When journalists stop believing in debate: https://theweek.com/articles/918140/when-journalists-stop-believing-debate excerpt: It is now quite common among journalists to think of opinions not as arguments to be advanced, engaged with, and potentially refuted, but as a kind of viral propaganda with the power to convert readers to new holistic outlooks, much like the spread of a religious fervor during a revival. . . . But endorsing this classically liberal process of political disputation in public requires that one holds certain liberal convictions — in the capacity of reason to determine right from wrong and of one's own side to prevail through the give and take of argument. It also requires a certain degree of modesty about the likelihood of any comprehensive moral and political view triumphing so decisively that competing views vanish or shrink to the furthest margins of a free society. What we increasingly see among journalists today is the collapse of these core liberal convictions. The consequences for our civic life are not likely to be salutary.
If this was an unabashedly pro-Antifa piece that NYT published, I wonder how different the reaction would be on the Right. I happen to agree with the ideal that editorial pages should try to represent a variety of views, even very unpopular ones, and allow the public to use their own minds and debate their merit. Now, how many of these conservative websites touting free speech live up to that ideal and publish radical left pieces?
NY Times isn't the federal government. They can't surpress speech. They can just believe as a private company that they don't want to express the violent escalating rhetoric that Tom Cotton published.
Lol don't so this concern trolling bullshit. NYtimes is morally and legally justified to not endorse content that escalates national tensions. Tom Cotton's rhetoric is what escalates not de-escalates tension.
@Os Trigonum would find some Federalist article about how immoral it is for journalists to endorse terror groups.
but their reasoning that it shouldn't be published isn't because of "violent escalating" but because it doesn't meet their standard AFAIK, their standard didn't change. It's that they didn't check this time (and i guess many other times) if it's met their standard. The articles and immediate push by Right Winger thought of suppression and journalist "stop believing" in debate conveniently forgot that newspaper has standard and until they show that standard has actually changed, nothing has really changed. But it's a good story to push a narrative so of course.
This is a very important point. The NYT is a private business and this is an Op/Ed. I would think Conservatives would be more considerate of what opinions a private business should publish. That said I have no problems with NYT publishing Cotton's Op/Ed. I don't agree with it and think it is Constitutionally unsound. I haven't checked the Times today but hope they publish an opposing piece(s) to his Op/Ed rather than pull his down.
Your approach might quell down some of the concern trolling I guess so ya that would have been a better approach.
And here is the NYT response. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/opinion/tom-cotton-op-ed-new-york-times.html Tom Cotton’s Fascist Op-Ed How should opinion pages respond to the right’s authoritarian turn? By Michelle Goldberg Opinion Columnist Before Donald Trump became president, most newspaper op-ed pages sought to present a spectrum of politically significant opinion and argument, which they could largely do while walling off extremist propaganda and incitement. The Trump presidency has undermined that model, because there’s generally no way to defend the administration without being either bigoted or dishonest. Opinion sections, eager to maintain ideological diversity without publishing lies or stuff that belongs in Breitbart, have therefore filled up with anti-Trump conservatives. As a result, newspapers like this one have often been criticized for elevating an intellectual clique that has little mass base or political influence. So I can sort of appreciate my bosses’ decision on Wednesday to run Senator Tom Cotton’s screed arguing that the military should be sent to American cities to “restore order,” which has caused a rebellion inside The New York Times. The Times Opinion section wants to include the views of people who support Trump, and the very qualities that make Cotton’s Op-Ed revolting — his strongman pretensions, his sneering apocalypticism — make him an important figure in Trump’s Republican Party. (He might someday come to lead it.) Readers should grasp what people like Cotton are arguing, not because it’s worth taking seriously but because it is being taken seriously, particularly by our mad and decomposing president. Cotton has made an even more extreme version of the case for military occupation of American cities on Twitter, but most Americans aren’t on Twitter. The paper could convey his views by reporting on them, but for the Opinion section, letting him express them himself is more direct. In the past, The Times’s Op-Ed page has offered space to enemies of the United States, including President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Sirajuddin Haqqani, deputy leader of the Taliban, arguing that its readers are served by access to their perspectives. “Haqqani is the second in command of the Taliban at a time when its negotiators are hammering out an agreement with American officials in Doha that could result in American troops leaving Afghanistan. That makes his perspective relevant at this particular moment,” a Times spokeswoman argued in response to outrage over his Op-Ed in February. A similar case could be made for hearing from Cotton, an enemy of liberal democracy who has the president’s ear. He is relevant, whether we like it or not. (Soon after his piece was published, Trump retweeted it.) Thus when I first saw the Cotton Op-Ed I wasn’t as horrified as perhaps I should have been; I figured he’d helpfully revealed himself as a dangerous authoritarian. But as I’ve seen my colleagues’ anguished reaction, I’ve started to doubt my debating-club approach to the question of when to air proto-fascist opinions. Putin and Haqqani, after all, weren’t given space in this newspaper to advocate attacks on Americans during moments of national extremis. Cotton, by contrast, is calling for what would almost certainly amount to massive violence against his fellow citizens: an “overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.” In a racist inversion, he equates his fantasy of soldiers putting down an uprising triggered by police brutality against black people with previous presidents using the military to enforce desegregation. His argument is frequently slippery and dishonest. The claim that police officers “bore the brunt of the violence” is hard to square with countless videos of police instigation. (So far, more civilians than police officers have been reported killed during the uprising.) Cotton notes that President George H.W. Bush sent federal troops into Los Angeles in 1992 to quell the riots that broke out after the police who beat Rodney King were acquitted. But he doesn’t tell readers that Bush did so at the invitation of California’s governor. That’s very different from the federal government overriding local elected authorities and occupying their states and cities, which seems to be what Cotton is proposing. It’s an idea that appalls many military leaders. As James Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary, made clear in his scathing condemnation of the president: “We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace’ that our uniformed military is called upon to ‘dominate.’ At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors.” Many people at The Times, including several in the Opinion department, reacted to the Cotton Op-Ed by tweeting, “Running this puts all black people in danger, including @nytimes staff members.” That took courage. The culture at The Times frowns on intramural criticism. The journalism industry is in free-fall, and working here often feels like being on the last boat out of a burning harbor. It is not a small thing to risk one’s seat on it. The danger my colleagues have tweeted about is real. All across America in the last week, peaceful protesters and journalists have been brutalized by police officers in the name of law and order. Anyone who has ever seen a military occupation up close should know how much uglier it can get. That includes Cotton, who on Twitter called for “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.” As David French, a conservative writer who is, like Cotton, a veteran of the war in Iraq, pointed out, “no quarter” orders — which mean showing the enemy no mercy, even if they try to surrender — are a war crime. So the value of airing Cotton’s argument has to be weighed against the message The Times sends, in this incendiary moment, by including it within the bounds of legitimate debate. Everyone agrees that The Times draws those boundaries. The question is where. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe The Times would have published a defense of family separation by former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during the height of that atrocity, or a piece by the senior Trump aide Stephen Miller about the necessity of curbing nonwhite immigration. In both cases, I’m pretty sure the liberal inclination to hear all sides would have smacked up against sheer moral abhorrence. It’s important to understand what the people around the president are thinking. But if they’re honest about what they’re thinking, it’s usually too disgusting to engage with. This creates a crisis for traditional understandings of how the so-called marketplace of ideas functions. It’s a subsidiary of the crisis that has the country on fire.
