s editors are frightened that he might make the radically bourgeois point that looting and violence are wrong.

Cockburn was thrilled to see the New York Times take an interest in The Spectator last weekend, after the paper published an article about our London office’s ‘incestuous ties’ with the governing elite. Amazing that during a global pandemic and nationwide rioting, the NYT saw fit to dedicate few inches on page A8 to a political adviser on a northern European island. ‘Rogue Trip by Boris Johnson Aide Makes U.K.’s Spectator Part of the Story’, declared the headline. At least that was the revised headline — the first suggested, erroneously, that The Spectator was in ‘turmoil.’ The Spectator may be in many things, but turmoil isn’t one of them. The Gray Lady isn’t known for its fair-mindedness these days. But its coverage of the Speccie was surprisingly reasonable.

Twitter began ‘fact-checking’ President Trump’s tweets for the first time last week, raising questions about the role that social media giants play as gatekeepers of digital information.After the President asserted that mail-in ballots would be ‘substantially fraudulent’, a blue notification was placed at the bottom of the original tweet: ‘Get the facts about mail-in ballots’. The notification links to a fact-checking page with the heading ‘Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud’.