The majority of the nation, including 46% of people who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, wants the military to assist local law enforcement in tamping down increasingly violent protests — not that you would know this if you listened to the staff of the New York Times.
The New York Times opinion page published a fairly straightforward argument Wednesday morning by Sen. Tom Cotton detailing the legal justification for calling on military involvement. By the evening, the newspaper of record’s staff had erupted into a civil war of copypasta, with dozens of high-profile journalists sharing a screenshot of the milquetoast piece with a single hackneyed refrain: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.”
On its face, a series of young reporters sharing the exact same text in their attempt to feel noble while bullying the bosses who pay their rents is laughable enough. But it’s worth noting where precisely the illiberal vanguard of the New York Times drew the line.
In the past few years alone, the New York Times has published, not in the form of news reporting but direct op-eds, the Taliban, Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, and Hamas. No one expects the Gray Lady to publish every extremist with a screed to sell, but there’s no consistent moral code when lines are drawn not for a number of dictators and terrorists who murder civilians and censor journalists but for a U.S. senator sharing an opinion held by the majority of the nation. Claiming it puts black people in danger when not even a majority of black voters oppose it renders it even more farcical.
And that’s because they don’t mean a word of what they say. After all, if you really thought your employer was putting your black colleagues in physical danger, you’d quit, not stage a coordinated temper tantrum on Twitter. And if it were really about physical safety, you’d oppose New York Times journalists trying to out the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower and dox civilians. But it’s not. It’s all a performance, one attempting to use the mob to censor conservative (or in this case, mainstream but anti-left) opinions from the opinion page.
Many of his predecessors have had a problem with the press, but Trump has made publicly teasing journalists on Twitter a presidential pastime, and with journalists dangerously under attack by both rioters and law enforcement this past week, there’s no question that the free press is under fire. But don’t forget: The calls are also coming from inside the house, and those will remain long after these protests are over.
