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At Hachette UK, meanwhile, a group of employees tried to refuse to work on JK Rowling’s new book, on ( false) claims that Rowling is a transphobic bigot. And so they provide us with a chance to study the dynamics of in-house corporate mobs that otherwise operate behind closed doors.Īt Hachette Book Group, employees actually demonstrated in the street earlier this year, claiming to “stand in solidarity with Ronan Farrow, Dylan Farrow, and survivors of sexual abuse”-this as part of a successful (if completely libelous) campaign to force their bosses to cancel publication of Woody Allen’s memoir. As public figures, they tend to have prominent social-media platforms from which they can prosecute their grievances.
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The professional duties of media workers require them to hold each day’s news developments up to the light of prevailing orthodoxies. Quillette often focuses on disputes within rarified professional subcultures because these milieus serve as canaries in our cultural coal mines.
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In 2020, it’s the journalists themselves who are championing a rigid ideological monoculture. In normal times, journalists and their unions fight for editorial independence and viewpoint diversity against bosses who push for centralized control. Times media columnist Ben Smith reports a union source to the effect that the original tweet was sent out by a rogue Guild official “without any internal discussion, causing a furor in Slack and drawing heated objections from others.” Yet either way, the union is already on record as advocating a regime of “ sensitivity reads” to control what reporters and pundits are allowed to publish. And this past weekend, the New York Times Guild, the union representing the newspaper’s media workers, publicly denounced one of the Times’s own columnists on Twitter-before deleting its tweet, which the union now claims was posted “in error.”
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Bari Weiss, one of the newspaper’s brightest stars, decided to follow Bennett out after enduring an internal newsroom campaign of verbal bullying, which included bizarre claims that she was a racist and a Nazi (these slurs targeting a Jewish woman whose recent book is titled How to Fight Anti-Semitism). Many journalists-and even their unions-now seem more preoccupied with denouncing heresies among colleagues than with maintaining their audience and livelihoods.Īt the New York Times, to take one obvious case study, op-ed editor James Bennet was hounded out in June after publishing a column that reflected widespread frustration with violent social-justice protests. But they can be blamed for the gratuitous acts of self-sabotage that are exacerbating the industry’s woes. Journalists are hardly to blame for the underlying causes of this contraction (which include the long-term shift from physical to digital media, and the growing ad-market share controlled by Google and Facebook). At newspapers, the drop has been more than 50 percent. Between 20, total newsroom employment in the United States declined by 23 percent.