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Journalists Against Free Speech
City Journal ^ | Autumn 2019 | John Tierney

Posted on 11/13/2019 6:43:34 PM PST by karpov

Suppose you’re the editorial-page editor of a college newspaper, contemplating the big news on campus: protesters have silenced an invited speaker and gone on a violent rampage. Should you, as a journalist whose profession depends on the First Amendment, write an editorial reaffirming the right to free speech?

If that seems like a no-brainer, you’re behind the times. The question stumped the staff of the Middlebury Campus after protesters silenced conservative social thinker Charles Murray and injured the professor who’d invited him. The prospect of taking a stand on the First Amendment was so daunting that the paper dispensed with its usual weekly editorial, devoting the space instead to a range of opinions from others—most of whom defended the protesters. When a larger and more violent mob at the University of California at Berkeley prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking on campus, students at the Daily Californian did write a forceful editorial—but not in favor of his right to speak. Instead, they reviled Yiannopoulos and denounced those who “invited chaos” by offering a platform to “someone who never belonged here.”

Free speech is no longer sacred among young journalists who have absorbed the campus lessons about “hate speech”—defined more and more broadly—and they’re breaking long-standing taboos as they bring “cancel culture” into professional newsrooms. They’re not yet in charge, but many of their editors are reacting like beleaguered college presidents, terrified of seeming insufficiently “woke.” Most professional journalists, young and old, still pay lip service to the First Amendment, and they certainly believe that it protects their work, but they’re increasingly eager for others to be “de-platformed” or “no-platformed,” as today’s censors like to put it—effectively silenced.

These mostly younger progressive journalists lead campaigns to get conservative journalists fired, banned from Twitter, and “de-monetized” on YouTube.

(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: 1st; bloggers; freespeech

1 posted on 11/13/2019 6:43:34 PM PST by karpov
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To: karpov
These mostly younger progressive journalists Useful Idiots(look it up).

Fixed it.

Censorship-because the left's ideas are so awful that there is no way they can win a public debate- so they shut everyone up.

Nice😒.

2 posted on 11/13/2019 7:10:11 PM PST by Pajamajan ( Pray for our nation. Thank the Lord for everything you have. Don't wait. Do it today.)
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