One line from the Harper's letter I've been thinking about: "Editors are fired for running controversial pieces." That would be disturbing, right? Part of what's irritating about the letter is that it speaks in generalities, so you can't check. But in this case we can guess. 1/
I suspect the editors are James Bennet, obviously, and Ian Buruma, who was fired from the New York Review of Books. The "controversial" pieces were Cotton's op-ed calling for military occupation of the US and Jian Ghomeshi's account of his "cancelation" for sexual assault. 2/
In both cases, yes, people on Twitter were very angry about the pieces in question, but, much more importantly, the staffs of the publications were angry, and revolted. 3/
In both cases, the editors in question went on to reveal that they had engaged in a lazy and thoughtless editorial process. Bennet claimed not to have read the piece! Buruma seemed totally incurious about the underlying incidents that Ghomeshi was (sort of) addressing. 4/
It would have been interesting if the editors had said: "We thought about this piece very hard. We discussed it as a collective. In the end, we decided to go forward, though the responsibility falls to me." Would they have been fired? We'll never know, bc they didn't do that. 5/
Again, without an uproar over the pieces, if the editors had just been revealed to be careless in some more innocuous situation, probably they would have kept their jobs. But should they have? 6/
Meanwhile, at the publication where this letter appeared--Harper's--the publisher has in the last decade fired two very good and popular editors-in-chief, and a deputy editor, for no good reason. (Though one firing followed a unionization drive.) So... there you go. 7/7
