Category: freedom of the press

Discuss: Mark Zuckerberg and free speech (or Trump)

January 10, 2025 • 9:30 am

As the article by Matt Taibbi below notes, Mark Zuckerberg is moving his Meta platform–notably Facebook and Instagram–away from censorship and more towards free speech (click the link to read):

The video in this post has vanished from YouTube, but I found it on Facebook and put it below.  Do watch it.

Taibbi quotes a bit of it:

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a video promising a shift toward free speech:

The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government, and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years, when even the US government has pushed for censorship by going after us and other American companies.

The NYT adds a bit more:

In his message, Mr. Zuckerberg announced a series of steps he planned to take to grapple with false and misleading information on Facebook, such as working with fact-checkers.

“The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously,” he wrote in a personal Facebook post. “There are many respected fact checking organizations,” he added, “and, while we have reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more.”

Eight years later, Mr. Zuckerberg is no longer apologizing. On Tuesday, he announced that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, was ending its fact-checking program and getting back to its roots around free expression. The fact-checking system had led to “too much censorship,” he said.

 

Now there is still an opportunity for counterspeech; fact-checkers will be replaced with “Community Notes,” similar to those used on X. There will be a policy to reduce “mistakes”, tackling “illegal and high severity violations” that are reported by others. People, rather than filters, will look for these violations and remove the ones deemed “not free speech.”

As I’ve said before, I would prefer large social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter (now X) to adhere as strongly as possible to the First Amendment of the Constitution. That Amendment, of course, has carve-outs: truly prohibited speech. This includes defamation, harassment, false advertising, child pornography, obscenity, and speech liable to incite predictable and lawless violence.

So long as Facebook and X adhere to this policy, I think it’s a step in the right direction. The “Community Notes” will allow the counter-speech that advocates of free speech see as essential to promote the clash of ideas that, according to John Stuart Mill, will promote the emergence of truth. So I think this is a good step, regardless of what you think of Zuckerberg (or Elon Musk, who is running X this way).

I will be at meetings all day today, so I ask readers to discuss this new policy of Zuckerberg (and Musk).  Yes, I know people say that Musk and Zuckerberg are pandering to Trump,  and perhaps that is one motivation, but I do not want readers to concentrate on the people involved, but on the speech policy itself.

Please discuss below.  Do you think places like Facebook and X should prohibit speech that is actually allowed by the First Amendment? If so, which speech?

Or you can discuss Trump’s sentencing as a felon:

After months of delay, President-elect Donald J. Trump on Friday became the first American president to be criminally sentenced.

He avoided jail or any other substantive punishment, but the proceeding carried symbolic importance: It formalized Mr. Trump’s status as a felon, making him the first to carry that dubious designation into the presidency.

“Never before has this court been presented with such a unique and remarkable set of circumstances,” said the judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan. “This has been truly an extraordinary case.”

The judge then imposed a so-called unconditional discharge of Mr. Trump’s sentence, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation. Explaining the leniency, Justice Merchan acknowledged Mr. Trump’s inauguration 10 days hence.

“Donald Trump the ordinary citizen, Donald Trump the criminal defendant” would not be entitled to the protections of the presidency, Justice Merchan asserted, explaining that only the office shields him from the verdict’s gravity.

The judge then wished Mr. Trump “godspeed” and departed the bench.

Harvard Committee apes the University of Chicago, recommends institutional neutrality

May 29, 2024 • 10:15 am

One of the reasons Claudine Gay didn’t come off so well in the Congressional hearings was that Harvard had no concrete policy on free speech, and thus applied it unevenly, in an almost hypocritical fashion.  Further, it was unclear what the university’s own stand was on issues like genocide.  Were they officially against it, or did calls for genocide of the Jews constitute free speech? In this case Gay answered using Constitutional principles, and her answer, “it depends,” was technically correct.

But the whole mess, including the involvement of MIT and Penn, could have been avoided had these universities adopted two policies that we have at the University of Chicago: the Principles of Free Expression (in effect, First-Amendment-like freedom of speech), and institutional neutrality, as embodied in our Kalven Report. This report mandates that, with very few exceptions, neither the University itself nor its units, including departments and centers, can make official pronouncements on moral, political, or ideological issues. (The exceptions include rare issues that affect the very working of the University itself.)

Indeed, in his Boston Globe article, “A five-point plan to save Harvard from itself,” Steve Pinker’s first two points were free speech and institutional neutrality:

Universities should adopt a clear and conspicuous policy on academic freedom. It might start with the First Amendment, which binds public universities and which has been refined over the decades with carefully justified exceptions.

and

. . . university pronouncements are an invitation to rancor and distraction. Inevitably there will be constituencies who feel a statement is too strong, too weak, too late, or wrongheaded. The resulting apologies and backtracking compromise the reputation of the university and interfere with the task of administering it. For this reason a stated policy of institutional neutrality would be a godsend to university administrators. Such a policy would still allow them to comment on issues that directly affect university business, just like any institution.

I’m not sure what Harvard is doing about its free-speech policy, but I was glad to hear that an eight-person committee has recommended that the school adopt a policy of institutional neutrality. They’ve confected a provisional policy that you can read by clicking on the link below. It hasn’t been formally adopted yet, but some version surely will be.

This policy is an obvious attempt to copy Chicago’s Kalven report, and two of its creators publicized the Harvard policy in a NYT op-ed, an archived version of which you can read by clicking on the archived headline below.

The problem with the Harvard policy lies not in its specifics above, but how it appears to be interpreted by the creators/op-ed writers, who seem to misunderstand the principle of institutional neutrality, try to diss our Kalven Report (perhaps to say, “Hey, Harvard has its own report, and a better one”), and then suggest that Harvard’s policy can in some cases be applied in a non-neutral way. In other words, what we get is a decent policy whose authors (at least two of them) have described for the public as a dog’s breakfast. This does not bode well for any future “institutional neutrality” of Harvard.

Click below to read the archived op-ed, which might have been called of “Harvard’s Very Own Kalven Report.”

Now I’m a big fan of universities adopting institutional neutrality. It would, as Pinker pointed out, save them a lot of trouble and buttress free speech as well. And the official report at the top is pretty good at that. It’s the NYT article, which might reflect how the report is interpreted in action, that seems problematic.

One of the big problems of the NYT piece is its claim that Chicago’s Kalven report wasn’t really institutionally neutral because it embodies the values of a university, and supporting those values is not “institutional neutrality.” I quote from Feldman and Simmons (their words are indented):

This policy might remind some readers of the Kalven Report, a prominent statement of the value of academic “institutional neutrality” issued in 1967 by a University of Chicago committee chaired by the First Amendment scholar Harry Kalven Jr. But while our policy has some important things in common with the Kalven Report, which insisted that the university remain silently neutral on political and social issues, ours rests on different principles and has some different implications.

The principle behind our policy isn’t neutrality. Rather, our policy commits the university to an important set of values that drive the intellectual pursuit of truth: open inquiry, reasoned debate, divergent viewpoints and expertise. An institution committed to these values isn’t neutral, and shouldn’t be. It has to fight for its values, particularly when they are under attack, as they are now. Speaking publicly is one of the tools a university can use in that fight.

This is arrant misinterpretation of the Kalven Report, which of course is not value free; it’s based on assuming the overweening value of free speech and open discussion in a university’s search for truth. Indeed, it’s hard to conceive of a university that isn’t based on those values. Greg Mayer, in an email to me, expressed this faulty comparison very well when writing me about a new interview with Feldman and Simmons in the Harvard Gazette:

[Feldman and Simmons] strain mightily, and unsuccessfully in my opinion, to distinguish what they propose from the Kalven report. Kalven never said the university has no values, just that those values are seldom relevant to current affairs or politics, and thus current affairs or politics will seldom be fit matters for the university to take a stand. There might be disagreement about exactly when the university’s values are implicated, but Kalven does not advocate a value-free university. Far from it, the ability to have open debate without an institutional thumb on the scale, as advocated by Kalven, is one of the most central values of the university.

The second problem is that Feldman and Simmons’s op-ed raises several issues that do seem political, and at best tangentially relevant to the mission of a university, be it Harvard or Chicago. This makes me worry that “Harvard’s Kalven” will be applied erratically.  Here are a couple:

In brief, the report says that university leaders can and should speak out publicly to promote and protect the core function of the university, which is to create an environment suitable for pursuing truth through research, scholarship and teaching. If, for example, Donald Trump presses forward with his announced plan to take “billions and billions of dollars” from large university endowments to create an “American Academy” — a free, online school that would provide an “alternative” to current institutions — Harvard’s leadership can and should express its objections to this terrible idea.

This plan, almost certain not to be enacted, seems just a way to diss Trump. I doubt he can take billions of dollars from University endowments, and only if this plan looks like it actually might happen should the University express an opinion about it.  Here’s another dubious case:

Take the use of affirmative action to achieve diversity in higher education admissions. Harvard argued in defense of this idea in the Supreme Court on several occasions — starting in 1978, when the court’s controlling opinion allowing diversity in admissions relied extensively on a brief that Harvard filed, through 2023, when the court rejected the use of race in diversity-based admissions. Harvard’s advocacy all along was far from neutral and would arguably have violated the Kalven principles. On our principles, however, Harvard was justified in speaking out forcefully in support of the method it long used to admit students, because admissions is a core function of the university.

Again, Harvard trumps Chicago! Well, yes, admissions is a core function of the university, and so is the elimination of bigotry, bias and harassment. But it’s stretching the meaning of Kalven to say that affirmative action is something that should be endorsed because it’s a vital part of the functioning of a university. That is a debatable question, not a given principle essential for a university to function as it should.

Affirmative action, at least when instantiated as race-based hiring or admissions preferences, is a debatable topic, not a moral given. At Chicago, as in all schools, race-based admissions has now been made illegal (at least when used explicitly), and our Shils Report explicitly mandates that hiring and promotion must be based solely on research, teaching, service, and contribution to the intellectual community.  There have been attempts here to use ethnicity as part of the hiring, I’m told, and I’m trying to find out if that happened, and if so whether it violated the Shils report. Official endorsement of affirmative action, or of certain tenets of DEI, regardless of whether they’re enacted sub rosa within the University, would not generally fall under Kalven. On the other hand, the University did endorse the continuing of DACA, for we would have lost students we already admitted were DACA rescinded. Less arguably, that hurts the working of the university. This shows that not all issues are clear cut.

Finally, there’s the contentious issue of divestment, a can that the new report (and NYT article) pretty much kicks down the road.

In formulating its recommendation, our faculty working group struggled with some challenges that don’t have great solutions. For example, we didn’t address, much less solve, the hard problem of when the university should or shouldn’t divest its endowment funds from a given portfolio. The Kalven Report claimed that a decision to divest is a statement in itself and so the university shouldn’t do it. In contrast, we saw divestment as an action rather than a statement the university makes. We therefore treated it as outside our mandate, even though symbolic meaning can be attached to it, just as it can to other actions (including investing in the first place). Our report encourages the university to explain its actions and decisions on investment and divestment — much as Harvard’s President Larry Bacow did in 2021 when the university decided to reduce its investments in fossil fuels, and much as President Derek Bok did when the university didn’t divest from South Africa in the 1980s — but that’s all.

The idea that divestment or investment are actions rather than statements is rather disingenuous; they are certainly regarded as statements by opponents of various investments (to mention a recent one, Israel). The University of Chicago’s policy is not to divulge investments nor to respond to those who call for divestments, a policy that’s held since at least the Vietnam War.

Yet although the Harvard statement doesn’t get into the mire of investment, it does urge the university to take positions on it: “explain its actions and decisions on investment and divestment.”  What is that but a justification of how a University allocates its money? Indeed, disinvestment from fossil fuels is a political “statement”. You might think it’s a good idea, but some people don’t.

In the end, I heartily approve of Harvard’s official proposal, but think that the NYT article is misguided—a recipe for a mushy policy on institutional neutrality. Sure, that kind of neutrality is not always clear-cut, but Feldman and Simmons’s interpretation leaves too many stumps sticking out.

UPDATE: My colleague Brian Leiter also has a note and brief analysis of “Harvard’s Kalven” on his Leiter Reports website, and I agree with his sentiments. His piece is called “Harvard to adopt Chicago’s Kalven Report, after getting burned by pontificating administrators this past fall.” I quote:

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that two Harvard professors (including philosopher Alison Simmons) felt the need to try to pretend what their committee recommended was different from the Kalven Report.   Just reading the latter makes clear how inapt their characterization of it is–it stood for a lot more than “neutrality.”  It was predicated precisely on a statement of the university’s values and missions, and made clear the University and its officers and units should always be free to speak in support of those (including the university’s admissions policies).  Even if Harvard narcissism prevents them from acknowledging it, I am glad they have adopted Kalven principles–the university’s leaders, but also its faculty, will be better for it.

And here’s a tweet that is itself debatable (h/t Eli):

Scottish police, explaining ridiculous new “hate crime” law,” parody J. K. Rowling as an example

March 27, 2024 • 9:30 am

Scotland has passed a new hate crime act, formally called the Hate Crime and Public Order Act 2021, which takes effect, appropriately, on April Fool’s Day (April 1).  It was passed in 2021, though, which accounts for its name.

The whole law is here, and part 3 is the most contentious part, including this (click to enlarge).

Note that it is a crime to make statements about age, disability, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, transgender identity, or “variation in sex characteristics”, stuff that a “reasonable person” would find “threatening”, “abusive”, and even “insulting”.  You don’t even have to have the intent of stirring up hatred.

Further, look at (2)aii above. You are committing a crime even if you “communicate to another person material that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive”.  So, for example, if you email a friend that a guy you don’t like “must have a small dick” (a common insult for males, but also abusive because it makes fun of “variation in a sex characteristic”), or say to someone “Jack is a dotty old codger”, which insults someone on the grounds of age, then those might be offenses.

Also, as one reader said, “Part of the reason why people are so worried is that the guidance that Police Scotland have issued seems to be somewhat different from what the law itself says. It’s a download document 29 pages long.”  Looking at it briefly, I find two things extra worrying.

First, even if what you do doesn’t amount to a “crime,” it’s supposed to be reported and the coppers will investigate it, probably putting your name on the record (bolding below is mine):

While it is accepted that not every hate report will amount to criminality, officers are required to take preventative and protective measures even when a non-criminal offence is apparent. Seemingly low level or minor events may in fact have a significant impact on the victim. Crime type alone does not necessarily dictate impact or consequences of the action. Repeated targeting of a person, whether by the same perpetrator or not, can lead to what is known as the ‘drip drip’ effect i.e. although seemingly minor incidents, the repeated nature could affect the person’s ability to cope. Each individual will be affected differently.

Further, as implied above, intent doesn’t matter; it’s the effect that does.  And that, of course, leaves the act open to all kinds of “I’m insulted” complaints:

For recording purposes, the perception of the victim or any other person is the defining factor in determining whether an incident is a hate incident or in recognising the malice element of a crime. The perception of the victim should always be explored, however they do not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief and police officers or staff members should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of malice and ill-will is not required for a hate crime or hate incident to be recorded and thereafter investigated as a hate crime or hate incident by police.

If you want an example of something that creates a slippery slope of crime, the bit above is it. For what is seen as “threatening”, “abusive”, and especially “insulting”, will depend on the “victim’s” perception.. Especially ridiculous is the (2)aii provision that restricts your freedom to insult a person to someone else, without insulting the “victim” directly. This is going to create a mess, and I hope it’s tested in the courts soon after it goes into effect.

I’m hoping this ludicrous law won’t be enforced as written, or really enforced at all, for in America this law would violate the First Amendment, except insofar as you harass someone repeatedly, defame them, create an atmosphere bigotry in the workplace, or say something publicly that incited “imminent and lawless action.”

Another reader said this, though I haven’t checked on the assertion:

“In the meantime, Police Scotland have published a list of third-party locations where people will be able to report hate crimes – it includes a sex shop in Glasgow, a mushroom farm, and the address of a council office block that was demolished a few years ago… What could possibly go wrong?”

The police, trying to explain to a befuddled public how the law will work, have confected an example that involves, of all people, J. K. Rowling, who has committed NO hate crimes.  Read the Torygraph report by clicking the headline below (probably paywalled), or find the piece archived here:

 

Excerpts from the Torygraph are indented. The picture above was part of the article and was surely not part of the police example, and I’m not certain about the decorative part on the left. But, based on the story below, I take the text on the left to be accurate.

Police officers who invented a trans-hating “parody” of JK Rowling [above] must be stripped of any role in enforcing new hate crime laws, more than 200 women have said.

In an open letter, female signatories expressed “disgust” that a fictional character called “Jo”, alleged to be modelled on the Harry Potter writer who called for trans people to be sent to gas chambers, had been created by serving Police Scotland officers.

Of course Rowling hasn’t come close to posting videos urging putting LGBT people in gas chambers, much less asserting that they all have “mental health conditions.” This example comes close, in my view, to defaming Rowling. But let’s read on:

They said the revelation had left their confidence in police to fairly enforce hate crime legislation at “rock bottom” and claimed the narrative created reinforced offensive “tropes” that gender critical women were comparable to Nazis.

At an official police “youth engagement” hate crime event last month, attendees were presented with a “scenario” in which Jo, an “online influencer” with a large social media following, is “passionate” about her beliefs such as there being only two genders.

“Jo” is what Rowlings friends call her, but is also the derisive name that her haters use.

The story escalates with “Jo” stating that trans people “all belong in the gas chambers”. Attendees were then asked to consider whether “Jo” had committed a hate crime.

The letter, signed by high-profile political figures, academics and gender-critical campaigners, said the story reinforced offensive claims about women who believe biological sex should take precedence over self-declared gender identity.

Such women are often compared by trans rights activists to racists while they also regularly face unfounded accusations of having links to the far-Right.

 

In a letter, the women said the “Jo” character had clearly been “a thinly veiled parody of the author JK Rowling, who in recent years has championed the sex-based rights of women and girls”.

“We write to you to express our disgust that public servants, not least those charged with enforcing the new offences created by the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, were responsible for this material,” the women’s letter, to Jo Farrell, the chief constable, stated.

“It plays into long-standing, offensive tropes that women who are concerned about the erosion of their sex-based rights are akin to Nazis.”

The row comes just days before Scotland’s new hate crimes laws are enforced.

Trans, non-binary and cross-dressing people, though not biological women, will receive new protections under the legislation which critics claim will be “weaponised” against gender critical women such as Rowling and erode freedom of speech.

The 235 signatories, who include Johann Lamont, the ex-Scottish Labour leader, former Labour MSP Elaine Smith and Sarah Pedersen, a professor at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, called on Ms Farrell to launch an investigation into the creation of “Jo”.

. . . . The Time for Inclusive Education campaign group, which jointly ran the hate crime event, last week revealed that Police Scotland officers have invented the “Jo” scenario “based on their expertise”.

Police Scotland has declined multiple opportunities to deny that the “Jo” character was based on Rowling, whose first name is Joanne and is called Jo by her friends.

Meanwhile, the organisation has so far refused to release training materials for officers charged with enforcing its hate crime law.

The article further reports that the cops won’t let anybody view the training materials until April 9, more than a week after the law takes effect, and further claims that the slow police response violates the UK’s Freedom of Information Act.

Knowing Rowling, she’ll take action against being defamed in this way. After all, the training materials above may constitute a hate crime itself; abusing Rowling because of her statements about sex and gender. If you think the name “Jo”—as well as the beliefs used to attack the “online influencer with a large following”—doesn’t refer to Rowling, I have some land in Florida to sell you.

Oh, woe is Scotland!

h/t: Christopher, Jez

 

Canada inching towards passing a bill that prioritizes “Canadian content” on social media

March 30, 2023 • 10:15 am

I’m not especially down on Canada these days, even though yesterday I criticized their frequent equation of indigenous knowledge with modern science. But then I read the article below on The Free Press, which describes a new bill—one likely to pass—that prioritizes Canadian content coming from big, commercial social-media sites like YouTube and Amazon.  I’m not sure why the government is doing this, and no proponents of the bill would explain to reporter Rupa Subramanya the rationale, but it must have something to do with preserving Canadian “culture” and protecting existing Canadian media from competition.

It’s also a form of censorship, since someone has to decide exactly what “Canadian content” is. Perhaps our many readers from up north can explain more. The article blames this bill—and a related one that requires platforms like Facebook to pay Canadian news organizations for any of their content used (in America we have a doctrine of “fair usage” that stipulates how much you can use)—on Justin Trudeau, characterized as “a man who has, again and again, shown contempt for those who do not share his worldview.” Well, I’m not touching that statement, as I am abysmally (and sadly) ignorant of Canadian politics. All I can do is comment on what this story reports, assuming it’s accurate:

Click below to read:

This link gives you a precis of what the bill, call the “Online Streaming Act”, says. More on that in a second.

Here’s Subramanya’s summary of what the bill says:

Canada’s Online Streaming Act, or Bill C-11—which is now being debated in Parliament and would make online streaming services prioritize Canadian content the same way Canada’s television and radio stations are regulated. . . .

Canada’s Liberals insist the point of Bill C-11 is simply to update the 1991 Broadcasting Act, which regulates broadcasting of telecommunications in the country. The goal of the bill, according to a Ministry of Canadian Heritage statement, is to bring “online broadcasters under similar rules and regulations as our traditional broadcasters.”

In other words, streaming services and social media, like traditional television and radio stations, would have to ensure that at least 35 percent of the content they publish is Canadian content—or, in Canadian government speak, “Cancon.”

That means that if you log onto, say, YouTube or Amazon in Canada, you’d see a lot more “Canadian content” than you would if you logged on south of the US/Canadian border.  Yet the U.S. doesn’t mandate “American content”, and it seems that any sort of mandate like this abrogates freedom of these companies to broadcast the content they want.

More:

The bill is inching toward a final vote in the Canadian Senate as soon as next month. It’s expected to pass. If it does, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said in an October blog post, the same creators the government says it wants to help will, in fact, be hurt.

Bill C-11, Mohan explained, would mean “that when viewers come to the YouTube homepage, they’re served content that a Canadian Government regulator has prioritized, rather than content they are interested in.”

That doesn’t bode well for creators, he said.

Here’s an explanation of the bill’s aims from the Canadian government site:

What are we trying to accomplish?

Once implemented, this Bill is expected to:

  • Create more opportunities for Canadian producers, directors, writers, actors, and musicians to create high quality audio and audiovisual content.
  • Make it easier for Canadian audiences to access Canadian and Indigenous stories.
  • Create one, fair set of rules for all comparable broadcasters—online or on traditional media—such as, requiring those who benefit from Canadian arts and culture to invest in it.
  • Make our diverse Canadian voices, music, and stories heard across Canada and globally through a variety of services.
  • Create a more inclusive broadcasting system that is reflective of Canadian society and that serves Canadians from all walks of life.

It apears to be like a national DEI provision, increasing the diversity of what one can access online by boosting Canadian content. In other words, it’s trying to “create a media that looks more like us.”

The explanation below of why this bill would hurt Canadian artists or creators like Justin Bieber doesn’t completely make sense to me, but I’m addled with insomnia:

. . . . users often give a thumbs-down to content that the algorithm steers them toward and that they don’t want to watch—and that leads the Search and Discovery systems at YouTube to limit visibility of that content. “[G]lobally,” Mohan said in his post, “Canadian creators will have a harder time breaking through and connecting with the niche audiences who would actually love their content.” (According to Mohan, more than 90 percent of the “watch time” on content produced by Canadian YouTubers comes from outside Canada.)

Bottom line: had Bill C-11 been the law of the land back in early 2007, Justin Bieber would probably have encountered more Canadian viewers who didn’t want to watch him, many would have given him a thumbs-down, and YouTube would have limited the number of viewers who ultimately saw him.

Why do they argue that Bieber would be less popular with Canadians than with other people? And even if YouTube did limit his viewers based on “likes”, wouldn’t the new bill actually help Bieber since YouTube content would now be more Canadian than before? (Bieber presumably counts as “Canadian content”.)

But this is that’s why I think this bill is fundamentally misguided:  it tilts the freedom of Internet providers towards Canadian content, which must be at least 35% of the total content, and of course there’s going to be a “Canada censor” who decides what constitutes “Canadian content”.

A bit more about the bill, which makes it clear that it’s meant in part to shield Canadian media from market forces:

As it turns out, Conservative senator Leo Housakos told me, it’s not Canadian creators who need a boost—it’s Canada’s sclerotic legacy media. Bill C-11, he said, is meant to protect the likes of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and conglomerates like Bell Media and Quebecor, all of which can be counted on to toe the Liberal Party line.

That certainly seems to be what the bill’s boosters are indicating. In an April 2022 post, Valerie Creighton, president of the Canada Media Fund, created by Canada’s Ministry of Heritage, appeared to agree with Housakos about the need for shielding legacy media from market forces. Creighton seemed to echo Pablo Rodriguez, who had noted a few weeks earlier that 450 Canadian media outlets had closed over the previous 13 years.

“The entry of the streamers and platforms into the Canadian market has resulted in aggressive competitive pressure on the Canadian broadcast and distribution system,” Creighton said in her post. “Our companies cannot compete with the deep financial resources and wide distribution these platforms offer.”

A few more critics are quoted at the end:

This unwillingness to engage with the opposition—to take part in the messy, cantankerous democratic process, to make room for more voices, to entertain more ideas and arguments and counterarguments—has left many old-fashioned Canadian Liberals dismayed.

In a January 31 speech invoking the Roman thinker Cicero and the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman, Liberal senator and award-winning author David Richards lashed out at Bill C-11: “We have lately become a land of scapegoaters and finger pointers, offering accusations and shame while believing we are a woke society. . . . what George Orwell says we must resist is a prison of self-censorship. This bill goes a long way to construct such a prison.”

Margaret Atwood, the acclaimed author of The Handmaid’s Tale, tweeted her support of Richards’ speech: “Needs a listen.”

Pattie Mallette was similarly put off by the government trying to steer its citizens, the people who were supposedly in charge, in the “correct” direction. Referring to Bill C-11, she said: “I feel like it’s almost an insult. It’s like Canadians don’t make good enough content for people to see, so we have to create a handicap to make sure that people are seeing your content.”

If this bill is characterized correctly, I find it censorious and, indeed, a form of “cultural appropriation”—preventing foreign cultures from intruding too strongly into Canada’s culture.

Weigh in below, especially if you’re from Canada.

More histrionic and harmful political statements from university departments

August 10, 2021 • 9:15 am

I recently wrote about an matter involving Anna Krylov, a professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California (USC).  Fed up with the politicization of science, Krylov published a letter in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, which you can read by clicking the screenshot below.

Krylov’s point was to show the similarity between the scientific censorship and “erasure” in the Soviet Russia of her youth with academic censorship of scientists in the West today. I’ll give one quote from her article showing the kind of “erasure” of scientists that Krylov deplores (I’ve omitted the references save for a self-aggrandizing one):

As an example of political censorship and cancel culture, consider a recent viewpoint discussing the centuries-old tradition of attaching names to scientific concepts and discoveries (Archimede’s [sic] Principle, Newton’s Laws of Motion, Schrödinger equation, Curie Law, etc.). The authors call for vigilance in naming discoveries and assert that “basing the name with inclusive priorities may provide a path to a richer, deeper, and more robust understanding of the science and its advancement.” Really? On what empirical grounds is this based? History teaches us the opposite: the outcomes of the merit-based science of liberal, pluralistic societies are vastly superior to those of the ideologically controlled science of the USSR and other totalitarian regimes. The authors call for removing the names of people who “crossed the line” of moral or ethical standards. Examples include Fritz Haber, Peter Debye, and William Shockley, but the list could have been easily extended to include Stark (defended expulsion of Jews from German institutions), Heisenberg (led Germany’s nuclear weapons program), and Schrödinger (had romantic relationships with under-age girls). Indeed, learned societies are now devoting considerable effort to such renaming campaigns—among the most-recent cancellations is the renaming of the Fisher Prize by the Evolution Society, despite well-argued opposition by 10 past presidents and vice-presidents of the society.(20)

For writing her piece in the journal, Krylov of course received considerable pushback, for there are people whose raison d’être is to sniff out any bad things that famous scientists did, and then use that as an excuse to vilify them and remove any honorifics attached to them. (The shabby treatment of Ronald Fisher by the Society for the Study of Evolution is but one example; another is the impending removal of Thomas Henry Huxley’s name from an Institute at Western Washington University).

A while back, Krylov and a large number of her USC colleagues wrote to the USC administration. concerned about the treatment of USC undergraduate Rose Ritch, forced to resign her position as Vice-President of the USC student government because Ritch, a Jew and Zionist, was subject to unrelenting harassment by student anti-Semites who oppose Zionism. The University President deplored the harassment and promised reform. But, as Krylov and colleagues say in a new letter, it never came:

In the wake of the Rose Ritch affair, we have been promised that a series of activities will be implemented to improve our campus climate. We were hoping to see educational activities that aim to combat zionophobia and antisemitism, as well as other forms of hate and discrimination, to reaffirm our commitment to tolerance and inclusion, and to enable discussion of controversial issues in a respectful environment. We are still waiting for concrete actions from the administration.

Now the attacks on Israel are back again, prompting another letter from Krylov and her colleagues.  This new letter was a reaction to a political letter signed by many university departments, programs, and centers concerned with women’s and gender studies, including the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies of the University of Southern California. Click below to read the latter letter.

The letter above comprises the usual overblown rhetoric and misleading statements about Israel, including the characterization of Israel as an apartheid state, a call for the “right of return” that would destroy Israel, and a call for solidarity of these feminist departments with Palestine, stating that “Palestine is a Feminist Issue.”

Well indeed it is, but not in the way the authors think. The culture of Palestine, unlike that of Israel—except for Orthodox Jews)—is deeply misogynistic, with women oppressed and treated as second-class citizens. It’s ironic, and highlights the blindness of this faction of the Left, that these women believe that supporting Palestine against Israel is a “feminist stand.” How nuts can you get? But so it goes.

Enough palaver; I won’t summarize the letter above because it’s short and you can read it for yourself.

The salient point for Krylov and her colleagues was not that academics were taking a pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli stand, which is their right, but that entire academic departments and units were speaking as a whole, presumably on behalf of their members. Yet surely not everyone in these many departments throughout the US share the histrionics about Israel. But, if they dissent, what can they do? Their dissenting views are lumped together with the opposite views of their colleagues.  What this does is chill the speech of the dissenters. What grad student, undergraduate student, or untenured professor in these departments would dare take a stand against their department as a whole?

It is this chilling of speech—this promulgating of official ideological, political, and moral views by departments of universities, indeed of universities as a whole—which led the University to issue the Kalven Report in 1967 and deem it one of our “Foundational Principles“. The Kalven Report, named after the committee’s chairman, expressly forbids the University from taking any official stands on political and ideological issues, though of course individual faculty are encouraged to do so. (There were also a few exceptions when the University may take a stand on an issue affecting the educational mission of the University itself.) The reason for the Kalven Report: because taking such stands chills the speech of dissenters and quashes free expression. Here’s a paragraph from the Report:

In October of last year, in response to inquiries from several of us, President Robert Zimmer affirmed that the Kalven Report extended to departments and units of the University. While faculty can take stands and sign their names to them, entire departments are forbidden from doing so for the reasons described above.  Despite that, several departments still have such statements on their websites, and they haven’t yet taken them down (nor does the University seem keen to force them to).

So Krylov and her colleagues, in their letter to the USC administration responding to the feminist calls for solidarity with Israel, promote principles identical to those limned by our Kalven Report: units of universities should not engage in wholesale political grandstanding lest it act to repress free speech: the lifeblood of any good university. The letter by Krylov and colleagues can be seen by clicking the screenshot below.

And here’s the crucial statement, which aligns very well with my University’s own stand. Note as well the misguided criticisms of Israel contained in these “official” statements:

We do not know whether such departmental declarations of political support are legal, but they are certainly unethical. They have nothing to do with freedom of speech of individuals; rather, they fall under compelled speech because they appear to speak on behalf of all members of the department (e.g. faculty, staff, and students), many of whom are untenured or supervised by more senior members and thus not in a position to openly disagree. Most concerning, this signing implies endorsement by USC itself. Thus, we call on USC leadership to publicly rebuke the practice of USC departments (or units) making statements for specific political agendas that have nothing to do with the University’s educational and research missions. The Statement above contains extreme, indeed fabricated, claims that criminalize the very creation of the State of Israel and, by implication, indict all its citizens and supporters, including us. Not doing so, would make USC complicit in comments within the Statement that describe the State of Israel as “settler colonialism”, “ethnonationalist violence”, “ongoing ethnic cleansing”, and “apartheid”. If USC’s implicit support stands, many Jewish students and others who believe in Israel’s right to exist will be reluctant to attend our university.

Do you think that USC will rebuke the posting of official departmental statements about issues having nothing to do with the departments’ educational mission? Will they make the departments take the statements down? I wouldn’t count on it. Even the University of Chicago, in response to repeated pleas by people like me, lets departmental political statements stand at the same time arguing that such statements violate university policy. I suppose it’s one thing to declare a policy, but another to tell a department that they’ve violated it and take “restorative” action.

Nevertheless these statements are examples of compelled speech applying to everybody in the units and departments, even if no individual signatures appear.

In these fraught times, such statements, which often seem to be a form of virtue signaling, aren’t uncommon. Here’s one issued not long ago by nine departments and programs (and some individual faculty) at the University of California at Davis. Like the USC statement, it’s a misguided and politically heated heap of denunciation of Israel and valorization of Palestine (click on the screenshot):

The statement was “updated” by adding a disclaimer at the top: “The statements below are part of our educational mission and reflect the views of the faculty in the department and not official University policy.”

But that’s deeply unclear. Why is demonizing Israel and lauding Palestine (the usual accusations against Israel, like “apartheid state” are pervasive) part of UCD’s “educational mission”? There are, of course, many political statements that could have been made: against Iran, China, North Korea, and so on, but the usual suspect is, of course, Israel. Further, the disclaimer says that the statements “reflect the views of the faculty in the department”.  Well, which faculty? ALL the faculty? Or only some? If the latter, then only the faculty who agreed should have signed, not entire departments and programs.

UCD, like USC, is violating its education mission by chilling speech, by allowing official units to take political and ideological stands (a pretty misguided one in this case) that will brook no dissent. No wonder that more than half of college students, at least in a recent survey, said they felt intimidated from speaking:

A majority—53%—also reported that they often “felt intimidated” in sharing their ideas, opinions or beliefs in class because they were different from those of the professors. A slightly larger majority feared expressing themselves because of differences with classmates.

Even accounting for shy people, that figure is way too high.

As for UC Davis, the administration basically took the coward’s way out, pretending that their refusal to prohibit compelled speech was actually a way of ensuring free speech. How’s this for doublespeak?

A spokesperson for the university told J. [the Jewish News of Northern California] in an email Wednesday that Davis “is committed to ensuring that all persons may exercise their constitutionally protected rights of free expression, speech, assembly and worship, even in instances in which the positions expressed may be viewed by some as controversial and unpopular.”

The spokesperson, Melissa Lutz Blouin, wrote that UC Davis had “consulted with University lawyers and learned that, provided that these statements do not engage in electioneering, including advocating for or against political candidates or ballot measures, these statements do not violate the law.” [JAC: they may not violate the law, but they still act to impede freedom of speech.]

She added that campus leadership is “consulting with campus stakeholders about whether there needs to be more regulation” in the area of “who may speak for a department” and “what may be posted on academic websites.”

The answer, UCD, is YES, there needs to be less promulgation of compelled speech.

I wonder if this politicization of universities is only a temporary phenomenon, and will one day be looked at as a sad overreaction to the George Floyd Era. Or is it here to stay?  Because if it’s here to stay, you can kiss academic freedom of speech—and academic freedom itself—goodbye.

And THAT is harm, however you define it.

“We must add new guardrails”: Biden transition team official wrote op-ed asking for hate speech laws

November 16, 2020 • 11:45 am

Two tweets disturbed me this morning, both calling attention to Richard Stengel‘s anti-free speech column in the Washington Post last October. Stengel is a writer and government official who was editor of Time magazine and also worked as Undersecretary of State during the Obama administration. Now he’s on the Biden transition team for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, though I’m not sure exactly what that job involves.

(The “ACLU retreats from free expression” piece mentioned in the tweet below was written by Wendy Kaminer in the Wall Street Journal in June, 2018, and access isn’t free.  I’ve been saying that same thing for a while though, and I’ll try to get my hands on it. It is true that the ACLU is taking some alarmingly regressive steps.)

At any rate, a bit over a year ago Stengel—and remember, he’s on the media part of Biden’s transition team—wrote this op-ed. Click on the screenshot to read it.

Stengel’s contention is that the First Amendment is outmoded, especially in an age of social media, for there is no guarantee that “truth will drive out lies” now. But when was there ever a guarantee? Here’s what he says:

It is important to remember that our First Amendment doesn’t just protect the good guys; our foremost liberty also protects any bad actors who hide behind it to weaken our society. In the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, Russia’s Internet Research Agency planted false stories hoping they would go viral. They did. Russian agents assumed fake identities, promulgated false narratives and spread lies on Twitter and Facebook, all protected by the First Amendment.

the intellectual underpinning of the First Amendment was engineered for a simpler era. The amendment rests on the notion that the truth will win out in what Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called “the marketplace of ideas.”

This “marketplace” model has a long history going back to 17th-century English intellectual John Milton, but in all that time, no one ever quite explained how good ideas drive out bad ones, how truth triumphs over falsehood.

Milton, an early opponent of censorship, said truth would prevail in a “free and open encounter.” A century later, the framers believed that this marketplace was necessary for people to make informed choices in a democracy. Somehow, magically, truth would emerge. The presumption has always been that the marketplace would offer a level playing field. But in the age of social media, that landscape is neither level nor fair.

Of course there’s no guarantee that the truth will drive out lies: Trump’s falsehoods have been widely believed, but of course the media has exposed them as lies. It’s the free press that allows this exposure, but it can’t guarantee that everyone is going for the “truth” side. If that were the case, there would be no religions! And there’s nothing all that different about social media: there has always been media in which people have told untruths. It’s just now that media is available to everyone, who can put up their merest thoughts in an instant.

Still, the clash of opinion on things like abortion, the Israel/Palestine question, affirmative action, gun control and the like are the only ways to give both sides an airing and to propound their best arguments. The rest is up to the people. If you don’t have this clash of ideas because one side claims that it KNOWS THE TRUTH and will censor the other side, then we’re truly doomed. Allowing someone to determine the truth is the surest way to guarantee that the truth becomes one person’s opinion. And this is the whole problem with Stengel’s attack on the First Amendment and push for “hate speech”—which he sees as speech that people find insulting to their race, religion, ethnicity, and sexual orientation:

Since World War II, many nations have passed laws to curb the incitement of racial and religious hatred. These laws started out as protections against the kinds of anti-Semitic bigotry that gave rise to the Holocaust. We call them hate speech laws, but there’s no agreed-upon definition of what hate speech actually is. In general, hate speech is speech that attacks and insults people on the basis of race, religion, ethnic origin and sexual orientation.

I think it’s time to consider these statutes. The modern standard of dangerous speech comes from Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) and holds that speech that directly incites “imminent lawless action” or is likely to do so can be restricted. Domestic terrorists such as Dylann Roof and Omar Mateen and the El Paso shooter were consumers of hate speech. Speech doesn’t pull the trigger, but does anyone seriously doubt that such hateful speech creates a climate where such acts are more likely?

It could, but it also outs those who are bigots and allows us to see their arguments. If arguments for bigotry win, then we have no chance as a democracy, anyway. And there are already laws, as Stengel says, against speech that incites violence—if the violence is imminent and predictable. If the violence could result much later from someone’s speech, then people like Richard Dawkins could be (and have been) accused of pulling the trigger, for Dawkins is an anti-theist who attacks religion in general, including Islam. If some crazed Muslim-hater reads Dawkins or Hitchens and goes on a killing spree, does that make them responsible, and should their works have been censored because they offend believers? No, because we can’t predict or fend off everything that could result from speech. We might as well ban Evangelical Christianity because the Bible, and their preachings, have led to the killing of abortion doctors and the demonization of homosexuals.

Stengel:

Let the debate begin. Hate speech has a less violent, but nearly as damaging, impact in another way: It diminishes tolerance. It enables discrimination. Isn’t that, by definition, speech that undermines the values that the First Amendment was designed to protect: fairness, due process, equality before the law? Why shouldn’t the states experiment with their own version of hate speech statutes to penalize speech that deliberately insults people based on religion, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation?

All speech is not equal. And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I’m all for protecting “thought that we hate,” but not speech that incites hate. It undermines the very values of a fair marketplace of ideas that the First Amendment is designed to protect.

Yes, Stengel is a Pecksniff who wants hate speech laws, but is curiously silent about who will make them? Who will be The Decider? We all know the problems with that, and they are pretty much insuperable. For every Biden official who disallows criticism of Black Lives Matter and Islam, there will be a later Trumpy official who criminalizes speech that liberals favor. The best solution is to allow everyone to say their piece, with a reasonable few exceptions that the courts have carved out as outweighing free speech (false advertising, defamation, harassment of individuals, and so on).

You know what my worries are: that Stengel will influence and also reflect a general censorious wokeness on the part of the new Biden administration. Granted, this editorial was written over a year ago, but I think it’s fair to ask Stengel if he still stands by it. If he does, then we should keep a weather eye on his behavior—and that of the Biden administration’s actions about speech.

The fracas about Tom Cotton’s op-ed in The New York Times: should it have been published?

June 7, 2020 • 10:45 am
You probably read about Republican Senator Tom Cotton’s June 3 op-ed in the New York Times, urging the President to send the military into cities with protests and riots inspired by police brutality against blacks. It caused a huge fracas at the paper, with the editor first defending it and then, after social-media pressure and a “virtual walkout” by Times staffers, saying that it shouldn’t have been published, among other things, because it put “Black@nytimes staffers in danger”.

You can read Cotton’s piece by clicking on the screenshot below (for some reason, the paper has made it impossible to put up a screenshot by simply inserting the URL of this op-ed).

The op-ed is preceded by a longish disclaimer by the paper, which I hear has decided not to run Cotton’s op-ed in the paper edition. Here’s the disclaimer:

Editors’ Note, June 5, 2020:

After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process. Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.

The basic arguments advanced by Senator Cotton — however objectionable people may find them — represent a newsworthy part of the current debate. But given the life-and-death importance of the topic, the senator’s influential position and the gravity of the steps he advocates, the essay should have undergone the highest level of scrutiny. Instead, the editing process was rushed and flawed, and senior editors were not sufficiently involved. While Senator Cotton and his staff cooperated fully in our editing process, the Op-Ed should have been subject to further substantial revisions — as is frequently the case with such essays — or rejected.

For example, the published piece presents as facts assertions about the role of “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa”; in fact, those allegations have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned. Editors should have sought further corroboration of those assertions, or removed them from the piece. The assertion that police officers “bore the brunt” of the violence is an overstatement that should have been challenged. The essay also includes a reference to a “constitutional duty” that was intended as a paraphrase; it should not have been rendered as a quotation.

Beyond those factual questions, the tone of the essay in places is needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate. Editors should have offered suggestions to address those problems. The headline — which was written by The Times, not Senator Cotton — was incendiary and should not have been used.

Finally, we failed to offer appropriate additional context — either in the text or the presentation — that could have helped readers place Senator Cotton’s views within a larger framework of debate.

Well, I could note a few Left-wing op-eds that could have used factual vetting as well, but they didn’t get it, and you know why. At any rate, the main objection by Times staffers were not these quibbles about wording, but about their claim that this editorial calls for the incursion of the military to put down riots, which supposedly demonizes all black Americans and puts them (and the Times staffers) in danger.

But if you read Cotton’s piece, which I disagree with in toto, what you find is no mention of black people, but of the need to get the military into cities to put down violence. In fact, it even draws a distinction between peaceful and violent protest:

Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.

Agreed. But sending in the military is a no-go. The National Guard, to which Cotton alludes repeatedly, was sent to states that had earlier protests, like Mississippi during the Civil Rights movement of the Sixties. But the National Guard is not the regular military, for the NG also has a civilian function—keeping the peace in society—which the regular military does not. The regular military has objected to being used in this way, and it shouldn’t, especially in this case where it is not only unneeded, but would throw oil on the fires.

Cotton’s views reflect the Republican law-and-order stance, and although it doesn’t mention blacks, one (or at least I) can sense that there’s a frisson of fascism here: wanting to sic the big guns on black people to keep them in their place.

There’s no doubt that Cotton is bawling up a drainpipe here, for there’s zero chance that the military will be called into U.S. cities to quell riots. In that sense, the fear of black Times staffers is completely unwarranted: they are not rendered unsafe by a few unwise words from a Senator writing in the paper. What they really object to, I think, is that Cotton expressed an opinion they don’t agree with. And if you can say that such opinions put you in danger, you gain some moral high ground. (Not to mention that if this was literally true, Cotton’s editorial would violate the First Amendment.) Given that the Times caved not only to its staffers but to some big pushback from social media, we can expect to see fewer conservative op-eds in the paper in the future. Here’s a statement about the virtual walk-out:

Columnist Bari Weiss has also been demonized in this fracas, as she put out a series of tweets noting an ideological and journalistic divide between the older and younger staffers. (As I predicted, the wokeness on college campuses will invade journalism as college students move into media jobs.) Here are a few of her tweets, which got the regular news staff riled up—even though she thought Cotton’s piece might not be worth publishing—to the extent that some called for her firing. (Op-ed writers are allowed to write about NYT dynamics on Twitter, while regular news staff aren’t.):

Finally, VICE published a partial transcript of a virtual “town hall” meeting between Time Publisher A. G. Sulzberger, Executive editor Dan Baquet, and Chief Operating officer Meredith Levien, in which they fielded questions from the paper’s staff. Click on screenshot to read it if you want to read a transcript and some background:

Here’s a question from a Times staffer laying out the main objections to Cotton’s editorial:

“We would presumably not submit to publishing op-eds advancing theories of Holocaust denial or advocating a resumption of slavery, on the grounds that these are not reasonable positions for the debate, but rather hateful notions that we can safely condemn without worrying about being accused of partisanship or closed mindedness. But in publishing the Tom Cotton piece, haven’t we effectively validated depictions of Black Americans as terrorists in exercising their First Amendment rights to protest police brutality? Haven’t we applied the imprimatur of the Times to rule that unleashing the military on this movement is a reasonable position for the debate? Doesn’t that undermine that our mission is to be a force for good in American democracy? And do we really believe that we are airing out genuinely important views, as opposed to seeking to expand our business by catering to alternate political persuasions?”

Well, whatever Cotton thinks of blacks, I don’t think the editorial explicitly characterizes them as terrorists. After all, he does draw a distinction between peaceful and violent protest. And no, the Times did not apply its “imprimatur” to the op-ed; it just published it. In the end, I think it was valuable to hear from at least one Republican to see how they can justify using the military to put down riots. It did not show that the paper approved of the editorial (in fact, it bent over backwards, lashing its back with barbed wire, to show that it didn’t), nor did the editorial in any conceivable way endanger the black staffers on the New York Times.

Should the paper have agreed to publish the editorial in the first place? I think so, as it gives us insight into a Republican mind and also “outs” a senator for what he thinks. But that’s a judgement call. Still, once the piece was accepted, I don’t think the Times should have furiously back-pedaled about it, or appended a foreword saying it shouldn’t have been published and didn’t meet the paper’s standards. They did that, of course, because they’re woke and want us to know it. They wouldn’t do it with a Left-wing op-ed of equal weakness, and I call that hypocritical.

Op-ed sections are supposed to be full of pieces that rile you up, making you mad—and perhaps making you think. If the Times is giving more scrutiny to op-eds from the Right, and is more willing to annotate them or leave them out of the paper paper, then the Times is not fulfilling its responsibility. Maybe we’ll be left with one token conservative columnist: Ross Douthat.

First the Times does this, and earlier the New Yorker was cowardly in canceling Steve Bannon’s scheduled appearance at the New Yorker Festival. And now, perhaps, New York Magazine may be censoring Andrew Sullivan’s columns. Do I have to unsubscribe to every form of media that has “New York” in the title?

h/t: Eli