Batya Ungar-Sargon

But in American journalism, a dam had been broken. It is now normal for editors at legacy publications to capitulate to outrage not only from their readers, but from their own staff. That’s what’s so shocking about this censorious development in American journalism. It’s not that online activists would try to use their power to enforce their views. It’s that older journalists — people who should, who do, know better — now surrender to the pressure.

George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020 put this moral panic on steroids. Since then, liberal media outlets have fired writers, editors and even their founders to placate the woke left. The limits of acceptable discourse have shrunk. People have been fired for the crime of disagreeing with a person of color on Twitter, or for not promoting enough black women. In February 2021, the New York Times pushed out long-time science reporter Donald McNeil after staffers found out he had used the ‘n-word’ in response to a question from a student about whether it’s OK to use the ‘n-word’ as a joke. Instead of fighting for McNeil’s job, the NewsGuild, the Times’s staff union, observed that ‘there’s never a moment when harmful racist rhetoric is acceptable’.

The Washington Free Beacon, reporting how the union had failed to fight for McNeil’s job, noted how many Timesstaffers come from wealthy backgrounds and how few actually rely on the job security the union provides. It concluded that ‘defending workers has given way to defenestrating them, especially when they violate the taboos of well-to-do progressives’. It isn’t just a culture war anymore, between antiracist wokesters and the last old-school journalists committed to objectivity. It’s a class war between highly educated young elites and their older middle-class colleagues who offend their woke sensibilities and thus, they think, deserve to be fired.