Bannon, Buruma and free expression: Media outlets should not be bending to the latest Twitter storm
Latest postings concerning free expression of opinion no matter what that opinion is.
Marcus Gee
The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books are two of the most respected titles in journalism. So when both of them fold under pressure over matters of free expression in the course of a month you know that we are in trouble.
The New Yorker was first to buckle. The magazine announced it was inviting former Donald Trump aide Steve Bannon to the annual New Yorker Festival. He was to sit down for a conversation with editor David Remnick about “the ideology of Trumpism.”
Twitter and other media erupted in protest. Several celebrities on the festival bill threatened to pull out. “I will not take part in an event that normalizes hate,” wrote filmmaker Judd Apatow. Facing a revolt, Mr. Remnick disinvited Mr. Bannon, who called the decision “gutless.”
It was certainly disappointing. Mr. Remnick, editor of the New Yorker since 1998, is one of best journalists in the English-speaking world, known for his brilliant profiles of everyone from Leonard Cohen to Barack Obama. He himself argued in a memo to staff that “to interview Bannon is not to endorse him.” The idea was to interrogate a man who played a leading part in electing a president who has upended all the norms of political conduct. Didn’t the famed Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci travel to Iran to interview Ayatollah Khomeini, a man whose views she loathed?
It’s a shame Mr. Remnick didn’t listen to his own argument. Journalists are supposed to explore dark corners. Their job is to help their audience understand the world and the people who influence it, even − in fact, especially − the hateful ones.
What happened this week at the New York Review of Books is even more discouraging. Since 1963 the Review has been using wide-ranging book reviews to explore every issue under the sun. This month it put a piece by Jian Ghomeshi on its website, with the print version to appear later. It is the first time the disgraced former CBC radio host has commented publicly on his high-profile sexual-assault trial in 2016 and what it did to his life. While expressing remorse for how he treated women he dated, he said he had suffered “enough humiliation for a lifetime.” The MeToo movement against sexual misconduct has drawn in many famous names, from Harvey Weinstein on down, “But I was the guy everyone hated first.”
Again, outrage. Many readers condemned Mr. Ghomeshi for what they saw as a self-serving non-apology and the Review for giving him a podium. The furor only grew when editor Ian Buruma told Slate magazine that “I’m no judge of the rights and wrongs of every allegation. How can I be? All I know is that in a court of law he was acquitted, and there is no proof he committed a crime.” By Wednesday, Mr. Buruma was out as editor of the Review, a post he had held since only last year.
To see a distinguished editor part ways with an illustrious journal like the Review for the crime of publishing one controversial article was shocking. It must be sending a chill through every editor in the Western world from London to Los Angeles. Mr. Buruma is another superb journalist. His well-wrought essays have been appearing in the Review and other publications (including The Globe and Mail) for many years. I’ve been reading him with admiration since he wrote about Japan and Asia for the Far Eastern Economic Review in the 1980s.
Mr. Buruma was not putting a seal of approval on Mr. Ghomeshi by running his essay, any more than Mr. Remnick was approving Mr. Bannon. He was trying to give readers an insight into Mr. Ghomeshi’s thinking and make them contemplate how we should view him now. Why did he act as he did toward women? Should we forgive men like him or not? These are important questions in the Me Too era.
Great editors don’t tiptoe around the sensibilities of their readers. They publish stuff that challenges and even provokes. The Ghomeshi piece certainly fit the bill
Of course those readers have every right to consider Mr. Ghomeshi an unreformed creep, just as they have a right to consider Mr. Bannon a strutting goblin.
But the impulse to gag or ban those who offend us is a dangerous one, and it’s spreading. It was only last year that three Canadian editors left their jobs under pressure amid an angry debate over cultural appropriation. Leading publications like the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books should be leading the defence of free expression, not bending to the latest Twitter storm.