Thread by @jeffjarvis

This is appalling. The both-sidesism of The New York Times comes out in full force from its editorial board as it equates the left criticizing hate and the right burning books. Pure moral panic. A 🧵. 1/ nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opi…

The editorial's lede is the worst of it. No, we have not lost our right to speak. We are exercising our right to speak around the gatekeepers that included old, white, male, privileged, powerful, closed newspapers and editorial boards and they resent it. 2/

I hate polls as much as I hate from-on-high newspaper editorials for how they both preempt the public conversation, and this one brings me both. How did they expect people to answer this leading question? 3/

Note, too, how The Times tsk-tsks liberals for "shutting down"--loaded choice of verbs there--bigoted, anti-democratic, and untrue (read: Republican) speech. 4/

If you doubt for a moment The Times' turn to sympathy with the white-right, let this end those doubts: a yes-but attack on the left for making white people uncomfortable. Here is white victimhood, naked to behold. 5/

If one doubts this is about race, The Times own poll shows it is. Black people feel freer to discuss various topics and that is what bothers The Times but they are blind to it. 6/

I'm reminded of this brilliant thread from Canadian academic @rinireg, about the Movement for Marginal Protections, which "wants to make it socially costly to debate the rights of marginalized people," against the Status Quo Warriors. The Times is SQW. 7/

https://twitter.com/rinireg/status/1280972857271627784

What The Times and Status Quo Warriors are objecting to is a process of norm-negotiation. The Times wants to be in a position to impose norms but can no longer. It resents the loss of power. 8/

The Times editorial board has been storing this anger up since losing its editor & columnists to criticism for bad decisions. The Times is blaming everyone but itself. That's the position of power The Times has long held. It can't adjust to being part of a larger conversation. 9/

What the internet has done is more voices too long not heard through the gatekeeping of white, male, mass media to have their say and the gatekeepers resent it. Just like the Trumpists, they do not want to share the institutions of power. 10/

So The Times gives us moral panic, blaming unseen forces that even The Times in this editorial refused to define: "However you define cancel culture, Americans know it exists, and feel its burden." Don't bother defining it. Calling it a foreboding force to fear is sufficient. 11/

It sounds like an old coot telling the newcomers to get off the lawn. "But the old lesson of 'think before you speak' has given way to the new lesson of 'speak at your peril.'" 12/

And get this: In issuing the necessary caveat that the First Amendment restricts only government, The Times draws an equivalency between Putin's censorship and that which The Times claims it feels here. Just offensive. 13/

Of course, the grand paradox of this editorial is that The Times is complaining of being silenced in the greatest platform for speech ever yet created, the editorial page of The New York Times. 14/

From its bunker, The Times Editorial Board issues this threat: "This editorial board plans to identify a wide range of threats to freedom of speech in the coming months, and to offer possible solutions." Can't wait. 15/

The Times Editorial Board is trying to convince us that it is canceled. There is no such things as cancel culture. The Times is not canceled. It is merely complaining about having to share its stage. 16/