When the Atlantic hired conservative Kevin Williamson, an angry Twitter mob came after the magazine, citing Williamson’s callous comments about abortion. The Atlantic caved to the mob and fired him.
When Daniella Greenbaum posited that actresses could act as though they were transgender (pretending to be what they are not is part of acting after all), an angry Twitter mob came after her. Her employer, Business Insider, caved to the mob and retracted the piece.
The New York Times wrote a literal, factual headline, but it wasn’t sufficiently anti-Trump, and so an angry Twitter mob descended. The New York Times caved to the mob and changed the headline.
Caving to social media mobs is something the editors do. And now, we see that includes Marty Baron, who on Sunday suspended reporter Felicia Sonmez for her tweets, which stirred up an angry mob.
There’s a lot of sensitive stuff in this story, and reasonable people can disagree about almost every element. But those disagreements ought to be able to happen without suspensions or firings.
There’s a question about the propriety of Sonmez’s first tweet, linking to a story about the rape accusation against Kobe Bryant, just hours after his death.
Most people believe that it’s wrong to criticize someone who has just died, particularly if they died young. I don’t agree with most people. I wrote very critical post-mortem columns and editorials about Mario Cuomo and Hugh Hefner. If the recently deceased is a public figure, then naturally praise for the person will pour out into the public. That can trigger, in journalists such as me and Sonmez, a desire to provide some balance to resist a false impression that forms.
I didn’t want everyone thinking that Cuomo had only good or even mostly good effects on U.S. politics. That would be false, and journalists hate it when the lie wins.
On Sunday, though, most of you, like me, felt only sadness, recalling Kobe’s greatness as a player, witnessing his devotion as a dad, appreciating his faith as a Catholic, and thinking about his contrition for his very public sin. That explains the outpouring of love and praise for the man on Sunday afternoon.
But some readers may have had different reactions.
Put yourself in the mind of a victim of sexual assault who was checking Twitter on Sunday afternoon. Or at the very least, imagine a woman who suffers years later from an emotionally scarring sexual encounter with a very powerful man that didn’t go the way she wanted. Imagine if that woman, seeing how Kobe settled the civil suit, believes that he had acted as a predator but is now being sanctified. That could make a woman feel like sexual predation simply gets brushed under the rug.
Sonmez, who has spoken publicly about being sexually assaulted, may have felt this.
This is a lot of emotional stretching that I’m asking of the reader, I know. Most of you aren’t journalists, and journalists sometimes have to do things in their jobs that would be considered indecent in normal life. Also, we don’t really know what Sonmez was thinking and feeling. But we should have enough empathy with her to understand why she tweeted very differently in that moment than you or I might have.
Then there are questions about Sonmez’s third tweet, which included the full name of a man who emailed vile insults to her. I don’t think journalists should publicly out even their hate-mailers. If there are real threats, call the police instead of provoking the person. If it’s impotent hate, we have a professional obligation to resist the temptation to ruin the person who is treating us like garbage. It’s not easy, but it’s right.
Marty Baron, according to the New York Times’s reporting on this, was unhappy with Sonmez’s tweets. He asked her to stop. Another editor asked her to delete them. She did.
And it should have ended there. But then, the Washington Post suspended her.
Why? Most likely, it was the Twitter mob. Tens of thousands of people were very angry at her and the Washington Post. They were attacking her newspaper. And making it much trickier for the Washington Post, race played a role in this story. Look on Twitter, and you’ll see lots of people upset that a successful black man is being smeared and presumed guilty of charges that were dropped in court.
If Baron and the other honchos felt they were on the wrong side of a racial issue, all while witnessing a barrage of hate tweets at their writer, you could understand why they might have panicked. And if you know how our media works these days, you’re not surprised that they folded.
