The Decline of the Dictatorship of the Commentariat: On the Free Speech Editorial
An image from The New York Times’s own printing plant.
Look, we’re on a schedule here, so I didn’t talk about the ill-conceived New York Times editorial, “America has a Free Speech Problem”, written by “the editorial board” – i.e., cosigned by the staff who write their editorials – when it came out. I swore off culture war topics a while back, but I find myself oddly entranced by this one, because of the sheer manufactured moral panic outrage it evinces. This piece begins with the statement that free speech means “the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.”
In short, the New York Times is taking the bold stance that the right to free assembly and religion, the right to be free of government interference in matters of personal expression, the right for them to print what they want, fundamentally means that no one is allowed to get mad at them on Twitter.
Clearly, this is the first misstep from a newspaper that has never published a bad take on anything.
Look, I’ve talked in the past that I think the way that we construe rights is a mistake – conceiving of your “self” as something that you own, in my mind, means that slavery is allowed, because ownership implies the right to buy and sell – but even leaving aside that, this is a malignantly useless topic for them to waste their time on. There’s still an ongoing pandemic that our elected leaders dropped the ball on funding relief for. There’s that horrifying war that they talked about for a bit. There are all of those other horrifying wars that they’re not talking about as much. There’s the global economic system crumbling.
Why this?
Well, that’s easy to understand and complicated to explain.
With the caveat that there has been some well-done push back, this is a major newspaper of record picking a side in our dumbest culture war. I maintain that culture wars are stupid, and that cancel culture isn’t really a thing, but the fact remains that cultural phenomena are given life by discussing them. I’m afraid that, to tell you how dumb it is, I’m forced to feed the beast.
However, I also want you to consider: Joss Whedon is sitting in his mansion and whining about people not understanding him – he hasn’t been reduced to waiting tables at a Chili’s. Louis C.K. is back to performing. J.K. Rowling still isn’t shutting up. In fact, if you search for “who has been canceled” on google, you find lists and lists of people who are still quite wealthy.
Given that no one is actually being materially harmed by this, what we have is people complaining that they don’t have the audience that they think they’re entitled to.
This is being equated – through the tried-and-true method of both-sidesism – with conservatives attempting to make certain identities illegal, banning books, making it illegal to teach children, and forcing state mandated pregnancies on people.
It really seems to me that, when one side is exercising the one right guaranteed to them by neoliberal capitalism – the right to spend one’s money elsewhere – and the other is intentionally trying to torpedo the HDI, this is a bad faith argument.
What is happening is that the importance of the institution in question, the New York Times and similar standard-bearers for the American ideology, is feeling less relevant because their power is waning. To shore it up, they are seeking to ally themselves with conservative forces that are a convenient way to prop themselves up.
Stanley Cohen himself, as pictured on Wikipedia.
This means becoming an accessory in the current moral panic over “cancel culture.”
I’ve used the term “moral panic” before, but I feel it’s important to explore it more thoroughly here than I have elsewhere. The idea comes from Stanley Cohen, a South African sociologist who spent his life campaigning against both apartheid and the treatment of Palestinians in Israel, where it was the subject of his book Folk Devils and Moral Panics in 1972. While he didn’t invent the term, he identified a process that moral panics tend to go through:
First, a phenomenon, individual, or group is identified as a threat to society.
Second, the media amplifies the story and flattens this perceived threat down into a symbol – people’s attention shifts from the subject of the story to the symbol.
Third, the narrative withers, leaving just the symbol and the reaction of anxiety, fear, and anger.
Fourth, the so-called “gatekeepers of morality” – those with influence in media, politics, religion, and so on – take a stand against it. This can be a new law being enacted, or it can be local elites whipping people up to a torches-and-pitchforks moment.
Finally, the condition disappears and people forget that it ever happened.
This cover of the AD&D DM guide was selected purely because we love a good wizardy guy.
This is purely anecdotal, but I believe this because I saw it happen. I was born in 1986, and so I came up in the last thrashing stages of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. When I expressed early interest in Dungeons and Dragons, pulling out one of the early Monster Manuals in a B. Dalton at the local mall while my family waited for the movie we had come to see to begin, I was told by my mother to put it back because it was associated with Satanism. Flash forward a decade, and the weekly Dungeons and Dragons nights my friends and I had were just part of the background noise of my weird, narrow high school social life. Gone were the fears of satanism – my parents were just happy that I had friends, and the Dungeons and Dragons set were less likely to result in me having to walk home from a house show at 2AM than the punk friends.
So, because I’ve seen this, I’m inclined to believe it. It’s possible that there is some explanatory factor that I’m ignoring or simply don’t know. This volatility, though, the fact that moral panics don’t stick in the memory, is not a bug but a feature. As far as I can tell, the forgetting never results in a reset, it shifts the personal overton window in one direction or the other, and while it slides a bit back towards the baseline it never goes back to where it was.
The Satanic Panic of the 1980s began with ideas from the evangelical christian community escaping containment into the soft sciences by way of the book Michelle Remembers, influencing the developing field of social work, and then resulting in a number of high profile court cases. This fed into the nascent late-20th-century media apparatus: CNN was launched in 1980, and was followed by a number of others who imitated the format. The real watershed moment for the emergence of our modern news media is most likely to be found in 1987 – the year the Fairness Doctrine (the rule that said that opposing sides of a controversial issue had to be presented fairly) was abolished and the year that Geraldo Rivera put a bunch of real satanists in front of a live television audience — which was about as smart as putting a bowling ball in a drier — and made himself into a joke.
It’s been a long shift at the consent factory.
Fox News didn’t emerge for almost another decade, but here’s my hypothesis: ever since the Satanic Panic ended, conservative media has been chasing a moral panic of similar quality. They have gotten fairly good at manufacturing them – violent video games, the Gay Agenda, Death Panels – but none have hit quite like that first conjunction of modern media and uncut, incoherent, counterfactual terror. They hunger for that, because terrified people are people who watch the news, and – as we know from Manufacturing Consent – the first filter that any news story has to pass to get airtime or column-inches is whether it will work nicely with the advertising-revenue-driven model.
My only comfort is that, if the New York Times is talking about it seriously (for certain values of seriously) perhaps that means we’re in stage 4 of the Moral Panic and it will be over soon – but if they’re getting in on this game, I think we’ll have to hunker down for more and more of them. We won’t have just right-wing manufactured panics, we’ll also end up having to deal with centrist moral panics, which will have the same effect but the drawback of also being boring.
As I tell my students at the start of our units on critical thinking, moral panics are the best argument for developing that skill: you can never be absolutely immune to them, but you should do your best to recognize them so that you can resist them when you can.
The framing of this issue by the NYT editorial board – equating any action by the left with overt violence by the right – is a longstanding tradition in American discourse and politics, and it’s alive and well on the page. If you doubt me, consider the fact that people often say that the Black Panthers, who ran a school lunch program, are often considered the equal and opposite of the Ku Klux Klan, who lynched thousands of black people. People not wanting to let someone speak on their campus is treated as equally bad to legislation designed to have a lethal effect. For example, my own state is trying to pass a bill that would prevent medical treatment of ectopic pregnancies, a situation which can kill the person bearing the child. Somehow this is the same as not wanting your money to be given to a bigot.
Stock photo of the door to which one might be directed for saying out of line shit.
Frankly, treating these as equivalent is acting in bad faith.
So, I propose the only solution that really makes sense here: it’s necessary for us to exercise our free speech and point out to all of these columnists that their takes are bad and that they should resign. After all, “free speech” doesn’t mean that they’re free from the consequences of their speech, it means that no one can stop them, and if they’re just going to use their platform to gin up moral panics, it’s incumbent on the rest of us to tell them to just go and buy a coloring book or something so we don’t have to read their uninformed opinions on things.
Also, I found this image from a law enforcement video on satanism, and was looking for a place to put it, but didn’t have a good one. Enjoy it.
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