Journalists should not pressure stores over ‘Fake News’ T-shirts

The saga began on Monday when Allison Kaden of Pix11 news tweeted the following:

I have two gripes with Kaden here. First, it should be up to private stores, not journalists, to decide what is either “funny” or “fashionable.” Second, Kaden’s claim that this T-shirt delegitimatizes journalists is ridiculous. Kaden’s words only illustrate that far too many reporters are actually opinion journalists with super-sized egos.

Want a real journalist of courage? Try Marie Colvin.

Anyway, the saga did not end with this sanctimonious and self-important tweet. As my colleague Becket Adams notes, journalists seemed determined to take as much offense as possible from the solitary yellow shirt. And following whinging tweets from luminaries such as Keith Olbermann, Bloomingdale’s apologized for “any offense” and pledged to withdraw the item.

But even this wasn’t enough. The Baltimore Sun’s Pamela Wood then tweeted to Bloomingdale’s that “Apologizing ‘for any offense we may have caused’ is not a sincere apology, this is not about journalists’ hurt feelings. This is about damage done to our democracy when your brand joins in perpetuating and celebrating the idea of ‘fake news.’ Please try again.”

Were I the Bloomingdale’s chief executive I would have tweeted back something along the lines of, “Get a life.” I’m sorry, but anyone who thinks that a T-shirt damages American democracy is not very well versed in the nature of American democracy. Unlike many other democracies, ours rightly embraces full freedom of speech, believing more speech to be better than less speech, even when the speech offends certain individuals.

In any case, journalists who claim to be objective have no business pressuring stores on what they should and should not sell.